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With the average sales rep spending almost three-quarters of their time on non-selling activities, it’s clear that many organizations are struggling to build and implement a healthy, efficient sales process.
This is a particular struggle for lead generation agencies.
If you don’t get your sales process right, you’re not only harming your own growth, but also that of your clients. And if you’re not delivering a constant stream of quality leads, those clients aren’t going to stick around.
Fortunately, there are some tried-and-trusted strategies you can employ to optimize your current sales process.
Read on for everything you need to know about the sales process for lead gen agencies, including:
The “classic” steps of a well-defined sales process
Best practices to maintain sales process health
Common sales process mistakes to avoid
Let’s get into it…
What Is a Sales Process?
The sales process is a phrase that describes the repeatable steps required to sell a company’s products or services.
(And, in the case of lead gen agencies, it’s also the process of generating leads for your clients.)
Also known as the “sales cycle”, the sales process is designed to guide sales teams from identifying and reaching out to a prospect to nurturing them, handling sales objections, and closing the deal.
Creating a healthy sales process ensures that all reps are delivering a consistent, high-quality service, giving them the best chance of hitting quota.
Learn more: Understanding the Sales Growth Formula: A Guide for Lead Gen Agencies
7 Step Sales Process Explained
While the specifics can vary from one agency and industry to another, the sales process typically encompasses the following series of steps:
1. Prospecting
Getting started is often the hardest step.
This certainly seems to be true for the sales process, given that 80% of reps named “prospecting” as the most challenging part:
It’s easy to see why.
Reps at lead generation agencies might be juggling multiple clients simultaneously. Tracking down and qualifying a constant stream of potential customers who align with each client’s ideal buyer is tough.
To make matters worse, if you don’t nail the prospecting stage, you risk derailing every other step in the sales process — which means you won’t deliver the desired results for your clients.
2. Preparation
Once you’ve identified a prospect that matches your client’s buyer personas, it’s time to do some further research.
This step is all about giving yourself the best chance of writing an initial outreach message that persuades your prospect to open it, read to the end, and hit “reply”.
The more you know about the prospect, the easier it becomes to personalize your communications. That’s a big deal, because personalized messages see higher response rates.
Specifically, at this stage, you want to understand:
Your prospect’s pain points and needs
Whether they have a clear and immediate need for your client’s product or service
Likely objections and other barriers to closing the deal
Having gathered all that information, you can start honing your outreach sequence…
3. Outreach
Finally, it’s time to get in touch with your prospect for the first time.
In reality, the outreach stage involves two separate steps:
Identifying the best outreach channel
Honing your outreach messaging
Let’s tackle step #1 first. There’s no shortage of cold outreach channels you can use to reach and engage prospects. Research suggests that cold calling is the most effective form of outreach…
…but it might not be right for every prospect.
If they’re super active on social media, LinkedIn could be a safer bet. And with 77% of B2B buyers preferring to be contacted over email — more than double any other channel — you should definitely consider email as part of your outreach strategy.
(Hint: For best results, use an outreach platform that lets you contact prospects via multiple channels. For instance, QuickMail allows you to reach out via email, cold calling, LinkedIn, and SMS.)
Once you’ve landed on the perfect communications channel, you need to build an outreach sequence comprising an impactful introductory message and multiple follow-ups. Because more than half of all cold email replies come from follow-up messages.
Not sure where to start with creating an outreach sequence? Check out these in-depth guides:
4. Sales Presentation
Up to now, your goal has been to grab the prospect’s interest and encourage them to respond.
Once you’ve got that initial reply, it’s time for the serious selling to begin.
The word “presentation” makes it sound like you’ll be delivering an in-person, PowerPoint-based sales pitch. In reality, that’s often not the case. You might be “presenting” your client’s product via email, phone, or video conference.
Whatever the case, you need to get your positioning right by linking it to your prospect’s needs and pain points.
5. Objection Handling
“Not right now.”
“We don’t have the budget.”
“I’m just not interested.”
Every B2B sales rep has heard these common objections — and others — countless times before.
It’s up to you to figure out the meaning behind your prospect’s objection. For example, if they say they’re “not interested”, they might have had a negative experience with a rival solution in the past. Or perhaps they would be interested — but only at a lower price point.
Be patient, empathize with their concerns, and ask questions to clarify what they’re really objecting to.
6. Closing
For most lead generation agencies, the first 3 – 5 sales stages are all that matter. After that, you’ll be passing the prospect’s details to your client to get the deal over the line.
At the closing stage, your client will overcome any final objections, agree contractual terms, and sort out all the necessary paperwork.
Once all the admin is finished, the deal should be done. Congrats!
7. Following Up
Last but not least, the client’s internal sales team should follow up with their new customer to thank them for their business and introduce them to other important contacts, like their account manager or project lead. It’s all about paving the way for a mutually beneficial, long-lasting relationship.
They can also take this opportunity to ask for referrals. Because it’s never too soon to start thinking about the next sale!
7 Best Practices To Maintain an Effective Sales Process
Now that we understand the individual stages of the sales process, let’s consider key strategies to optimize it:
1. Define the Buyer Journey for Your ICP
The sales process isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Rather, it should be personalized based on the unique preferences and requirements of your client’s ideal customer profile (ICP).
