Pay Attention to Your Sales Process - You Might Actually Be Upsetting Your Prosects
How you manage your prospects through your sales process says a lot about your company and it tells people what to expect from you, if and when they become a client. If your sales process isn't smooth. If your sales process doesn't set clear expectations. If the communication is weak or inconsistent how will prospects come to know, like and trust you. We all agree that knowing, liking and trusting you is the key to a good sales process right? Good, I thought for a minute, I might have lost you.
We take our hiring process at Square 2 Marketing very seriously. We designed an elongated sales process to make sure we get the perfect new team members for our firm. Right now that process doesn't include any testing or formal evaluations. I was evaluating a number of formal evaluation tools including one from a respectable provider, click here to see the firm.
During the sales process, the representatives spent time helping me understand how we would use it in our complex hiring process, helping me review a few sample reports on my team, and helping me see how I could create a team model to use when selecting new potential team members and even offering to profile my entire team so I could establish a benchmark of my current team. Sounds pretty good doesn't it? I thought so too. Wasn't I surprised when a question arose about payment and next steps triggering all communication to stop.
After inquiring about the drop off in attention, I was told hours of free consulting had been provided and since I wasn't interesting in paying for any team profiles the process was over. What happened? So, I thought we were getting to know each other and engaging in the sales process and they thought they were giving away free consulting. Given their position, I might have done the same thing...the issue here is expectations. They weren’t clear. The sales process wasn't defined and the result was a lot of wasted time and an unhappy potential customer.
All they had to say was..we are going to do this, and then that, and if we do the following, you should have everything you need to make a decision, right? It would have been so simple.
Don't make the same mistake. With a few choice words and a couple of expectations set, we could still be working together right now. What a shame?
Square 2 Marketing - We Help Entrepreneurs and Businesses Who Have Well Defined Sales Processes!


