Sales system: step-by-step building and optimization

How to optimize business processes in sales

1. Define the potential of the region. The potential is the number of potential customers who consume this type of services regularly.
2. Define target-oriented share of the market. If the market is full of competitors, there is no chance to raise your share to more than 5-10%.
3. Define the potential of existing customer base. It is defined as a maximum satisfaction of customer requirements to services in one company.
4. Define categories of customers. There can be two or more categories: the more complicated the business is the more categories of customers are.
5. Classify customers according to their perspectives. An appropriate number of services should be defined for each group.
6. Define opportunities of growth on each customer. It is necessary to define targeted sales indicator.
7. During business process optimization in sales you have to make changes in accounting systems, create databases, train employees, etc. It is necessary to calculate, how much each improvement can bring to the company.
8. Record and analyze the result. The monitoring should be provided at the following levels:
   1. Operational (once a day)
   2. Tactical (once in two weeks)
   3. Strategic and short-term (once in a quarter)
   4. Strategic and long-term (annual).

Strategic planning: defining of targets

Indexes of the market share, total revenue, profitability don’t refer to sales directly, but have a significant impact on the format of sales department. That’s why it is very important to define target indexes. This will help to understand what actions are necessary in order to fulfill these objectives.

Tactic planning: customer base segmentation

Having defined strategic objectives, you need to divide customers into groups according to their profitability for the company. Among these groups you should define the most perspective ones: they are customers who are able to bring the highest level of profitability to the company. You should pay much attention to satisfy requirements of this group of customers and optimize business processes of your company in a way to keep and to enlarge the number of such customers.

Operational planning: defining of requirements of key customers

Unfortunately, in most companies managers don’t have the understanding of real requirements of customers and include almost everything into purchase proposals. In order to create a proposal which will be targeted, you need to have an opportunity to get feedbacks. If you have all necessary information on customer requirements, optimization of business processes in sales will be more effective.

Optimization of business processes in sales department: division into direct sales and customer support

If you divide all managers into those who are engaged with direct sales and those who provide customer support, you will get an opportunity to cover all aspects of customer acquisition. Customers will be satisfied with the fact that their preferences are taken into consideration. At the same time, you will provide the continuality of sales process.