Lesson 1, Part 1: Introduction

In a world of variables, it is vital to create standards and processes wherever possible in your business.

If you are a growing trade business, there will be a time when you need to start defining your processes. This is a necessary part of scaling up your business. If you don't have a defined sales process and rely on your charisma and knowledge, that will not scale. You need to define your customer's experience to be consistent and repeatable. That starts with defining your sales process. Many people refer to this as your sales funnel.

There are quite a few variations depending on industry but for our purposes, we will use the image above as a reference and I will be replacing the loyalty/advocacy portion with a vault.

We will begin with a questionnaire to set a baseline for what your sales process looks like today. This questionnaire will serve as a guide to point out potential leaks in your sales funnel and provide a list of priorities to focus on that will have the biggest impact on your business.

The course consists of 4 lessons:

1. Introduction: Course overview
2. Customer Origination: Awareness, interest, and intent. Making a great first impression.
3. Offering Solutions & Shipping the Work: Evaluation and sale. Creating and delivering your promise.
4. Customer For Life: The vault. Keeping the customer engaged whether or not they buy.

Lesson 1, Part 2: Define Your Baseline

You should have a handful of KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) tracking performance in each department. Since we are talking about sales, let's start there. You should know what your sales targets are and what is required in terms of leads, phone calls, proposals written, etc. for you to reach those goals. If you don't have sales goals you have to reach, start there. This topic is covered more in another course.

Let's begin by mapping out your current sales process.

Write down your current sales process and define the customer journey as it exists today. You will answer the questions and prompts and fill in any additional points not mentioned. As you go through this first part, note any topics or ideas that you want to define, refine, or explore further. Identify high-impact touch points. You will prioritize these points later to focus your efforts for maximum impact, so just keep track of those topics that you think would benefit your sales process for now.

As you work through this course, you will make many decisions and define standards that follow your company's value proposition to deliver the best service possible and ensure every customer receives the same high-quality service that you are promising. The work you do in this course can serve as a blueprint for training and help define your sales process so it is repeatable and scalable. You can set dashboards, KPIs, and set your goals for success to ensure everyone wins.

 Let’s get to work!

Lesson 1 Homework: Define all major points of the customer initialization portion of your sales process

After going through all of the questions and identifying your highest impact points, look back over lines 1-30. Which lines did you label a 4? Pick your top 3-5 priorities in this category and write out the current state of this point and if what it would look like if resources were not a concern.

Example:

#7 Online booking services- Currently, we do not have any form of online booking services. Several customers have told me they would use this feature if we had it. I love being able to book dinner reservations online. In an ideal world, the customer would be able to look us up on Google and click once for available appointments and be able to easily select an appointment that fits with their schedule. These appointments would be vetted, gathered all of the correct information, classified, and booked without the need for our CSR.