Improve the Sales Process; Benchmark Employees' Performance and Process Adherence

Whether dealing with basic up-sell tactics or a complex, demonstration-based sales process, Listening Methods collects detailed sales process data from your sales calls and the prospect's responses to structures it into the sales steps and tactics used by customer service reps and sales people.

With this information, the factors that lead to the best revenues emerge. When the optimal steps are understood, Listening Methods develops solutions to automatically monitor adherence to these best practices, enabling customers to increase their revenues.

Finding the Important Factors in the Sales Process

The chart below is complex, but it is full of important information. First, through contact analysis, steps in the sales process have been defined. A high quality data set was created that captured hundreds of sales calls, and a correlation analysis determined which were important in the sales process. The names of these steps are on the horizontal axis. Not surprisely, this chart shows the classic steps used by a seasoned sales person when they manage a sales call and stay in control of the sales process. The steps include:

• Discovering Needs
• Presenting Features
• Discussing (not just presenting) prices
• Handling Objections
• Closure Attempts
• Handling Closure Objections
• Closing the Sale, or keeping the prospect open to further discussions

Enable Self-Improvement by Sales Personnel

In the chart, this process is revealed with a goal of enabling each sales person to view their approach versus the top and bottom performers.

• The vertical axis captures how often a sales step is used with prospects
• Users can compare the approach used by top performance (top 20% of sales successes) versus the bottom performers (those that were in the lowest 20% of sales closures). The results are presented in this chart.
• In this chart, the user is viewing John Smith's performance in relationship to the top and bottom performers. How often is John using the optimal sales tactics that tend to lead to the best sales results?

Note that each sales person's approach to a sales call will be different - averages do not reveal actuals. One salesperson's performance may be spectacular using different approaches. The chart's data should be viewed with this in mind. It is making information available to sales people so that they have better tools for managing themselves towards the optimal sales closure rates. This will lead to the best performance overall. In addition, it may be the most cost effective way of improving performance, especially if a company has commission-based compensatoin for the sales force.

Thus, one can provide tools to their sales force for improving sales through self-improvement.