Meet John – Your Ideal Client
How to Understand Your Clients and Build an Effective Sales Process
- 18/10/2024
- Know-how
Many business professionals focus heavily on the sales process itself, but very few consider the most fundamental question: Who is buying from you and why? Some might argue that even a mediocre product or service can be sold if there’s a skilled salesperson behind it. While this might be true in the short term, long-term success comes from truly understanding your clients’ expectations. This enables you to deliver more valuable products or services, improve sales performance, and accelerate company growth. In this article, we’ll explore how to create a strong sales process by analyzing client behaviors, economic preferences, motivations, and real expectations.
Real Value vs. Perceived Value
In reality, there’s no such thing as a perfect company or client. However, building a successful sales strategy starts with creating a buyer persona—an ideal client profile. This model helps you and your team answer key questions, such as:
Who are our clients? – Instead of focusing on demographic factors like age or location, it’s more important to define your clients’ personality, motivations, and reasons for being interested in the value you offer. This helps you understand the context in which they operate.
How do our clients’ situations relate to their problems? – Understanding your clients’ challenges allows you to step into their shoes and think from their perspective. This insight helps clarify their motivations and pain points.
Why do our clients make certain decisions? – Once you understand their perspective, it’s essential to map out their decision-making process. What needs to happen for a client to decide to buy? This knowledge provides insight into their buying behavior.
What are our clients doing to solve their pain points? – Analyze how clients currently attempt to solve their problems, the obstacles they face, and how your solution can be more efficient or effective. This will give you a clear understanding of the options available to them and how you can offer a better alternative.
All the bove questions and answers should be related to the general problem of your client that your product or service solve.
Realizing If Your Product or Service Meets Real Expectations – Product Performance vs. Organizational Performance
This is one of the most crucial points in the entire sales process. Even if your product or service is underperforming, you can still sell it, but you’ll need to rely heavily on your sales and marketing efforts to compensate. However, it’s essential to address two key factors:
How does your product perform? – Understand and assess how well your clients actually like your product or service. Does it meet their core expectations and solve a critical „must-have” need, or is it simply a „nice-to-have”? The answer will shape your approach moving forward.
How does your organization perform in approaching clients? – Equally important is evaluating how effectively your organization delivers the value behind the product or service. Before building a sales process, outline the entire value delivery path from your company to the client, then construct a process around it.
Building a Step-by-Step Process for Engaging Clients
Once you’ve created a buyer persona, assessed how your product and organization perform, and understood your value delivery path, you can begin developing a step-by-step sales process.
Start by analyzing how your clients make buying decisions – If you’re building a sales process from scratch without prior experience or feedback, you’ll need to evaluate the factors that drive your clients’ decisions. Consider what information clients need at each stage, how it should be delivered, and the key reasons they might trust your product. Building client trust is essential.
Build a sales funnel – Once you understand how your client approaches buying, it’s time to create a funnel. A sales funnel outlines each major stage of the process, guiding your sales team on how to act, what value to deliver at each stage, and what you expect from the client before moving forward.
Implement tools to measure and analyze performance – Sales is a process, and it’s critical to track performance. To stay competitive, you need to know where your organization may be underperforming. Tools like CRMs, email campaign reporting, and analytics software are crucial for gathering insights and optimizing your sales process.
Measure how long it takes to get a „yes” – Understanding how long it typically takes to close a deal is vital for managing expectations. If you’re a growing company, this insight will be essential when hiring new sales representatives, helping you set realistic performance goals. If you already have a sales team, it will aid in onboarding and tracking efficiency.
Prepare content and other sales materials – Effective sales often requires various types of content, such as email templates, presentations, landing pages, or even physical marketing materials like brochures or cards. For more complex solutions, you might need a demo presentation or detailed case studies.
Prepare a clear step-by-step guide for your team – Document your process in a simple, easy-to-follow guide or PDF for your sales team. This will streamline the onboarding process for new hires, helping them quickly understand their roles and responsibilities in the sales process.
Analyzing Results and Updating Information
As mentioned earlier, sales is a process that requires ongoing evaluation. Periodically analyze your team’s performance, the product/service fit with client expectations, and changes in market conditions, such as shifts in client behavior. To truly understand your „John” (your ideal client), you need to track how they respond and how well your team is performing.
Monitor the sales funnel – Regularly assess how clients respond to specific sales activities at each stage of the funnel. It’s crucial to determine whether potential customers are appreciating the value you’re providing even before they make a purchase. This insight will help you fine-tune your approach.
Stay aware of how trends impact client awareness – Trends can subtly or drastically affect how clients perceive and engage with your product or service. While some changes are immediately noticeable, others may require more in-depth analysis of decision-making patterns and the factors that influence their buying choices.
Understand the real problems of your clients – Analyze why clients choose to buy from you. Identify the strengths of your product or service and the areas that still need improvement. By comparing this to your client profiles, you can better understand the true value you’re offering and why clients choose your solution over others.
Let Us Show You How to Master the Sales Process
One of the most valuable tools in any sales activity is a well-structured CRM, combined with insightful dashboards and a comprehensive database. These resources help you define your ideal client and improve your understanding of their behaviors and actions. We’ve prepared a set of tools designed to help you build an effective sales process and analyze your sales activities.
Join our business network and take advantage of these resources. One of our business development partners will guide you through the process, showing you how to optimize your sales strategy.
AUTHOR(S) OF THE PUBLICATION
Bartosz Glanowski
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