Ensure your retail sales team follow your sales process: the ultimate guide
How amazing does it feel when you finally nail your winning sales process? You know exactly what steps you need to take in order to maximise your chances of closing a deal and each customer can be guided through a consistent journey.
What’s even better is that sales processes aren’t just easy and predictable for your frontline sales team to follow, they’re directly linked to good performance. According to a sales-focused study, 90% of all companies that use a formal, guided sales process were ranked as the highest performing.
With all this in mind, it seems obvious that your frontline sales team would want to follow your process, right? Unfortunately, this is not always the case. One of the hardest jobs that you face as a sales manager is getting your frontline team to follow your sales process.
Why aren’t my frontline sales team following my process?
This is a good question and it can depend entirely on the individual sales representative, however, there are usually a few common reasons as to why your frontline sales team aren’t following your sales process. These are as follows.
You haven’t provided adequate information about your sales process
You told them about the sales process once or twice, then after that, it was never to be heard of again.
Your sales reps couldn’t access any resources to remind them of the process and there was nowhere for them to go if they wanted to train themselves more or top up their sales knowledge.
You haven’t made it clear that the process is used by everyone
We’ve all experienced that first day at work when the manager vaguely tells you how things should be done, then once you get started you realise that everyone is doing things their own way.
You don’t want to seem like an uncreative robot, so you add your own twist to the rules just like you think everyone else is doing.
Here lies the problem, unless you really emphasise the fact that your sales process is a company-wide tool which is used by everyone including the highest performing managers, your sales rep will take your process as something they could do but not something they should do.
You’re not holding them accountable
In order to ensure your frontline team follows your sales process, you need to make sure you hold them accountable. You must set the precedent that when you ask them to follow something, you mean it, and you will be checking to see if they are.
If you don’t and you just let them coast along, selling in the way which they think is best, then why would they bother changing?
You haven’t inspired them enough
If a highly qualified sales rep joins your team with tonnes of experience and different selling tactics they are going to think they know best.
If you give them a dull explanation of your sales process then they are going to be left feeling demotivated, deflated and reluctant to use your process.
How to get your frontline sales team to follow your sales process
Although there are multiple reasons why your sales team may not be following your process, there are also a huge number of things you can do to get them back on track.
Provide continuous training
Talking about your sales process once or twice is never going to ensure it is consistently being followed. In fact, in one hour we forget up to 50% of the information we have consumed and this increases to 70% after 24 hours.
With this in mind, it becomes obvious that you must keep repeating the sales process to your staff to ensure the knowledge becomes embedded in their mind.
How do I provide training for sales teams that ‘never have time’ to learn?
Make information easy and accessible for your frontline sales team - Your staff are busy so being able to access information on their phone or tablet is always handy. For example, if you have a nice infographic of your sales process, it’s no good tucked away in a drawer. Email it to them, put it on your company intranet or better yet, house it on a sales knowledge hub like Ocasta Engage. You’ll be able to see how much engagement and reach the article receives plus you can send out notifications that link to the infographic reminding staff to look at it daily, weekly or monthly and you can set acknowledgements on the item so sales reps have to acknowledge that they have looked at it. Again, those acknowledgements can be set as often as you like to ensure your staff are constantly reminding themselves of it.
Ensure your training is bite-sized - It’s no good having hour-long training courses because your staff are just too busy to remember the information or set the time aside to complete the course. Use microlearning which is small bite-sized chunks of content that staff can learn in 5 minutes. Ensure they can access the microlearning content on their phone and because it doesn’t take long to complete, it’s reasonable to ask your sales reps to complete a microlearning playlist every day.
Incorporate training goals into your coaching sessions - Whether you do sales coaching, staff 1-1s or staff observations, you can use these to set training goals and ensure that your staff complete the training by the next session. Psychological studies have proven that you are 65% more likely to complete a goal if you commit to someone and if you book an appointment of when you will have completed it, your chance of success goes up to 95%.
Do overt sales observations
You’ve got your sales process checklist at the ready, so now’s the time to carry out a sales observation to ensure those steps are being followed. Set a time and date every month (or however regularly you want to carry yours out) and let the sales rep know when they should expect to be observed.
The benefits of an overt sales observation are as follows;
Your sales rep will study and learn more in the lead up to their observation.
Your sales rep will try really hard to put their learning into action when they know you are watching. This will make it easier for them to repeat this when you are not watching.
It will make it easier for the sales rep to get into a pattern of learning when they know their observation is coming up.
Once you have completed your sales observation, highlight the employee’s areas of strengths and weaknesses. Use this information to build an action plan for them to work with moving forward. Within this action plan set tasks which they should work on before their next observation e.g. You struggled to confidently discuss the product’s features please read and do the X phone microlearning playlist before your next observation.
Do covert sales observations
Alongside your overt sales observations, it’s a good idea to incorporate covert sales observations. This is simply because you don’t want your staff falling into the trap of only putting your sales process steps into action when they know you are watching.
A customer of ours used our digital sales observation tool to covertly watch their staff and ensure they were doing their upsells. The results showed them that the majority of staff weren’t even offering the upsells. They let their frontline sales team know that they would be observing their behaviour but didn’t tell them when this would be. This led to a 300% increase in sales numbers due to more upsells being carried out.
The benefits of covert sales observations are as follows;
Your frontline sales team are always consciously aware that you may be watching so they are much more likely to follow your sales process consistently.
You’ll get a truer representation of how your sales team acts when they think you are not watching.
You’ll get a truer representation of whether your sales team actually understands your sales process.
Top performer presentations
As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, if you don’t inspire your frontline sales team when you discuss your sales process then the chances of them following it are much lower.
To motivate and inspire your team and to prove that your sales process is the key to success, ask your top-performing sales rep for that month to hold a presentation or to make a short video. This should explain how they sold so much and which part of the sales process they found most helpful.
The rest of your sales team are much more likely to follow your sales process when they can see a real-life example of how it works and how much success it can bring them.
Lead by example
If you want your frontline sales team to follow your sales process, it’s crucial that you and all other senior members of staff follow it too. This is an obvious point but it’s sometimes forgotten or overlooked in fact, only 10% of CEOs are natural leaders who guide staff by example.
An excellent manager will show their frontline sales team how to behave through their own actions. Employees, especially new employees have a tendency to watch their leaders closely to ensure they are performing up to standard.
The benefits of leading by example are as follows;
It sets the tone for how your entire sales team should act.
It builds positive relationships between you and your employees, your sales team are less likely to resent you or other senior members of the organisation if they can see that you are happy to roll up your sleeves and do exactly what you are asking them to do.
You build an inclusive culture - one of the quickest ways to alienate your staff is to ask them to behave in a certain way and then don’t follow suit yourself.
You build trust and loyalty - people like people who act constantly and in accordance with the things they say. If you talk endlessly about the importance of your sales process but you never follow it yourself your staff will see you as disingenuous and untrustworthy.
So there you have it, those are our top tips to ensure that your sales process is being followed by your frontline sales teams. If you have any more suggestions which you would like to see in this article please let us know and in the meantime, happy selling.
