Every successful sale doesn’t begin with a pitch but with a carefully crafted customer journey that guides potential customers from curiosity to commitment. As a Product Marketing Manager (PMM), your role is pivotal not just in sparking these conversations but in steering them towards a successful conclusion during the sales process. Your expertise in providing the sales team with critical resources and sales enablement assets ensures that each customer interaction is optimized for success. While PMMs are not typically responsible for the full sales process, understanding the process helps optimize it and eliminate potential bottlenecks that can significantly impact your product’s success. 

In this blog, we will unpack the sales process designed specifically for B2B tech products, identifying key stages where your expertise can transform potential leads into loyal customers. From equipping your sales team with essential tools to fine-tuning the final stages of customer onboarding, you’ll see how each process phase offers unique challenges and opportunities.

What is a Sales Process?

The sales process is a sequence of steps a sales team follows to move a potential customer from initial contact to final purchase. This structured approach helps sales teams navigate from identifying prospects to securing sales efficiently and effectively. As a PMM, your involvement will be to ensure the sales team is adequately equipped to move the customer through these phases by providing resources and sale enablement assets made specifically to alleviate any bottlenecks during the process. If your organization has a Sales Operations representative or team, you will work closely with them in developing and validating the sales process. 

A Common B2B Sales Process

Here is what a sales process can look like for your product. Understanding your product’s sales process will help you identify areas of improvement or potential bottlenecks. 

1. Lead Generation

In this phase, you identify potential customers through various marketing efforts like content marketing, social media, networking events, advertising, and referrals.

2. Lead Qualification

After generating a lead, you’ll need to assess the lead to determine their potential to become customers based on criteria such as budget, authority, needs, and timeline (BANT).

3. Sales Handover

Once a lead has met the criteria of a qualified lead, they are handed over to the sales team. This step ensures that only the leads with a higher likelihood of conversion are pursued actively by sales the sales team.

4. Initial Contact/Sales Outreach

After the handover from marketing to sales, a representative will make initial sales contact with the lead, often through an email or call, to introduce themselves and the product and gauge interest.

5. Needs Assessment

If the lead responds to the initial sales contact, the representative will conduct a detailed discussion or analysis to understand the specific needs, challenges, and goals of the potential customer through a phone conversation or a Zoom call.

6. Sales Presentation/Product Demo

Once an understanding of a lead’s needs is understood, the sales representative presents the product to the lead, highlighting how its features and benefits address the identified needs and challenges. For larger sales teams, the sales representative may hand this task off to a more senior sales team member, such as an account executive or a sales manager. 

7. Objection Handling

After presenting the product, the sales representative may need to address any concerns or objections the lead may have regarding the product, pricing, implementation, competitors, or other issues.

8. Closing the Sale

If all goes well and the lead decides on your product, the sales representative will begin negotiating terms and finalizing the deal. This could include signing contracts, agreeing on pricing, and setting up delivery or implementation schedules. 

9. Implementation and Onboarding

Once the contract is signed, a sales team member or team will assist the new customer in implementing the product and understanding how to use it effectively. This step is crucial for customer satisfaction and retention.

10. Follow-Up and Support

After a customer is implemented and properly onboarded, it’s a best practice to check in with the customer post-sale to ensure satisfaction, address any issues, and offer additional support or training as needed. This is a good phase for PMMs to do their own win/loss interviews with the customer to understand the new customer’s experience throughout the sales process. 

11. Reporting and Analysis

After the post-implementation follow-up, PMMs can review customer feedback and data, such as sales KPIs and metrics, to assess the effectiveness of the sales process, understand which tactics worked well, and identify areas for improvement. While this stage is typically used to identify what can be fixed, it’s also a great time to provide kudos for the outstanding work a sales representative or team has done for what went well. 

12. Sales Feedback and Continuous Improvement

While it’s important to understand the customer’s perspective, this process is a two-way street, and you should also gather the sales team’s perspective. Since they are in constant contact with the lead, gathering their feedback pn on the process, product, and customer responses will help to refine sales strategies and tactics continuously, while also building trust with the sales team. 

Conclusion

Navigating the B2B sales process requires a meticulous approach to ensure that each phase—from lead generation to post-sale support—is executed with care and precision. For PMMs, this involves providing strategic marketing insights and engaging directly with the sales process to refine and enhance the customer journey. By actively participating in each step, from initial contact to the continuous improvement post-sale, PMMs can foster a more effective sales environment. The insights gathered from customer feedback and sales team experiences are invaluable for refining sales strategies, enhancing product offerings, and ultimately ensuring customer satisfaction and loyalty. Remember, the goal is to facilitate a smoother sales process and build lasting relationships with customers and internal teams. This continuous loop of feedback and improvement is essential for staying competitive in the ever-evolving B2B market. I cover the details of supporting your sales team in the PMM Playbook e-learning course. Sign up if you’re looking to get a deeper understanding of the sales landscape for your product.