Sales cycle

SALES CYCLE

Understanding Sales Cycle

What’s the purpose of knowing and understanding sales cycle for sales persons? Why is it important?

To make structured and standardized sales activities, which it can be measured, traceable, and of course, easier to achieve the sales objectives

To create sales persons with professional attitudes and behavior, because of standardized and structured sales activities.

Increased corporate image through corporate’s sales forces



8 stages of cycle :

Plan/identify the prospects, at this stage the activity percentage is 0%

Connect with prospects/gain acceptance, at this stage the activity percentages are 10%

Fact finding/probing for needs identification, at this stage the activity percentages are 20%

Deliver solution propositions/send quotations, at this stage the activity percentages are 30%

Propositions/quotations evaluation, at this stage the activity percentages are 40%

Buying terms (price, delivery, payment, etc) negotiation, at this stage the activity percentages are 75%

Buying terms agreement/purchase order released, at this stage the activity percentages are 99.9%

Get referenced for other prospects, at this the activity percentages are 100%


8 stages of sales cycle:

Plan/identify the prospects:

This activity requires sales person to gather all the sales lead sources to create the prospects list

Sales lead sources could be from existing customer database, business directory, yellowpages, websites, etc.

Identify the qualify prospects based on :

Prospects MUST be our target market, ex: fabricators who fabricates steel/stainless steel, etc

Doing small research on the prospects company profile and find out the potentials



Connect with prospects/gain acceptance:

After the prospects identification process finished, and list of potential prospects has been made, sales person MUST get connected with these prospects and gain their acceptance on your presence.

At this stage, probably sales persons will be having trouble to connect/gain acceptance due to barriers that created by the prospects. These barriers could be broken if the sales persons are used the right openings,

example: don’t do hard selling on your first call attempt to make an appointment, such as “We’re from PT Dihen Bersama, and we want to do business with you”. Instead of that statement, you could just say, “We’re from PT Dihen Bersama, and would you mind if I want to know more about your company profiles? So we could know about the potentials of future business relationship with your company”.



Fact finding/probing for needs identification:

This activity requires sales person to make good sales call, which the sales call objective is to identify the needs trough fact finding and probing.

Mostly sales people failed at this stage due to oftenly jumped into conclusion, which they just offering the products without conduct proper fact finding/probing.



Deliver solution propositions/send quotations:

At this stage, sales persons MUST make their propositions/quotations based on their fact finding/probing results.

This stage could be call as the crucial stage for the whole sales cycle, because mostly sales persons only send their propositions/quotations without proper presentation and lack of information collected during probing stage



Propositions/quotations evaluation:

At this stage, major activity is on the customer’s side, because this is the time when customers internally discussed our propositions.

But, sales person could do more on the influencing the decision, through the contact person they know. That’s why sales persons MUST have more than one contact person on the prospect’s company, and one of them MUST be the decision maker.



Buying terms (price, payment, delivery, etc) negotiations:

This stage requires sales persons to have good negotiation skill, because prospects will negotiate all the terms based on their comforts and expectations, such as SOP, business culture, etc, while our company also has its own expectations and comforts. Sales person with good negotiation skill will be able to make sales deal by elaborating customer’s and our company’s terms.



Buying terms agreement/purchase order released:

At this stage, sales cycle stages are actually almost completed, because prospect is finally closed the deal.

Thus, sales person should be fully in charge to ensure that purchase order won’t be cancelled by prospect.



Get referenced for other prospects:

At this stage, sales persons mostly forgot to ask for referrals after they closed the deal with customers.

If sales persons have good relationships with customers, they could ask to their customers to give good recommendations for given referrals.