Sales Process – Top 10 Reasons Why Sales are Lost

When a salesperson fails to land a deal, sale or order which they expected, projected, forecasted and pre-banked, nine times out of ten, you can lay the blame on one of the following ten conditions:

1. The salesperson did not have an effective sales process.
2. The salesperson did not follow the sales process.
3. The salesperson was not coached on this opportunity in the context of the sales process.
4. The salesperson was not held accountable to applying the sales process
5. The salesperson did not use a CRM which was orientated toward the sales process.
6. The CRM application did not include the sales process.
7. The CRM application did not require the criteria for each stage of the sales process to be met prior to moving to the next step.
8. The sales process lacked criteria for each stage.
9. The steps for the sales process were improperly sequenced.
10. There was no CRM application.

I’ve written many articles about sales process over the years, but despite my articles and others like them, I’ve not observed a significant shift in company emphasis on sales process.  According to Objective Management Group’s statistics from evaluating salespeople in 8,500 companies, 91% of salespeople still don’t have or follow a formal, customized sales process.

We spend hours developing, customizing and optimizing sales processes for each of our clients prior to drumming it into them for months on end, but the same can’t be said for most companies.

Would you like to know where you stand on sales process?  Try this free tool – The Sales Process Grader.

[Update – After this article was published Jonathan Farrington, CEO of TopSalesWorld.com, interviewed me on this topic for Sales Talk Hardball.  You can hear the short interview here.]