Understanding roles and terminology

In all of my years in sales, the biggest disagreements I've witnessed between various departments are often because of the lack of clarity in the initial stages of the sales process. The failure of getting everyone on the same page about terminology, agreeing whose responsibility it is for what task, and determining how success or disappointment will be evaluated is a big problem. It's not only an enormous time waster, but it puts the entire team at odds before even taking the first step to reach out to potential new customers. I can't stress enough the importance of educating everyone and coming to consensus with roles and terminology before you begin any sales discovery efforts. It starts first with a short meeting with key players from sales, marketing, operations, finance, and any department in your company with ties to your product or service offering. At this gathering you'll review roles, responsibilities and terminology. Don't forget to keep seeing your management informed too, since they need to be aware of the process, because at some point you can be assured they'll have questions. Go to any company and ask for a definition of leads, prospects, and opportunities and you will get a slightly different response depending on who you speak with. What you were taught at your old job may not be how people were trained at your current company. You could never assume. The same holds true for whose responsibility it is to generate leads. Is it sales, marketing, the sales representative's job, a business development person? Every company has a different procedure for handling this. In this course, leads means to me just a lot of names that may have a some interest in your product or service. Once there is some communication with the customer and potential exists for business, that lead becomes a prospect. It's during the discovery phase that you qualify the prospect, and when revenue projections are assigned, it then becomes an opportunity. Don't be surprised if someone asks if sales are closed during the discovery phase. Believe me, I've been asked that. So agree on a definition of a sales discovery call. What the objectives are, how success is evaluated, and even how long the average meeting lasts. It can be as simple as saying, "At our company the discovery is a 30-minute call "to determine the details of a prospect's interest "in our service. "We're gathering critical information "to assess their needs, pain points, and develop a plan "to present a solution in future meetings." All of this really isn't that complicated, and won't take that long to accomplish. However, I can't stress enough how important it is for everyone to be in agreement on roles and terminology. It will save you a lot of aggravation down the road, but more importantly ensure that everyone is in agreement from the first step of the process.