The sales process is the number of steps that a potential customer or prospect has to go through before becoming a customer.
Most companies do not have an established sales process, this causes each salesperson to perform different activities when dealing with prospects, or even to omit a step that is crucial to achieve the sale.
The sales process may vary depending on the company and the different steps that need to be performed to achieve each of its sales, however all of them start from the following basic model of sales process.
Prospects: It is the first contact that the person has with your brand or company, at this stage the prospect shows interest in your product and requests more information about it.
Opportunities: It is when a formal sales proposal is already made, generally a decisive point is when they ask a salesperson for a quote, at this point the speed of response will be crucial.
Customers: After having followed the previous steps, this is the moment when the person decides to buy your product, thus becoming a new customer.
Based on this process helps us to know even at what stage we could be losing more prospects or customers.
The Sales Glossary is a compendium of all the most commonly used terminology in sales strategy. Many of the concepts listed here are used when implementing a CRM system or a digital sales funnel, no matter if they are legacy systems or an online CRM. See also our blog that deals with sales techniques, marketing and sales culture.