Another key part of building your first go-to-market playbook is aligning your sales process, by stage, to your buyer's journey.
Your buyer's journey is based on the stages that make sense to a buyer: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Success. However, it helps your team to align your internal steps to this journey so they understand what they are doing at each stage.
Example: Your team should understand that prospecting is supporting driving buyer awareness.
Here’s how you can get started...
This should be buyer driven criteria, not sales driven criteria. Why? A buyer’s actions are a better indicator of intent. If a demo call is held, the criteria to move it to proposal stage should be something like:
Guide your sales team members to do the actions that will facilitate moving the deal forward. These include sending a mutual eval follow-up email, scheduling the next call, or other internal steps like getting pricing approved. You can think of this as a checklist for your Account Executives.
The best way to drive consistency on your team is to build your criteria into your CRM at each stage. This reinforces the importance of using the criteria to both evaluate an opportunity and accurately forecast. Some companies even tie the criteria to the stage so an opportunity cannot move on unless it meets the criteria.
Here’s an example of a CRM customized with buyer driven criteria:
Need further guidance on how to align your sales process to your buyer's journey? Check out my video below: