Create a sales process to secure and serve your right customers

Once you have described your right customers, and created generic and specific strategies to achieve success, you must create a sales process for actually securing those customers. Please note, though, that these are not really sequential steps; all of these activities are accomplished in an interactive way.

For example, when you define the right customers, you might consider the effort necessary to secure those customers—length of the sales cycle, cost, proximity to your people, and so forth. So these first three steps are activities that should be conducted together.

Elite sales-driven companies use a sales process to track their sales activities at every stage—from the first contact with a potential customer until the final delivery of the product. The process can be a complex one with multiple steps, but it really is comprised of two major activities: identifying prospective customers (generating leads) and compelling those prospective customers to buy (closing). Thus, we speak frequently of “lead generation” and “closing” as the two key activities in the sales process.