Navigating The Sales Process Labyrinth
Salespeople may not be born, but they can be taught the skills and capabilities for successful selling. However, salespeople also become creatures of habit over time and can get comfortable with how well they can maneuver through a sales process. In the event you are ever faced with the inevitable change of adapting to a new sales process, here are some helpful tips to learn from my own personal experiences for successfully selling, while adapting to an enterprise-level change in how your sales organization conducts business.
Don’t Fight The Change, Embrace The Change: In my experiences, I have seen good salespeople fail because they get bogged down in the minutiae of an enterprise-wide sales process. No matter how long and how resistant you become to the change, it’s going to happen anyway. Corporate management has invested several thousands of dollars into a selling system that not only can provide state-of-the-art reporting for management meetings, but also offer a better, transparent method for salespeople to do business with existing and potentially new customers.
A good case in point for this ideology is from when I was working for Sun Microsystems in the Java integration data space and suddenly, Oracle Corporation acquired Sun Microsystems for billions of dollars. As the integration into Oracle took place, my role was realigned as an Account Executive for the MySQL open-source database, which is a freely downloadable database. Oracle monetized the MySQL database by selling support subscriptions and extensions for the database. During the integration process, the well defined and structured sales system of SalesForce that Sun Microsystems had utilized for its CRM tool was phased out and replaced with a highly customized Oracle-based selling system, derived from a Siebel CRM tool. Unfortunately for the newly integrated salespeople into Oracle, there was no formal training classes or defined training manuals. For the most part, the new salespeople adapting into Oracle were thrown into the proverbial “Sales Process Labyrinth” to see who could adapt and survive and also to see what salespeople will struggle and fail in a massive cultural shift of immediate change.Acknowledge Your “Minotaur” and Learn To Overcome Obstacles Efficiently: As the integration took place, I am often reminded of the Greek mythology tale of Theseus being cast into the labyrinth maze to escape to the other side of the convoluted maze. However, Theseus was hampered in his quest by the Minotaur, a vicious half-man and half-bull beast that captured and killed wary travelers through the maze. At every twist and turn, danger awaited the determined, but careless traveler who encountered the monster.
So, what is a typical “Minotaur” look like in the world of sales? Well, from my experience at Oracle, there can be a host of obstacles to completing a sales agreement for your customer. First of all, if you were selling an add-on product to an existing customer, then a salesperson would have to reference an existing contract, which was usually housed in a linked site with thousands upon thousands of archived contracts. What made it even more challenging to locate an existing contract is that none of the contracts were saved with an intuitive naming convention, such as the company name. Everything was named under a sequence of dashed numbers, which made searching for contracts extremely challenging. Secondly, this was an on-line repository of thousands upon thousands of existing Oracle customer contracts with no search capabilities!
To overcome this obstacle, I ascertained a common naming convention, based on the product grouping and that helped make the searching and locating of existing contracts much easier. But, what about creating and updating the opportunity in an existing CRM? This was no easy feat either, as the Oracle CRM at the time was a Siebel-based convoluted, non-intuitive tool. There were many buttons to press and boxes to check in order to have a legitimate and qualified opportunity show up for reporting purposes. The best way to overcome a complicated sales sequencing process is to create a flow chart of sorts that can help map the proper path in creating a qualified sales opportunity. With a planned out diagram, you can easily reference what steps need management approval in order to help advance your deal to a finished contract.
One last obstacle to consider is the magnitude of the sales organization and how much “red tape” there is to endure and overcome in order to get a sales contract completed for your customer’s signature. As most would surmise, Oracle Corporation is a massive software organization - the largest one in the world as a matter of fact. This usually meant getting buy in and approvals from not only the sales management team, but the legal team, the consulting services organization, the marketing team, and even from the many customer services teams! Being that time is a precious commodity in generating a sales contract, these levels of departmental approvals can be a huge drag on producing your approved sales contract.
Gather Your Arsenal of Weapons and Align Your Allies in Defeating Your “Minotaur”: When faced with these obstacles in generating a sales contract for your customer, take a step back and determine the best course of action in delivering against all salespeople’s most precious commodity - Time. If you have to reference an existing sales contract, be sure to create a speedy and effective searching system to locate those relevant contracts quickly and be expeditious about getting all of the important factors together that are easily overlooked, such as the customer’s legal name, the customer’s address, tax identification number, and contract number. If you are using a convoluted, non-intuitive CRM tool, then either ask your management team for help in getting the sales opportunity created or utilize any recorded training materials to learn and navigate through the CRM tool. Unfortunately, there were no recorded training offerings for the CRM tool that Oracle offered and everyone had to learn how to use the Oracle CRM tool through trial and error. In the event, there is no formal training, then be diligent about self-training methods and record how to avoid any CRM system “traps” in order to successfully create a sales opportunity quickly and error-free. As for any departmental approvals in creating a sales contract, keep in mind that these internal resources are there to help you and not impede your progress in creating a sales contract. The best thing to do in this circumstance is create relationships with those resources on the legal, consulting services, marketing, and any other relevant departments that touch and approve your sales contract. Thank and recognize these individual departmental resources in an email to their management team for their hard work and dedication to the sales efforts of the sales organization and incredible things will happen. Mighty allied forces will jump to your side and help you get your sales contract in front of your customer for signature quickly, efficiently, and accurately, if they are genuinely appreciated and recognized!
Defeat Your “Minotaur” and Claim Sales Victory!: As a result of learning how to master the convoluted Oracle selling system, several subsequent results happened. First of all, my customers were happy and appreciative that I was expedient in getting a sales contract in front of them for their signature because this demonstrated that I valued them as a customer and prioritized their business as significant and meaningful to the Oracle organization. Secondly, I got to spend more time in developing the relationship with my customers and building that “trusted advisor” status with them. After learning how to expeditiously learn how to navigate the “sales labyrinth”, I was able to increase my face time with my customers by 70% and further developing trusted relationships and demonstrating value to my customers. This increased selling time on a personal level, help catapult me to “MVP” status for ten consecutive quarters with an average of 125% of exceeding my quarterly sales quota. My customers were happy, my management team was happy, and I was happy.
Sales Lessons Learned: Although CRM data accuracy and selling processes are essential to any salesperson’s success, it’s best to keep in mind that one does not have to be a “slave to the selling system” if you can learn to “master the selling system” and use your sales talents for the benefit of being an advocate for your customer’s needs and priorities. Armed with knowledge from my experiences, you can successfully navigate through your personal “sales labyrinth” and face and defeat your “minotaur”! Happy Selling!
