Our customers ask us this, "How can we improve our sales process?"

Our answer to this simple; measure each sales stage, for time and efficiency. Time how many days a sales record sits in a sales stage. For me to explain further look at Quote, a common stage for industrial companies. The sales person has had to qualify a lead to opportunity, and now has presented a quote to the sales prospect. What happens now? What time is spend at Quote stage? Logically, companies that have requested a quote, should be ready to buy. But not in most cases. Most cases, Quotes sit idle. Reasons are the quote was done to fast. Qualification was not deep enough. There are other reasons. To know this is important.

Sales training can try to solve the stall issues. In my example, qualification can be defined across the sales team; what is a qualified opportunity? This can be modeled. IBM uses BANT which is budget, authority, need, time frame. Here is a good rule; no quotes until the 4 items are filled out, in the sales tool, completely.

Improvement of the sales process can not happen unless the process is measured. You need sales data. Data which tells you what has stalled at which stage. Then you can mine the reasons and open bottlenecks. Simple.

One sales tool shows you with a glance what is stalled. The record turns color. This sales software turns the stalled record RED. So with a glance sales people can see and can get on the sales record.