If your aim is becoming a top seller on cokodeal marketplace,you need a proper sales process designed. A robust sales process will help you maximize the performance of your sales effort, encourage growth and attract more qualified leads. The major importance of sales process is it introduces structure and system to your business and this can help you:
1. standardize your process
2. Ensure improvement on each stages of the process
3. Ensure best practices are replicated
4. Ensure everyone in your team has access to the tools and techniques known to deliver the best results and the highest conversion rates.
So whats a sales process?
A sales process is an approach to selling goods and services. In a more elaborate definition, sales process is the Set of steps aimed at initiating and supporting the identification and evaluation of likely customers (prospects), sales presentation, and successful conclusion of sales activities. It requires a close coordination of people, equipment, tools, and techniques, and includes advertising and promotion.
In another definition, A sales process (or sales pipeline) is the journey sales teams take prospects on to encourage them to become a customer.
What are the major processes involved in a sales pipeline?
Basically, there are about six processes involved in the sales pipeline and proper defining these processes helps you better engineer your own sales process:
- Prospecting/initial contact
Prospecting is the identification and evaluation of likely customers(prospects)- with prospecting you are saying who are those with buying authority, financial capacity and are willing to buy? Once a seller identifies a visitor to his store, he should engage the visitor to confirm if the visitor is qualified to be a customer in the long run. Prospecting would also help a store owner know how ready a visitor is and how best to move them up the sales process. Another best practice is to do a little research on your visitor who can be an individual or company. This can give you insight as to their financial capabilities and other vital information to qualify visitor as a prospect. go ahead to research the client or company on how best to meet their needs. Without visits to your online store, one cannot have prospect, on cokodeal marketplace, one can generate enough visits to their stores through cokodeal ads packages in which sellers then take these visitors through the stages of their sales process.
2. Qualify/identify and cross questioning
Alongside your prospecting phase, cross questioning and can help you have a glimpse of vistor to know if she is fit for you to commit your resources in communicating and pushing further into the sales pipeline. Asking some vital questions in line to the requirements of your business would help you know if certain visitor is likely to be your customer in the end. Some store owners on cokodeal would ask you first hand if you can meet some certain order requirements. Some can ask you how soon you want to get orders shipped. Not everyone who contacts you would be your customer; and knowing the key identifiers to help you screen out the ones likely to be your customer is what this stage is al about.
3. Need assessment
Assessing needs require you examining the resources your have compared to perceived gap between the conditions prospects are in and where they ought to be in some cases. Your ability to pick the vital information and provide an on-point solution is key. However situations may not always be in this consultative model where prospects pour out their pains to you. In most times a seller on cokodeal make inquiries on specific products, it is for the seller to identify if he can meet such demand. Assessing what resource is required to meet a request to see if your business can meet such demands is what is needed on this stage.
4. Presentation
Providing a solution to meet prospects need is what this stage is all about. your solution should be such that it spells out the benefits prospects would gain and should be enough to lure prospects to patronize you in the midst of competitions. you should do a proper job of identifying customers needs, and presenting a irresistible offers with benefits that buyers cant resist. Note that you should be careful enough to know benefits has to be thought through carefully such that it can benefit both you and your prospects.
5. Decision
You have presented your prospect with an enticing solution, he sees the benefits and he is showing interest. It is time for the buyer to make a buying decision. Most times it is not as smooth you offering and prospects just jumping at your offers. You must be able to anticipate objections and be sure to handle them. Your ability to handle prospects objections would help your prospects be more confident to make the final buying decision. There are several sales techniques top sales people use to handle objections, Get some handy and use them whenever you’re in contact with your prospects.
6. Follow up
Your visitor has successfully moved down the sales pipe to close. He is now a customer.Your followup is to nurture, appreciate and reward your customers for doing business with you. This stage is very vital as you want to be able to keep your paying customers as they can be a good asset for bringing other paying customers through referrals.
Can your sales process be automated?
The essence of sales process automation is such that the process of moving visitors up through the sales pipeline to closing is done with little or no human intervention. There are software solutions which helps business people automate their sales process such that it can ease business people involvement in all activities involved in the sales pipeline. In the world of e-commerce and selling online, handling all incoming inquiries and orders to your business may be too much for you. Yet if you don’t handle all of them, you’ll lose potential customers to your competitors. A way out is to incorporate the use of online forms in your sales process. An online form can help you collect lead contact information which can be ab automatic way to collect contact information that you’ll use to start the selling process later. You can set up an auto responder to reply to their email, based on keywords or fields that they filled out on your form. However, it is important to note that an auto-responder is NOT a substitute for a direct response from you at some point, but the immediate auto response does help to reduce any impatience on your potential customer’s part. You’ll also have an
To wrap up, an underlying ingredient common in the entire sales process is communication. While your prospects move through the sales pipeline, you can agree a need for constant communication between the seller and buyer. On cokodeal for example, a seller has a built in mailing application which helps sellers and buyers communicate throughout the period of transaction plus online Shopping Carts which sellers can use to automate their selling process.
Do you have any question as regards sales process? share and lets talk about it.
