The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Having a strategic sales process goes far beyond knowing how to close a deal. If your goal is to drive sales performance and increase revenue, stay true to a repeatable sales process that leads to predictable sales.

The six steps of the Sales Accelerator lead salespeople from identifying a good prospect to developing a business relationship that results from the sale of your solution. Making it to step five—Close—means the finish line is in sight. But we’ve all heard the phrase, “the end depends on the beginning, and everything in between.”

Based on HubSpot research, only 3% of buyers trust sales representatives. If your sales process follows the cookie-cutter pattern of simply selling a product or service, the chances of you reversing that statistic are slim to none.

If you follow the formulated Sales Accelerator process, you know how important it is to execute the steps in correct order. During Discover, sellers uncovered prospect’s desired business results. The next step is to Advise the prospect on the best solution path, and that starts by determining which solution path is right for the situation.

This is the step where sellers learn how to differentiate themselves and prove to potential clients how they can make their life easier. From determining a solution path to removing surprises and handling objections, there are several points you don’t want your salespeople to overlook.

The third step of our sales process is often the most tedious. Discover—also referred to in other sales process steps as “define,” assessment,” or “needs,” all share the same goal of meeting with a prospect or client to uncover their desired business results.  

The key part of this stage is understanding each prospect's challenges and needs and establishing how your product or service can help. We find that sellers rush through this step, but by taking their time in the Discover phase of the sales process, they will actually accelerate the sales cycle and increase their odds of closing the deal.

While technology and buyer behaviors have caused businesses to modernize their sales process, basic principles such as qualifying prospects, defining needs, and understanding buying patterns haven’t changed that much. Every business is different, but most follow a progression with comparable sales stages.

Recognizing the need to humanize the sales process, our Sales Accelerator series is known for being more in-step with how real selling is done today while applying basic fundamentals.

Each of the six steps in the Sales Accelerator series offers important points you don’t want your salespeople to overlook. However, the second step—Connect—is where we teach sellers how to establish two vital fundamentals: establishing credibility and building trust.

Routines, schedules, processes—they all make us more efficient, consistent, and accurate in our roles. A strong sales process helps the prospect along their journey but also acts as a roadmap for reps so that they can consistently close deals.

The strategic sales process that we teach at The Center for Sales Strategy is called Sales Accelerator. It's an updated look at the customer-focused sales process, addressing how the sales process has evolved, and more in-step with how real selling is done today.

There are six steps of the Sales Accelerator, each filled with several courses that goes deep enough to build an effective, tailored solution while moving fast enough to achieve acceleration. Sales managers take note; these are the things you don’t want your team to overlook in the first step—Identify—of the sales process.

Many clients at The Center for Sales Strategy are essentially in the business of helping companies grow their business. 

In order to do that effectively, we teach salespeople how to think like a business owner. Thinking like a business owner takes the focus off what you sell (your products) and puts your focus on how to help your client or prospect achieve their desired business results. 

The better a salesperson becomes at thinking like a business owner, the better they will be at asking questions, establishing credibility, and ultimately becoming trusted and valued.

There are endless amounts of podcasts out there on business development and new ones being released daily. This article isn’t about all the great business podcasts hitting the market, but rather a handful of the best podcasts that we feel will help salespeople improve their business acumen and encourage salespeople to help their clients and prospects grow their business.

As a sales manager, how can you do more teaching and less telling?

It's not uncommon for salespeople to get frustrated when the only thing they hear from their sales manager is that they need to have more activity, increase the number of asks they have, and boost the dollar amount of the asks they have. Salespeople know this. They want to be taught how to do that. They want training and teaching, and not just telling.

At The Center for Sales Strategy (CSS), we take delivering results seriously. Our proven strategies help clients improve their company’s sales performance and increase their sales revenue by providing strategic plans and tailored solutions for their needs.

We've taken some time to dig into last year's numbers so we can analyze and improve in the coming year. Here's what 2019 looked like.