Sales Process vs. Deal Management: Why your Sales Process is failing you

What happens when you put passionate MEDDICC and Gap Selling methodology leaders in a room? 👀!!

Watch the replay of Braedi, Tony, David, JR, and Mark in an epic masterclass webinar as they move beyond sales methodology tribalism and give you field-tested insights for empowering your team to execute at the highest level.

🎁 Free bonus curated content at the bottom of this article to help you manage your sales processes, trainings, and deal management.

Your key takeaways:

✅  The biggest deal management mistakes sales leaders make today
✅  Why you need both sales process and deal management to accurately forecast and close complex, high-value deals
✅  When and how to use MEDDIC vs. Gap Selling for optimal results
✅  Real-world strategies for implementing methodology so it sticks
✅  How to coach reps on blending rigor with practicality to win more deals

Our passionate speakers:

1. Braedi DeLong: COO of A Sales Growth Company (Gap Selling)
2. Tony Wiedenski: CEO of RevUp Sales (Gap Selling)
3. David Weiss: CRO of The Sales Collective; And David Weiss' Deal Coaching
4. JR Butler: CEO of Shift Group
5. Mark Fershteyn: CEO of Recapped
   

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Navigating the Complex World of B2B Sales: Insights from the Sales Process vs Deal Management Masterclass

As a B2B seller or sales leader, achieving predictable revenue is more challenging than ever in today's economic climate. Buyers have more access to information and more options to choose from, lengthening sales cycles. At the same time, companies need to tighten budgets and operate more efficiently.

So how can you set up your sales team for success in this environment?

The key is getting alignment across four critical pillars in this order:

1. Sales Process: Documented process
   This is your blueprint, your game plan. Remember, "A goal without a plan is just a wish." The sales process is about structuring your path to success. It's the stages you set, from prospecting to closing.
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2. Sales Training: How you do it
   Ever heard the saying, "Knowledge is power"? Well, in sales, it's pure gold. Sales training is about arming your team with not just product knowledge but the skills to connect, engage, and persuade. It's the difference between shooting in the dark and hitting the bullseye.
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3. Deal Qualification: Identifying prospects for the best fit
   One of the webinar speakers hit the nail on the head: "Not every lead is a golden ticket." Deal qualification is about being discerning, picking battles worth fighting for. It saves time, resources, and a lot of heartaches.
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4. Deal Management: Executing the training and making it scaleable
   This is where the rubber meets the road. "It's not just about getting the deal; it's about getting the right deal," one speaker noted. Deal management is the art of steering each deal, navigating challenges, and crossing the finish line.

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Sales Process vs. Deal Management: What's the Real Scoop?

Your sales process maps out the stages your reps need to guide buyers through their B2B buying journey. This provides structure and repeatability to your sales conversations. Without a clearly defined process, each rep wings it on their own, leading to inconsistent buyer experiences.

Having a Digital Sales Room Platform with Mutual Success Plans, like Recapped, will help standardize sales processes that every rep can follow, while reducing buyer friction and improving buyer enablement.

Since sales people love their analogies, and we had plenty of them in the webinar, this is one of the ones that stood out from David Weiss:

1. Sales Process = Your Road Map
2. Sales Training = Your Car
3. Deal Management = Learning how to drive effectively and navigating your blindspots

The sales process is your road map. It's the plan you sketch out before you embark on a journey, hoping it takes you to Sales Success City. It's about plotting the course from "Hey, nice to meet you!" to "Let's seal this deal."

A sales process should outline major milestones like:

• Prospecting
• Discovery calls
• Demos
• Proposals
• Negotiations
• Closing

But here's the kicker – while you're following this map, each deal is like driving a different car. Some are smooth, luxurious rides; others, well, they're more like trying to steer a bumper car. That's where deal management comes into play. It's the skill to drive any deal-car, whether it's a sleek sports car or a temperamental old van, to the destination.

Why Sales Training Isn't Just a Buzzword

Imagine going into a high-stakes game without knowing the rules or the tricks up your sleeve. That's what skipping sales training is like. Sales training isn't just about learning to pitch or talk shop; it's about becoming a deal-making ninja. It's learning to read the room, tailor your approach, and anticipate curveballs. It's about turning a "maybe" into a "yes" and knowing what to do when a "no" is looming on the horizon.

Sales training should equip your reps with the skills to effectively execute your sales process. But one-off training sessions have minimal impact.

“Without ongoing coaching and skills reinforcement from managers and tools, reps forget 84% of training within 3 months.”

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Deal Qualification: The Art of Choosing Your Battles

Deal qualification is the process that sales reps use to determine if a potential sale is viable and worth pursuing based on criteria set by sales leadership. It involves gathering information from prospects to evaluate if they have a real need, budget, authority to make purchasing decisions, and alignment with the seller’s solutions.

