Sales is a tough job. It inherently requires behavioral change, and as humans, we naturally resist change. This means you have to be agile but also strategic and measured while handling the sales process, knowing precisely what makes your product so valuable to customers. This is why founders often make the best initial salespeople.
When you’re just starting out—still searching for product-market fit and even finding your ideal customer—your sales process might be a bit fragmented. In fact, calling it a “process” at this stage is probably generous. But as your sales team grows to support company growth, those established processes become an essential piece of creating sales success across the board.
While those early days are nimble time, it also makes it difficult for founders to let go of sales responsibilities when there’s no concrete process to show new team members how to guide a prospect to becoming a customer. In addition to a formally documented sales process, teams also need an inside sales process flowchart that visualizes the journey of converting prospect into customer and accounts for the various scenarios that can arise. With an established sales process, the entire sales organization can own this responsibility rather than relying on founders or sales leaders to close more deals.
What is an Inside Sales Process Flowchart?
An inside sales process flowchart is a document that outlines and maps a prospect’s decision tree and the actions a sales rep should take at each main point of the sales process. They are especially helpful for training new employees, as they will illustrate the steps of the process, and they can also help longer-tenured employees who might not have already written out all of their knowledge. These flowcharts allow you to map out every part of your sales process, from qualified leads to final sales stages that move into the sales pipeline. A sales process flowchart gives you an opportunity to break it down and tie each step back to a part of your sales strategy.
Further, inside sales process flowcharts provide benchmarks for your ideal sales process and ensure that your team has the proper structure in place to keep them focused on hitting their goals. While it might seem a little daunting at first, developing a sales process flowchart doesn’t have to be an incredibly difficult task. Here are some helpful tips to create an effective sales process flowchart and that you can leverage for success.
Why is an Inside Sales Process Flowchart Important for Business Success?
By its very nature, a sales process flowchart is a tool for increasing the efficiency of your overall sales operations. By mapping out how your company makes and manages a sale, you can identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies that may be holding growth back, which allows you to take action to improve them. Sales processes that have been carefully mapped out can help you pinpoint where problems are occurring and determine how you might resolve them.
In many ways, a sales process flowchart is similar to a standard business process flowchart. It shows a chronological series of steps to move from one stage to another until you achieve your final outcome. In this way, it helps by breaking down the more extensive process into smaller, manageable chunks to show which stages need the most improvement.
Having a formal inside sales process flowchart also gives greater visibility into the status and progress of each deal. Having each step of the process clearly noted will make it easier to determine where your sales are moving forward and where they may be lagging. This is particularly useful if you have customer accounts that need greater management or oversight, or if your team needs to take a different approach with specific customers because their requirements are different than others.
It improves training and reduces onboarding time
A sales process flowchart provides new hires and trainees with a visual overview of successfully guiding a prospect through to a sale. By visualizing how it works and what each stage entails, you can ensure that new employees receive an education that will help them quickly grasp the basics, put their learning into practice, and hit the ground running. As a result, they received improved training and reduces onboarding time.
With so many benefits to mapping out a flowchart of your sales process, it’s clear why this kind of tool can be such an invaluable asset for businesses looking to improve their overall sales activity and maximize their growth potential.
5 Key Tips to Creating an Inside Sales Process Flowchart that Works
In creating a sales process flowchart, it’s best to start from a high view, then slowly drill down into greater detail as necessary. This allows you to include all the steps and stages of your sales process while keeping things clear and straightforward for each stage.
And overall, the most critical factors to successfully leveraging your inside sales process flowchart come by creating it effectively, so we’ve outlined five tips to serve as a guide.
1. Outline the most important steps
Once you’ve examined your current sales process, take note of each step and stage in an easy-to-manage medium such as a CRM tool so you can easily see it all in one place and make changes as you go. For example, a lead’s first interaction with your company would be a logical first step. Another would be successfully qualifying the lead, and another would be booking a demo. Further, providing case studies or use cases, and, finally, presenting the sales proposal, closing the sale, and initiating the post-sale process.
