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Let us imagine for a while that your
marketing team is rocking it with the kinds of measures they are undertaking.
Concurrently, your sales team is not realizing the effects of their measures
and is spending a lot of its time in prospecting instead of closing deals. What
does it signify? There is discord between these two teams, and most probably,
your organization won’t achieve the desired sales target. 

What’s the fix, then? You must
consider incorporating sales development into your existing process to rectify
marketing and sales alignment. 

A
Sales Development Process

A sales development process is
crucial in improving your marketing and sales alignment. It cheers up leads or
prospects and prepares them for the subsequent buying decision. 

An entire sales process comprises of
following steps: 

1. Prospecting 

2. Connecting & qualifying

3. Researching 

4. Proposing 

5. Handling disagreements

6. Closing

Why
is the sales development process critical? 

The importance of sales development
can be highlighted in inbound marketing. While your marketing team strive for
generating leads, it is the sales team that pushes prospects for
decision-making. Thus, closure of the deals becomes easier. 

The robust sales development process
work through partners for selling to the end customer in a scalable way. It
also ensures the closing of more deals and offers more time to work on selling
activities.  

Stages
of creating a sales development process

A sales development process primarily
includes the following three stages: 

1. Acknowledging Marketing and Sales
Qualified Leads (SQLs) 

2. Engaging leads 

3. Converting leads into real sales
opportunities

It is important here to note that
sales development can be realized successfully only when sales and marketing
teams are aligned.

Following are some of the steps that
help you get started with implementing your process: 

1.
Assessing the qualities of each lifecycle stage

You cannot label a mere website
visitor as your prospect. Thus, your sales team must acknowledge and categorize
visitors who are close to a purchasing decision. 

There are two kinds of leads- A
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) and a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL). 

A marketing team flag a lead as an MQL
if he is ready for sales. On the other hand, a SQL is a lead who is being
flagged as a qualified prospect by the sales team. It’s then their target to
engage that SQL till they convert into a real sales opportunity. 

A sales team need to define what they
are looking for to help the marketing team generate the right MQLs. Moreover, a
sales team need to offer a rough framework to increase the number of MQLs that
convert into SQLs and minimize the sales reps’ burden by removing bad fits.

2.
Figure out gaps in the pipeline

Once you have categorized each
lifecycle stage-MQL, SQL, and Opportunity, now is the time to identify gaps in
the pipeline. You can consider asking few questions to identify the gaps like-

• Who are the best-qualified leads? 
• Where are you wasting your resources in the prospecting and
  engaging stages?
• What measures should the marketing team undertake to nurture and
  convert leads who are not ready yet?

3.
Set up a process to close those gaps 

Initiate marketing activities that
help improve sales enablement. Also, consider defining collateral needs so that
reps can begin to have more meaningful conversations. Besides that, incorporate
technologies that support the alignment between sales and marketing.

Now, let’s understand the five building
blocks that constitute every sales development process: 

1. A CRM platform 

A CRM (Customer Relationship
Management) platform is necessary to support your workflow. It eliminates
additional administrative requirements that usually consumes a lot of your
time. 

Moreover, the right CRM helps sales
development reps collect lead information and run prospecting activities
adeptly.

2. A Lead Qualification System 

A sales development process acquires
greater efficiency with more qualified leads. However, who is a qualified lead?
At what point a lead becomes a prospect, or when does a prospect close the deal
with the sales team? You must gain insights into the answers to these questions
to save your valuable time. 

If you send non-qualified leads to sales development, then it would be a waste of your resources. Similarly, sending prospects to sales closers without educating them enough about your products or services can lead to mismanagement.Thus you need a lead qualification system in place.

3. A Central Content Management
Portal 

Sales development reps need diverse
collateral and content assets for educating prospects and qualifying leads. A
central database comprising approved sales collateral that’s clearly tagged and
categorized for various buyer personas can help the sales development team
create an impact with buying decisions. 

4. Sales Analytics

Sales analytics tools support sales development teams by offering easy access to content assets, providing data on the most effective sales materials in accordance with buyer personas. 

If a sales team is equipped with the
right tools, for the right prospects, just at the right time, then a lead
qualification process becomes more efficient. Thereby, your sales team can save
their time and focus on the core task, i.e. selling.

5. A channel for collaboration and
feedback 

Sales development connects the gap
between marketing and sales in a real sense. It provides ongoing input from
both sides and thereby enable continuous improvement. 

The robust sales development process includes a built-in feedback mechanism. It facilitates marketing teams to notify sales developments representatives about the challenges related to sales leads while allowing the sales team to offer feedback on the preparedness of prospects.

Concluding
Thoughts

Whether they define it or not, all
sales organizations are likely to make use of the sales development process in
some way or the other. However, suppose an organization construct these
processes carefully and train it’s both marketing and sales teams in each
aspect of the process thoroughly. In that case, it tends to generate more
qualified leads, thereby closing more leads. Thus, you as a developing sales
organization must build a strategic, data-driven sales development plan to boost
the efficiency and gain magnified returns.  

The post Why do you need a Robust Sales Development Process? first appeared on ONPASSIVE.