Most salespeople think their role is to complete a bunch of semi-random activities to “hopefully” get a deal over the line.

They set targets to complete a specific number of cold calls, business cases, sent proposals, discovery calls…
And this is not how high performing salespeople operate.
Having our focus spread across lots of non-connected activities each day leads to overwhelm.
This is why salespeople only spend 30% of their time each week actually selling (Salesforce, State of Sales Report) and burn out faster than any pretty much any other career.

 
I've trained over 2,500+ high performing sellers and the quickest way to improve sales performance for both teams and individuals is to get the sellers is to transform their list of random prospecting and closing activities into a defined, step-by-step sales process that they follow each day.

Each step of the sales process needs to have specific activities assigned to it. Each activity then moves the prospect to the next step of the process. Over and over until a deal is complete, or the prospect is qualified out.
This transforms sales performance because our brains love to follow processes as they have clear start and end points.
For example: I feel hungry, I go to the fridge and grab a snack, I eat the snack, I no longer feel hungry, I then get a spike of dopamine to celebrate.
I didn't get overwhelmed as to how to solve the problem.
I didn't go onto LinkedIn to look for new strategies or motivation.

I started the process, finished it and then had the reward of a full belly and a dopamine hit that motivates me to do it again.
Step-by-step sales process
All high performing salespeople and business owners running their own sales function follow a linear, step-by-step sales process.
So, let me ask you, could you draw out your sales process? Could you tell me the exact activities that have to occur at each step to move the prospect further along to the point where they commit to working with you?
Probably not. And that is OK. I'm going to explain how to build our your own step-by-step sales process in this video.
But first, when I train sellers I often get the pushback that they've been given a sorta, kinda, half-assed sales process to follow in the past, but they haven't managed to stick with it.
Well, it's easy to explain why.

The problem with traditional sales processes is that they're defined at a very high level, but they don't have enough detail to keep sellers on track day-to-day.
As incredible as our brains are, they're terrible at managing activities that span over anything more than a couple of days.
That cold call that you made 3 months ago that lead to the deal that you closed today are so far apart that our brains inherently can't connect them together.

So there is no dopamine spike and positive reinforcement for completing the steps that lead to the new customer.
However, with a step-by-step sales process, with specific defined activities at each step we can help bridge the time gap in our brains between all of those boring activities that we all want to procrastinate on doing and the results that we get from them.
This dramatically increases motivation to complete those activities because our brain can now see the full picture of the inputs that lead to the outputs that we desire.

* More motivation = Sales activities get started
* Simple, measurable activities = Sales activities get completed
* Completed sales activities = More deals completed

This is how you make selling simple and 2x-5x your revenue in weeks rather than years.
Building your sales process
OK, that's enough theory. How do we build a step-by-step sales process that delivers results and gets followed every time?