What are the Essential Elements of a Sales Process Flowchart and How to Create One?
How often does your sales team ask a lot of questions about the sales process or wonder how to close the deal? If you often encounter this, then your team lacks organization. It means that they do not have a clear plan of what they need to do from the moment they start communicating with the client to the moment the deal is closed.
Your sales team needs a simple guide or step-by-step instruction that they can use whenever they have any questions. You don’t need to write detailed guides or detailed walkthroughs, as you just need to create a concise flowchart.
In a sales environment, teams are starting to use the sales process flowchart more and more, especially when there are a lot of newcomers in the team who can get confused and fail the deal. Depending on what product you are selling, as well as who you are selling to, the sales process scheme will be different. If you are in enterprise sales and sell complex products and services to other businesses, your sales process will be very different from what it looks like in retail.
We’ll walk you through the elements of a sales process roadmap for teams and what you need to do to create one.
Understanding the sales process flowchart
Instead of writing instructions and detailing which step comes next, you can concisely visualize the action plan that your sales representatives must follow. This is a kind of memo that reminds your team of each stage of the sale that must be completed.
This arrangement makes it easier for managers to free up time instead of answering typical questions day in and day out. It’s also a huge plus for sales reps, whether experienced or new, as they can quickly use the sales process flowchart to fill in the gaps and quickly figure out what they need to do next.
What are the key components of the scheme?
Before you move on to start creating a sales process plan for your team, you need to understand what components it will consist of. Components can be divided into two categories. Here is what your sales process diagram should consist of:
- The basis of the scheme is all the steps that you go through while selling to your customers. Usually, these are the following steps:
- Search for potential customers;
- Lead scoring;
- Planning and preparation;
- Sales pitch;
- Dealing with objections;
- Closing;
- Initiating post-sales.
- Various symbols, shapes, and figures that you will use to guide your team to the next steps. There is no single norm on how you should present it. You can choose shapes and elements that your team will understand so they know what to do next.
What do you need to do to create an effective chart?
Find the right tool or software
Instead of trying to create the chart yourself, you can resort to using a tool or software designed for this purpose. Just as you use numerous tools and software to help you with sales, such as Salesforce scheduling, which you can learn more about from Revenue Grid, you can use an effective tool to create a schema.
Your task will be to determine the steps to follow and visualize them so that your team is no longer left with questions about what they need to do next. The software allows you to quickly share your sales process flowchart with your team so they can save it and open it when they are at a crossroads.
Describe all the stages of how your team should work
By understanding the intricacies of how you work with potential clients, qualify them, and then negotiate to close the deal, it will be much easier for you to describe each item of your memo. You can use all kinds of tools that your team uses when working with clients. This may be your CRM, which will tell you what steps you are doing.
On the net, you can find many templates that other companies create. However, you can use them as an example to develop your scheme. Depending on the specifics of your products, your customer base, and sales strategies, you need to create a custom schema that will help your reps achieve success faster.
Ask for your team’s opinion
You are creating a schema that your team will use, which is why you need to get feedback from them to understand if you are moving in the right direction. They can give you tips that you can incorporate into your schema to help newcomers to your team adapt to working with clients more quickly.
- You can ask the following questions:
- What are the most important steps?
- Which steps are the most difficult?
- How can you improve your work and close deals faster?
Track the performance
At this point, you will already have the first draft of the sales process chart, which you can share with your team. However, this is not it, because you need to understand whether your scheme is effective and understandable for the team.
At any time, you can update your scheme, and add comments and tips that will help both experienced team members and beginners. After you implement your scheme, you should check to see how your team’s performance will improve.
If you notice that the number of deals is increasing, and your team members are starting to work better with customers and ask fewer questions to managers, this indicates that you have created an effective sales process flowchart. If you do not see progress, this is a clear signal that the scheme is not working and needs to be changed.
Conclusion
Whether you are recruiting new salespeople or your team is made up of seasoned specialists, you should have a sales process flowchart. This is a visual memo that will remind team members of all stages of the sale until the deal is closed. There is no one-size-fits-all checklist because it all depends on what you’re selling, who you’re selling to, and the way you’re selling. This is great training material that will help your team work more efficiently.
