Today we are going to share a 10-step sales management process that you can use to build your sales team, empower your salespeople, and retain top performers.
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You should start by automating lead generation so that your salespeople won’t have to waste time chasing leads.
The easiest way to do that is to build a lead generation funnel that you can then drive traffic to with paid ads.
Here are three funnels that you can use to get leads:
The squeeze page funnel is the most popular sales funnel out there because it’s so simple and easy to build.
It looks like this:
Page 1: A squeeze page.
Page 2: A thank you page.
In theory, you can build a squeeze page funnel without a lead magnet, but in practice, funnels with lead magnets convert much better than funnels without them.
What’s a lead magnet? It’s a freebie that you offer to the potential customer in exchange for their email address.
It can be anything that they can download to their device or access online:
…etc.
What’s important is that:
Ideally, the lead magnet should not only serve as bait but also help you build trust, increase your credibility in the eyes of the potential customer, and set the stage for the upcoming sales pitch.
Also, if you are concerned that this approach will increase lead quantity, but decrease lead quality, you can ask for more information than just their email address to filter out people who are unlikely to convert into paying customers.
Some businesses ask potential customers to provide their names, last names, company names, job titles, and phone numbers in exchange for their lead magnet. That’s extreme but it might make sense in some situations.
ClickFunnels includes a squeeze page funnel template, a visual editor that you can use to customize that template, and an email marketing functionality that allows you to collect potential customers’ email addresses and sell them your products and services via email.
The webinar funnel is a funnel where you use a webinar as your lead magnet.
It looks like this:
Page 1: A webinar registration page.
Page 2: A thank you page.
Page 3: A webinar page.
You then either pitch your product or service at the end of the webinar and direct the attendees to its sales page or encourage the attendees to book a free consultation and close the sale on that call.
Webinar funnels can be extremely effective.
Moreover, while we do recommend starting with live webinars, they don’t have to be live to work well.
You can create a webinar funnel where the webinar is pre-recorded. Just be upfront about it because misleading people into thinking that it’s a live event can damage your credibility.
Also, you can combine a squeeze page funnel with a webinar funnel for the best results:
Page 1: A squeeze page.
Page 2: A thank you page where you invite the potential customer to your webinar.
Page 3: A webinar registration page.
Page 4: A thank you page with webinar information (date, time, etc.)
Page 5: A webinar page.
This gives you an opportunity to build a lot of trust with the potential customer before making your pitch which can help you sell high-ticket products and services.
ClickFunnels includes a webinar funnel template, a visual editor that you can use to customize that template, and an email marketing functionality that allows you to collect potential customers’ email addresses and sell them your products and services via email.
The quote funnel is a variation of the survey funnel.
It looks like this:
Page 1: A survey where you ask the potential customer lead-qualifying questions.
Page 2: A squeeze page where you ask the potential customer for their email address so that you could send them a quote.
Page 3: A thank you page where you encourage the potential customer to book a free consultation with you.
You can either calculate the quote manually or generate it automatically.
This funnel can be an excellent choice for service businesses that charge per project as opposed to having fixed pricing listed on their websites.
In such a situation, potential customers may be hesitant to reach out for a quote because they don’t want to feel embarrassed if what you offer is way outside their budget.
They might feel more comfortable with filling out an online survey and getting a quote without having to speak to anyone at your company.
Do you actually need a sales team?
You might be able to automate sales by building a Value Ladder sales funnel for your business.
This sales funnel was created by our co-founder Russell Brunson who then used it to take ClickFunnels from zero to $10M+ in annual revenue in just one year (it’s at $100M+ now!).
Ideally, you also offer a continuity program of some sort, meaning, a subscription product that generates recurring revenue.
We also recommend adding downsells, upsells, and cross sells to these core offers in order to maximize your revenue.
The reason why this sales funnel works so well is that it allows you to:
Here’s how Russell explains it:
Structuring your sales funnel like this makes it easy to automate sales. Why?
Because at each stage, you can capitalize on the trust that you built in the previous stage. And the more someone trusts you, the less persuasion is needed to close the sale.
This means that you might be able to sell your products and services through completely automated email sequences.
ClickFunnels has an email marketing functionality that you can use for that. It allows you to set up a welcome sequence, create offer-specific sequences, use behavioral triggers to tailor your email content to each subscriber, and more!
We strongly advise automating your sales process as much as possible. This can help you free up your time, increase your profit margins, and scale faster.
It will also make your company more appealing to potential buyers should you ever want to sell it.
Not all products and services can be sold through completely automated sales funnels.
Sometimes, the only way to close sales is to talk to potential customers directly, whether in person or over a call. This is often the case with high-end B2B products and services.
If this is the situation you are in, you should still be doing your best to streamline the sales process as much as possible.
Set up a customer relationship management system so that each lead that comes in will be assigned to someone in your sales team.
That salesperson should then reach out to the lead, set up a call, talk to them, close the sale, and then help finalize the sale so that the new customer could proceed to onboarding.
You want to automate everything that can be automated including lead assignments, appointment reminder emails, follow-up emails, etc.
ClickFunnels has a customer relationship management functionality that makes it easy to set all this up!
When sales can only be closed manually it’s extremely important to establish a lead scoring system so that your sales team can prioritize the most promising leads.