Once you’ve outlined the most important steps, you’ll want to map each step on the flowchart to a buyer journey stage. As a bonus, leverage a tool that allows you to provide examples or links to the types of sales enablement content that’s most helpful for each step.
2. Get feedback and buy-in from your sales reps
Sales reps are your on-the-ground advocates for your sales process, so you’ll want to seek them out when creating this flowchart. After all, they’re the ones that will be living and breathing it every day! Ask each rep what they think is important in the process, how their job could be improved, and what stages they see bottlenecks happening the most—this will give you great insight into what’s already working and what isn’t.
You may also want to ask them questions that will help you understand how this exercise can specifically help them, such as: How do they prefer to receive information about events, product changes, or new content? What types of content are most helpful in moving leads through the qualified stage? Even better, a digital enablement tool like Spekit can help streamline the administration and delivery of that sales enablement content.
If you have representatives with different selling styles, be sure to ask for feedback from each of them. Your sales process flowchart should encompass the entire company, so make sure it’s an accurate depiction of the whole team.
3. Measure and monitor your team’s success
This is easily one of the most important factors! Whenever you create something new, it’s essential to measure how well your team is doing. Consider something as simple as monitoring how long it takes for leads to go from one stage of qualification to another, or how quickly reps respond to customer requests and questions in service engagements.
Overall, you are looking for opportunities to make more meaningful interactions with prospects and customers, which will lead to more sales. At the end of the day, the primary purpose of creating and leveraging a sales process flowchart is to improve efficiency and fuel growth so everyone can benefit and bring in more revenue.
4. Start simple and add more detail over time
Flowcharting your entire sales process is an ongoing initiative. Your goal should be to start with something simple enough to understand easily but informative enough to identify opportunities. Once you’re past the introductory stage, your objective will be to add more depth and detail over time. Here are some ideas for how you can expand your flowchart:
- Document not only what each stage and step is but also the details to watch for, like potential factors that could influence a lead’s path or progress.
- Add more detail to the stages to further define and refine your process—for example, creating specific roles to guide your team in the sales process or helping your team identify different use cases or pain points.
Ultimately, you’re looking for ways to help your team strengthen their selling skills, grow revenue, and improve customer interactions and satisfaction. A solid sales process flowchart will help maximize your team’s ability to accomplish these goals.
5. Leverage the right technology to support your sales process
There’s no question that flowcharting your sales process is a critical step to streamlining your sales operations, but using the right technology can make a huge impact too. Even the most well-intentioned improvements can fall flat if not backed up by the right tool—and on the other hand, using the right tools can supercharge even the smallest changes.
Because of its ability to streamline, technology can make it simple to break down your sales process and then share relevant content for each step with your team. And because technology is constantly evolving, this will be in your team’s best interest.
You can better enable your sales reps this way by using a tool that provides them with everything they need directly in the apps they use every day —this could include training, product collateral, helpful blog posts, case studies, battle cards, and more
Closing Thoughts
The most successful sales teams have a proven process that they follow. They understand what steps are necessary to generate and close more deals while also meeting their company’s goals for revenue growth. And a sales process flowchart can help your team by visualizing the journey of that process to identify what’s working well, which areas need improvement, and how to get from one point to another more efficiently.
To make it the most effective it can be, start by outlining the important buying phases, get feedback from your sales reps, measure and monitor the team’s success, and start simple so you can add more detail over time. And lastly, leverage the right technology tools and partners to support your process.
By creating and using an inside sales process flowchart, your team will know exactly how to guide each prospect through the pipeline from lead generation all the way up to customer success! Spekit makes it easy to enable your sales team by delivering sales enablement content at every step in your sales process flowchart so you can arm your reps with everything they need for success. Request a demo today to get an inside look at how Spekit can empower your sales team!
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