How a Process Driven Sales Process Makes Your Business a More Attractive Asset
If you’re planning to sell your business, you need to consider what the buyer wants. They want a profitable revenue-generation machine. If you’ve struggled to hit your revenue goals reliably and productively, what can you do to make your business more attractive and achieve the purchase multiples you desire?
In my role as a Fractional Vice President of Sales, I work closely with clients to build a sales and revenue-generation process infrastructure that helps companies reach their sales and revenue-generation goals reliably and productively. Here’s what you should look at to accomplish this in your business too.
How to Build a Business Worth Selling
1. Sales and Revenue Generation Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Do You Have Any?
Track sales activity and results key performance indicators to have a clear idea of how your business is performing and know when and how to course-correct your sales process.
Sales revenue for the overall company is, of course, required. But going more granular and tracking sales revenue per rep demonstrates that you have cracked the code on how to make salespeople in your business and your industry successful.
Classic sales and revenue generation KPIs are things like sales quota per territory, which rolls up to a regional and then a national goal. Next to that would be the actual revenue generated per month, per quarter, and per year per rep.
2. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System: Do You Have One?
If you’re currently using spreadsheets to track sales activity and performance, chances are that you could benefit from streamlining your process by adopting a CRM. Invest in a CRM and use it religiously, 100% of the time, for all of your sales opportunities and salespeople. A good CRM is like a mirror that reflects the diligence with which your sales team follows your sales process.
A CRM not only gives you a centralized repository of all your sales information and lets you present it in an easy-to-understand format but also allows you to increase productivity and optimize your selling.
3. Build a Documented Sales Process
This crucial aspect of your business is the recipe for your sales team’s success. It is essentially an instruction manual to follow to generate sales in your industry. When you have a detailed sales process nailed down, this is a clear indication that you can scale up and have any new salespeople you onboard become active and productive very quickly.
4. Refine Your Hiring Process
Create a defined and refined hiring process that ensures you can consistently hire candidates with the highest probability of sales success. This will position your company to scale up at any time.
Without a clear hiring process, the purchaser of your company will be left to try to unravel the mystery of hiring sales winners on their own. By giving them a tried and tested formula for hiring excellent salespeople, you make your business more attractive.
5. Have a Sales Coaching Protocol
Sales coaching is an integral component of empowering sales reps to reach and exceed their sales quotas, share best practices, and improve retention rates. Creating a process description that outlines the content of sales coaching sessions shows that you understand how to take great sales hires and long-term performers and continually increase their knowledge base, sharpen their skills, and improve their performance levels year over year.
When you have all of the above components, it demonstrates to potential buyers that your company is not reliant on a single individual for revenue generation success. Rather, you can demonstrate that you have a well-oiled revenue-generation machine that can continue to function even when the players change.
A buyer wants to see that you have set up a systems and process infrastructure so that the company is in a position to generate revenue in up markets or down markets, good times or bad. This is the type of guarantee that a potential purchaser of your business is looking for.
If you’re thinking of selling your business or if you are currently building one with the long-term goal of selling it, get in touch to discuss how to structure your sales function to make your asset as attractive to your buyers as possible.