For example, there are deal qualification methodologies, like BANT (Budget, Authority, Need,  Timeline). However, sales people have their opinions on BANT. 😅

How do you know if your deal is qualified? Sellers always overlook long-term qualification. Braedi interviewed 300 sellers, and most of them replied, “if they have a pulse, and they are talking to me." Your deals are NOT qualified. 🥲

Effective deal qualification enables sales teams to focus their limited time on high-potential opportunities that align with the company’s goals, increasing sales productivity and accelerating revenue growth. Setting ideal customer profiles and mandatory qualification thresholds helps reps quickly identify deals that warrant further pursuit versus those that should be discarded.

Besides establishing the sales framework, sales leaders also need to coach reps on questioning and probing techniques to extract the required information from prospects quickly and accurately. Asking the right mix of open-ended and closed-ended questions is an art that reps need to master. Leaders should conduct role-playing sessions and provide feedback to improve rep skills. Usage of qualification scorecards and assessment tools helps track how well reps qualify deals. Ongoing training and sharing of best practices are critical for the deal qualification process to yield consistently high-quality opportunities.

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Mastering Deal Management: The Secret Sauce to Closing

Now, let's talk about the heart of the matter – deal management. This is where you're in the trenches, working each deal, making those calls, and sending those perfectly crafted emails. It's about nurturing, negotiating, and sometimes, knowing when to walk away. Effective deal management is like being a chess master, anticipating moves, and always staying two steps ahead.

Deal management is essential for identifying gaps in information and game planning next steps. Rather than leaving this to the end of a quarter, managers should proactively perform deal reviews earlier in the process.

Analyze any missing information that could impact the forecast and develop plans to fill those gaps, whether researching the customer’s buying process or getting the economic buyer to validate ROI. Doing this early when there’s still time to course correct is key.

David Weiss’s recommendation is to color-code your methodology: Red, yellow, green.

1. Red - "I don't know"
2. Yellow - "I think I know, and each letter has a little variation to this"
3. Green - "I know. I'm confident that I've closed the gap on this"

So when he’s doing forecast reviews, he’s looking for not only the data, but for the red, yellow, and green because then he knows where to aim, and where to spend the time on the reds and yellows. He trusts the greens because he’s pressure-tested them. Learn more from our previous webinar on How Revenue Leaders are Optimizing Deal Reviews with Mutual Action Plans.

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To Recap with Recapped 🎯

All this talk about processes, training, and management is great, but how do you put it all into action?

Create alignment around a documented sales process and reinforce it through training and active deal management in Recapped. It's the tool that helps you make sense of the madness. Think of it as your personal sales assistant, keeping track of everything from initial contact to closing the deal even through handoff to CS with onboarding and implementation.

Unfortunately, 58% of companies admit sales managers spend less than 30 minutes per week coaching reps. This lack of skills development and deal guidance is a major pitfall.

The time is now for sales teams to get back to basics if they want to thrive in today's customer-centric selling environment. Following structured sales processes, enabling teams with continuous training, qualifying deals effectively, and managing opportunities closely ultimately empowers reps to add value as trusted advisors.

Those able to achieve alignment across all four pillars will gain the visibility and confidence needed to hit their numbers in 2023 and beyond.

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💪 Strengthen your Sales Process and Training with Effective Deal Management

Armed with this in-depth understanding of the fundamental principles of B2B sales, you're equipped to navigate the intricate sales landscape with confidence. The four pillars – Sales Process, Sales Training, Deal Qualification, and Deal Management – serve as your essential toolkit for success.

Companies rigorously executing across all four pillars see forecast accuracy jump from a coin flip of 50% to over 90%.

Deal Execution Platforms, like Recapped, are here to support you in translating these insights into action whether you're using Gap Selling, MEDDIC/MEDDICC/MEDDPICC, Sandler, Command of the Message, or other sales methodologies. Remember, it's not just about closing deals; it's about closing the right deals, the right way.

This is an example of a sales rep inputting MEDDICC within Recapped. It bi-directionally updates that information in Salesforce in real time. Recapped integrates directly with HubSpot as well.

Take a step closer to reinforcing your sales process, training, and deal management Our team at Recapped is here to help. Request your personalized demo today!

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Or Try Recapped out for yourself with our free bonus curated content 🎁

Want to learn more about optimizing these four pillars of predictable revenue growth? Access free sales templates and implementation guides created in conjunction with the experts featured in this webinar:

1. Mutual Action Plan with MEDDPICC template - Curated by David Weiss - Releasing soon!
2. Mutual Action Plan with Gap Selling template - Curated by Tony Wiedenski - Releasing soon!

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