If you are just starting out, you’ll have to make your best guess as to who is the most likely to pay for your products and services and then prioritize leads that meet this dream customer profile.
And if you are already generating revenue, you should look at your sales data, identify your most lucrative customers, figure out what they have in common, and then prioritize leads that have those traits.
The exact setup will depend on the complexity of your business but at the very least your salespeople should be able to see lead scores so that they could prioritize leads accordingly.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the metrics by which you evaluate an employee’s performance.
Setting KPIs for salespeople can be somewhat tricky because the final result (sales) is not completely within their control.
That’s why the most important KPI should be the number of leads they have reached out to in order to schedule a call. Outreach is something that they have complete control over.
However, it can’t be the sole performance evaluation metric because that would incentivize your salespeople to maximize outreach at all costs which might backfire.
You should also track the conversion rates across your sales pipeline. What percentage of leads agree to a call, what percentage of those who agree show up, and what percentage of those who show up become paying customers?
Establish the minimum conversion rates that you want to see and then use them as KPIs. It’s important to be reasonable here. If you set your expectations too high, you might end up demotivating your sales team.
You should also track the number of sales each salesperson makes, but keep in mind that this metric is downstream from the other KPIs.
If they reach out to enough leads, schedule enough calls, and talk to enough potential customers, they should be able to close enough sales (provided that they have the necessary sales skills).
Finally, you might want to also track cancellations and refunds. Why?
Because if someone is closing a lot of sales but then those customers cancel immediately and request a refund, it’s likely that the salesperson is misrepresenting your product or service in order to make sales.
Unhappy customers can damage your brand by leaving bad reviews and complaining on social media. In extreme cases this can lead to a PR nightmare. And some businesses never recover from that.
Setting KPIs that incentivize your salespeople to be mindful of cancellations and refunds can help you protect your company’s reputation.
We recommend reviewing each salesperson’s performance on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis.
This performance review schedule can help you spot problems early on and course correct before the situation gets worse.
It also provides enough leeway for normal variability: someone’s performance might temporarily worsen due to health problems, relationship drama, family issues, etc.
We are all human so this is to be expected, what’s important is that they bounce back in a reasonable timeframe.
You can’t just drop someone in a sales role with no training and expect them to start closing sales left and right
It’s your responsibility to provide them with everything they need to meet their KPIs. That includes:
The more you invest in employee onboarding, the better prepared they will be for the job, the quicker they will find their bearings and the sooner they will start closing sales!
We recommend this compensation structure:
You want to be generous and reward good performance but you also need to be mindful about what you are incentivizing because commissions and bonuses can backfire.
Consider tying commissions to customer retention metrics (e.g. only pay a commission if the customer stayed with you for three months) or refund metrics (e.g. only pay a commission if the refund period is over and the customer didn’t refund the product).
As for the bonuses, both quarterly and yearly bonuses can work well, so you need to think about what makes the most sense for your business.
What’s important is making sure that these bonuses are clearly tied to performance and that your salespeople understand what they need to do to get them.
There can’t be any ambiguity here because it will lead to resentment!
When it comes to hiring salespeople, you will have to choose which trade-off you are willing to make:
You can hire people with no experience who will accept a lower salary but require a lot of training.
Or you can hire people who have experience and won’t require as much training but will expect a higher salary.
As for the hiring itself, you can post job ads on job boards, social media, and LinkedIn.
We recommend setting up some minor hurdles to filter out people who are spam-applying to all jobs that they see without reading the ads.
It can be something as simple as requiring a 3-minute video “cover letter”. Make it clear that the production quality doesn’t matter. Everyone has a smartphone and can easily film a video but it’s probably safe to say that most applicants won’t.
That will leave you with people who read the ad, can follow instructions and are interested in this opportunity enough to go through the minor trouble of recording a video.
We also strongly advise starting with a 3-month contract for a trial period. Only extend a full job offer to people who have proven themselves.
Sales training shouldn’t be a one-time thing.
You want to provide your sales team with regular opportunities to learn more about sales.
How exactly this will look will depend on your budget: you can buy your team sales books, sales courses, tickets to live events, etc.
You should also provide ongoing one-on-one mentorship where you help each person improve their sales skills
Everyone should know what they are doing well, what they could do better and what they need to focus on in order to close more sales.
If you are too busy to mentor salespeople yourself, you can assign this task to your best salesperson.
Just make sure to increase their pay accordingly because being a mentor is a serious responsibility!
You want to retain talented salespeople for as long as possible.
Entrepreneurs often make the mistake of expecting loyalty from their employees instead of treating the relationship as the business transaction that it is.
The reality is this: if you want to retain your employees, you need to ensure that remaining with your company is their best option.
We have already mentioned a generous compensation structure. This is the absolute bare minimum if you are serious about employee retention.
You should consider offering various perks such as a flexible work schedule, an opportunity to work remotely, fun company retreats, etc.
You might also want to look into profit sharing where employees get a percentage of the company’s annual profit with that percentage increasing each year they stay with the company.
Finally, as your company grows, you should provide your employees with career opportunities by hiring from within!
ClickFunnels has everything you need to streamline your sales process:
We also offer a free trial which means that you can check out our software without any risk. So why not start streamlining your sales process today?
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