SALES PROCESS DOC: Sales process example To see the sales process in action, let’s take a look at how home manufacturer HomesRUs finds customers and closes deals efficiently. Background: Construction company HomesRUs launched in 2020, with a simple goal: to sell affordable homes in the Chicagoland area to young families. Their homes typically take three months to build, and early estimates show they will cost between $200,000 and $500,000. With construction on their first homes underway, HomesRUs onboards an eager young rep, Emily, to start selling. Unfortunately, there’s no sales process in place and Emily doesn’t know much about the company. Emily has experience selling, however, so starts building out the process she needs to land her first sales. Company and product research: On her first day, Emily meets with the construction lead and the CFO. She asks specific questions about how the homes are designed, what materials are used in the building process, where the homes will be built, and how the company determines initial pricing. She learns that one of the company’s key differentiators is its American-made materials. Prospect research: With a better understanding of the company and its product, Emily then sits down to map out what she knows about her ideal prospect. She wants to target young families, and given mortgage rates, aims for those with a household income of about $100,000. She also reaches out to a couple of local real estate agents to ask about their client base — specifically, what they look for in a new home, what their challenges are, and where they typically look for homes. Prospecting: Emily now knows enough to start looking for prospects. She joins some local real estate community groups, real estate-related Reddit threads, and LinkedIn groups used by her target buyer. She also plans a few real estate “get to know you” events at local clothing and home goods stores where she knows her ideal buyer likes to shop. Qualification and discovery: With a few prospects in hand from searches and events, Emily reaches out. She starts by offering free packets of information on the local real estate market and the home-buying process — must-have information for new homeowners. She then asks for a quick call to talk about what her prospects are looking for and how she can help. She learns some of them are targeting homes at a much lower price point, so removes them from her prospecting list. Sales call: For her best-fit prospects, Emily suggests meeting in person to tour one of the model homes and talk through features, price, availability, and timing. To make the home more alluring, she makes sure it’s staged with freshly baked cookies in the kitchen (chocolate chip, of course). After several successful walk-throughs, only one of her prospects is keen to move ahead right away. The others have some concerns about price and ask for more time to think about the opportunity. Follow up: A day after her home tours, Emily follows up with each one of her best-fit prospects to let them know what the next steps are, including home inspection and the loan application. For those who were on the fence about a purchase, she lets them know she’ll follow up in a few months to see how they feel about moving ahead. Close: Lucky for Emily, her most engaged prospect agrees to buy. Yay! She sets up the home inspection and helps the customer file all of the paperwork for the loan and purchase. As a thank you, she sends the buyer a gift basket filled with goodies for their new home. Nurture: Emily sends the new homeowners an email a few weeks after the sale to check in. She makes sure the home meets their expectations and they haven’t seen any design or structural issues. She also checks to ensure all the final steps of the sale — loan paperwork, and so on — were wrapped up without issue. When she hears how happy the customer is, she asks for a referral, offering a $1,000 incentive for every new customer they bring to HomesRUs. Not every sales process will look the one Emily and HomesRUs use, of course, but the basic flow is the same. Make sure you have ample information to find the right buyer, then deliver value throughout the process to make the close easy. Below are some probing questions that can guide this discussion: What pain points or problems do you have right now? How have these problems affected your day-to-day work or life? What’s preventing you from finding lasting solutions? If you implemented solutions that didn’t work, why didn’t they work? What would an ideal solution look like? The reason for my call is to provide a short introduction of our company: ask you a few questions to see if we are a good fit and if it makes sense for us to schedule a web meeting at a future date.. Since we are OSF, and we only do Salesforce… Do you own Salesforce today? If so, what capabilities do you own? how long have you owned each of those capabilities? What challenges are you facing with those capabilities? Do you think you are getting the value that you invested? These are all questions leading to offering a an assessment of those capabilities. If you don’t own Salesforce… are you aware of the capabilities Salesforce offers? are you aware of the benefits the combined Salesforce ecosystem can provide? what is important to your digital agenda? what will enable your digital strategy to provide better service, to improve sales management, increases the effectiveness of your market reachout and drive increased revenue? all leading questions to get to OSF demoing capabilities and providing advisory services to assist them in evolving their digital strategy