If sales are sluggish and morale is low in your sales department, it might be time to refresh your sales process. Sometimes, simple changes can be the key to a new start. Refreshing your sales process can also give you a chance to re-align with a swiftly changing market or to incorporate new technology in your sales process to help your sales managers and reps to work more efficiently.

The following tips can help you to refresh your sales process.

Take a Survey

Before you can know what needs to be refreshed, you’ll need to do a little research. Survey your sales reps, sales managers, and customers to find out what’s working well and what’s not. After you’ve gathered your data, analyze it using the following questions:

• Is everyone clear about his or her roles at each step of the sales process?
• Are there certain places in the sales process where prospects commonly back out?
• Which parts of the process run the smoothest?
• Which parts of the process are the most expensive?

The answers to these questions can help you to discover the parts of your sales process that need attention and change.

Review Your Goals

Without reviewing your company’s goals, you might inadvertently refresh your sales process in a direction that will actually steer you away from your desired destination. Before you make any changes, review your goals with your executive team. 

If it’s been quite a while since your goals and mission statement were reviewed, you might want to spend a little time thinking about the overall direction of your company. Once your goals are settled and agreed upon, you’re in a solid position for making changes to your sales process.

Analyze Your Prospecting

If you have pinpointed prospecting as an area where your process needs refreshing, consider adding one or more of the following items to your procedures:

• Daily prospecting scheduling
• Improved cold calling scripts
• Social media strategies
• Inbound marketing strategies
• Improving client relationships
• Asking for client referrals

Closing Techniques 

If your survey results find that you lose prospects during the sales closing, refresh your sales process in regards to closing techniques. You may need to do some training with your sales reps to introduce them to skills and strategies for closing more sales.

You can refresh your process by focusing on some of the following closing techniques: knowing your impact on customers’ lives, being a storyteller, slowing down and listening to the concerns of customers, connecting the dots between needs and solutions, and focusing on being a problem solver instead of “just a sales person”.

Continuity and Connections

Does your sales process end at the closing? If so, it’s time to refresh with an additional step: continuity and connections. In order to reap the full benefits of a sale, you need to focus on continuing that relationship. Your sales process should include ways to stay connected with customers. Such connections can result in repeat business, customer referrals, and an expanded business network.

In addition to staying connected with customers, you also need a way for your employees and sales people to stay connected with each other. Regularly scheduled meetings can help them to share ideas, build relationships, and strengthen team unity.

Refreshing your sales process doesn’t have to be a huge, arduous task. By making a few simple changes and homing in on the areas where your company needs improvement, you can improve both your sales and the working environment at your company.