Sales Basics and Procedure

A friend of mine who is a very proud salesperson, often tells me this quote. 

“Sales is the only department which gets the revenue for the company. Rest all are cost centres”.

I partially agree, as it takes a lot of background work in handing a product to sales, which gets the money it. However, the quote does emphasise how important the sales process is in the Company. It’s more than visiting customers, giving demos and sending quotes. It’s extremely important that we break the entire sales process into multiple steps and track it regularly. In the sales SOP, you will find some of the objectives your sales team must follow to maximise the conversions.

Tracking Leads

Lead could be an individual or a person who could become your customer in future. It can come from different channels like calls, emails, in-person meetings, referral through a customer and so on. It’s often seen that all these leads are not accumulated in a single database. It is highly important that you maintain a single log of these records, so that at anypoint of time, you can review their history and pick-up discussion from them.

If we are not tracking leads in one place, it’s highly likely that you are also losing leads in different platforms, which otherwise would have converted. Bring leads in one place to ensure everyone else in the team knows about it, even if the lead owner is not around tomorrow. In the future, you can also utilise this data for sending event and newsletter updates to these prospects.

Following are some of the practices we expect each partner to follow, so that you can maximise deal conversion.

Lead Validation Mechanism

Following are some of the indicators to ensure leads are vetted well before offering a demo call.

Build Trust

This is a step zero in ensuring you can lead Lead further. Trust can be established in multiple ways. Some of it you can follow are:

• Listen to their requirements and need before offering any solution
• Adhere the meeting time and dress code as expected by the prospect
• After listening, present a solution based on their requirement, so that they can correlate
• Talk a language they are familiar with. Present the case-studies and references they can find parallel with.
• Have a bit of casual conversation, and try to find more parallel in the conversation as well.

Tracking Opportunities

Only the leads which are highly likely to close are converted into Opportunities. Again, even in the companies implementing CRM and ERP for their customer, the data about opportunities reside in the email and Google spreadsheet. Due to that, it’s very likely that even high value opportunities are lost with employees leaving. Or delays in the follow-up as Opportunities are not tracked transparently.

Here are some of the actionable on the opportunity front which can help you close deals better.

Conducting A Demo

Till you reach here, ensure you have validated the prospect well, and their needs are logged well in your CRM solution.

To keep Demo interesting, ensure to keep it concise and curate it around the needs of the customer. Don’t focus on the other good features, which are not so relevant to them. Ensure to update their logo in the demo account. That’s the small hack which often leaves a prospect with a good feeling.

Here are a few more suggestions which you could follow for curating a customer oriented demo.

Quoting A Customer With Frappe

Quoting an enterprise prospect can get pretty tricky, esp. where you have multiple parties involved. To prevent any confusion, ensure to align with Frappe (the OEM) and other partners bidding for the same project.

Eventually, the evaluation depends on the judgement of your sales team. You might have prospects fulfilling certain criteria, and might lapse on some other, however might still categorise them as Enterprise based on their budget for ERP, which match easily with our proposal’s value. Do ensure to connect with Frappe’s sales team to validate your categorization.

When it comes to quoting, firstly you should know what services you can bill for directly, and what is driven by Frappe.

Secondly, ensure that your quote for the services adhere to the base price set in the Frappe ecosystem. This will ensure that partners within Frappe’s ecosystem doesn’t reduce services price way too below it’s worth, and make it difficult for other quality partners to compete.

Thirdly, ensure to collaborate with Frappe to plan who sends the quote. Ideally, Frappe's quote and partner’s quote should go in the same email. This naturally means we are the OEM and partner aligning internally in advance.

On a case to case basis, we can also allow partners to add Frappe’s component in their quote, especially where the partner has stronger rapo with the customer. If keeping all the serviceable items in one quote could make it easier for prospects to make a decision, we can align for it.

Lastly, while sending a quote to the customer, ensure to set up a joint meeting/call, so that we can explain and justify the value quoted.

SMB Customers

When it comes to SMB, it will be ideal if you can propose a user based support plan to the customer. It will help you recover the commitment fee, as you can consume your used credits to get support enabled for the new customers. If you are a Silver and Gold Partner, check this post to learn how you can avail bundled support for your customers. When it comes to quoting prices of your services, ensure to follow the base price as mentioned above.

If it’s found out that  a Frappe Partner is quoting for a service less than the base price set, then Frappe will initiate an inquiry on it. It can have several consequences, which can go till  Frappe terminates a contract with the partner, cancelling Partner certification and delisting them from the website.

Here are some of the key actionables we expect partners to follow.

For the project estimation needs, you can use a tool available in the called “Partner Project Requirement” in the PRM.

Sign A Contract

A signed contract becomes a legal binding, hence you must be very careful with the terms and each and every clause. As seen over the years, 90% of the contract terms are the same. Ensure to keep it intact. Each contract also has a few unique terms. You can capture it separately as Order Terms of Addendum. Also, ensure to have a maker and checker process, to ensure the legal terms offered in the quote and final contract are holistic.