Whether or not you already have a documented sales process for selling psychometric assessments can depend on a number of factors; the size of your business; having a salesperson or team in place; having product or service packages to sell.
If you’re a small independent business, your sales process might be as simple as finding people on LinkedIn or at events that have the right job title or challenges you can solve, book a meeting and sell your product or services - if this works, that’s great! But as you scale your operations and the volume of psychometric assessments and consulting you sell increases, you might need an optimised sales process that any salesperson can pick up and run with.
To optimise your sales process, consider how well thought out the following 6 phases are and how they fit your organisation:
1) Prospecting
Prospecting is essentially finding the people that could buy your product or services - it’s your prospective customers.
It’s common for this part of the process to be done remotely through phone calls, email and LinkedIn messaging. How you choose who might be a suitable prospect usually depends on your buyer personas and target audience - whether that’s based on the challenges or even job titles in certain size companies.
For example, you might start by searching for recruitment or talent managers in companies larger than 1,000 people on LinkedIn and work your way through those that fit the buyer persona and ideal customer profile.
2) Discovery
Discovery involves working out if there is a business fit between your organisation and the prospect’s organisation, with a key question being: can you solve their challenges and problems?
So let’s say you’ve found 5 prospective customers, each with a slightly different job title and in different industries, you can use the discovery phase to work out what the key challenge they have is, and they might all be slightly different. For example, one might be a recruitment director that is constantly having high attrition rates for new hires, and another might be a team leader or in an upper-management role and is struggling to develop the internal team.
This part of the process is often done on a call or video conferencing call and is all about understanding the prospective company, not trying to sell to them!
3) Sales Meeting/Presentation
The 3rd phase is when you start to pitch your product or service - it’s the point at which you’ve figured out that you can provide the prospect with a solution and they’re in a position to buy.
This is often done in person, but it’s not uncommon for the sales meeting to be done over video conferencing as well. When carrying out the sales meeting, demonstration or pitch (or whatever it looks like for your organisation), it’s crucial to know your audience and think about what your product or service can do for them - it’s all about solving their problems!
It’s also worth considering that it might not only be your core prospect in this meeting, especially if they’re not the final decision maker, so it’s key to understand who you’re going to be pitching to!
4) Proposal/Quotation
Congratulations, if you’re at this phase of the process, the presentation has probably gone well! This part is all about outlining what you’ve understood about the prospect’s challenges and current situation and showing how your product/service can now help solve their problems.
Try to outline the exact deliverables you’re committing to and the associated costs with each line item and service you’re offering.
For example, if you are going to provide psychometric assessments for recruiting senior management professionals, consider what work is needed to do this and the costs that will be associated.
5) The close
The close is often seen as the most important phase of the sales process, and providing you’ve been working closely with the buyers throughout the sales process, it might come naturally, but it’s best to have some ideas in place for how you close. Practice it, develop it and optimise it so over time, it’s perfect!
The close is generally confirmed by the exchange of contracts or receiving a Purchase Order (PO) number from your new customer.
6) Account Management
A key mistake many companies make is thinking that the sales process ends at the closing phase, but actually, account management is key to stopping a new customer from churning and ultimately losing the sale.
It’s important to have a fully-documented account management process that takes into account what’s been sold and how that will now be delivered. By sticking to what was set out in the sale and delivering an amazing psychometric assessment experience, you can delight customers and hopefully keep them coming back for more!
It’s vitally important to ensure that your customers are receiving the service they expect and that you’re delivering on the promises that you made when they signed up to your product and service. An effective Account Management process will help you to achieve this.
By mapping out and documenting your entire sales process, you can begin to create a repeatable process and scale it over time and with more people. This will in turn help the business grow to a point where it’s not relying on only one or two key people to sell the products and services.
And remember, keeping the customer happy once the sale has gone through is crucial!
Learn more about optimising the Sales Process for businesses selling psychometric assessments in our guide: How to Build and Scale Your Psychometric Service