To do this effectively, you first need to map the customer journey for each client. For instance:
Have the prospects you’re targeting heard of your client?
Do they understand your client’s product/service?
What methods do they use to research purchases?
How many people are on their buying team?
How long does it take them to reach buying decisions?
Once you understand the prospective customer’s journey, you can adjust your outreach to better meet the prospect’s needs.
2. Understand What Prospect Actions You Want To Drive
As a lead gen agency, it’s your job to guide prospects from the start of the sales process to the end as efficiently as possible.
This means understanding the specific “actions” required to move a prospect from one stage to the next. For example, at stage #3 (Outreach), your goal is to generate a positive response to your outreach messaging.
Defining these actions at each step will help your reps stay focused on tasks that are most likely to result in sales.
3. Speak To Your Sales Team
Your sales process might look fantastic on paper. But your sales reps can tell you if it works in practice.
Ask your team about any shortfalls or speed bumps in your sales process. For instance:
Do your reps struggle to find relevant prospects?
Does it take them too long to personalize outreach messages?
Do they need more (or better) sales collateral to share with prospects?
Of course, you can’t take every piece of feedback on board. But if you repeatedly hear about a specific issue or challenge, it’s time to take a closer look.
4. Test Different Outreach Strategies
For lead gen agencies, developing a sales process is rarely a one-and-done activity.
Sure, you might have a broad outreach framework that can be applied to any client in any niche. But when you start working with a new client, you’ll want to test a bunch of different sales methodologies to see which is best.
Your tests will likely fall into one of two categories:
Communications Channels
In our experience, the most effective outreach campaigns incorporate multiple communications channels.
It’s up to you to find the right combination for each ICP.
With QuickMail, you can build sequences including cold email, cold calling, LinkedIn, and SMS steps:
So you can view a prospect’s LinkedIn profile, send them a connection request, reach out with an introductory email, and follow up via a cold call — all in the same sequence.
“I've tested out every single email outreach platform...I've never found anything that replicates the results we get from QuickMail."
— Will Wang, Lead Gen Agency Founder
Messaging
Not all prospects respond to the same types of messaging, so it makes sense to test different subject lines, intros, body copy, and CTAs.
That’s why you should choose an outreach platform like QuickMail, which makes it easy to add multiple variations to outreach sequences:
Use our A/Z testing functionality to identify the most effective emails for each ICP you target.
Learn more: 8 Best Practices for A/B Testing Email Outreach
5. Identify Sales Funnel Leaks
Once you’ve defined the actions you’re trying to drive at each sales process stage, you can start to identify and plug any leaks in your funnel.
For instance, maybe you’re finding a ton of relevant prospects, but your response rate is super low.
In that case, you’ll want to test different types of outreach messages to boost opens and replies.
QuickMail brings clarity to this process by tracking opens and responses based on when you sent the initial email:
So you can instantly understand the impact of any changes to your outreach sequences.
6. Build Automated Follow-Up Sequences
As we’ve already noted, the majority of cold outreach replies stem from follow-up emails. So if you’re not following up effectively, you’re likely missing out on a ton of qualified leads.
Sales professionals are busy, so you can’t rely on manual follow-ups — inevitably, some opportunities will slip through the net.
Instead, use an outreach platform like QuickMail to build automated outreach sequences comprising multiple follow-up steps.
7. Track Sales Process Results and Optimize
However effective your sales efforts, there’s always room for improvement.
Use your outreach platform’s analytics tools to keep on top of key lead gen metrics like:
Email deliverability
Open rate
Click rate
Response rate
That way, you can take the guesswork out of campaign optimization.
Learn more: Lead Generation Metrics and KPIs To Track for Marketing Success
3 Common Sales Process Mistakes To Avoid
Finally, let’s consider what not to do when building, implementing, and maintaining your sales process:
1. Misaligned Sales Actions
Remember: sales reps have a ton of other responsibilities — admin, internal meetings, training — that keep them from selling. So you need their time on revenue-generating activities to be spent as effectively as possible.
Ensure their actions are closely aligned with your sales process to reduce inefficiencies. Consider creating a sales playbook so your reps know what’s expected of them at each stage of the process.
2. Overly Rigid Methodology
While building a formal sales process is helpful to keep your reps focused, you want to leave them some room for experimentation and creativity.
To give a simple example, if a prospect is highly active on LinkedIn, a social-first approach might yield better results than targeting them via email. Sales managers must give reps the flexibility to switch up sequences on the fly rather than blindly relying on the same approach time after time.
3. Ignoring KPIs and Micro-Goals
Ultimately, as a lead generation agency, all your actions are geared toward a single objective: generating leads. But if you only look at the big picture, it’s hard to understand why your campaigns are working (or not).
That’s why it pays to consider smaller sales goals and KPIs. By analyzing metrics like open and reply rates, you can get a more granular view of campaign performance, helping you course-correct fast when necessary.
Enhance Your Sales Process With QuickMail
Manual effort can only get you so far.
Sooner or later, you need to invest in effective outreach tools to streamline your sales process and level up your results.
For example, with QuickMail, you can…
Target prospects via multiple channels in a single sequence
Scale campaigns by adding new inboxes (at no extra cost)
Optimize campaign performance based on real-time analytics data
…and much more besides.
See for yourself by signing up for your free QuickMail trial!
