There are three points that should be considered when defining, refining, and managing a sales process so not to increase the burden of administrative tasks on to an already heavy workload of the sales person.
The first point is to see how many of the sales people are using it as a road map in bringing sales.
The second point is to establish what the sales process looks like for won, lost, and abandoned opportunities. Since the sales process is being used to monitor sales progress for each opportunity, look for patterns emerging for the different outcomes. Take into account segmentation by market, product, channel, territory, etc. This will establish what the won, lost, and abandoned opportunity sales process templates look like so that they can be used to overlay the situation in a current opportunity to identify at any time what could be the possible outcome then decide on activities to be carried out.
The third point is to check the results from the second point against the sales management’s expectations of what the sales process of a won, lost, abandoned opportunity would look like. Make the adjustments and monitor. The more the sales process can be refined the better will be the results, e.g. shorter sales cycle, focusing on high probability opportunities and abandoning low probability opportunities early on in the sales process, anticipating possible issues, producing accurate and credible sales forecasts that can be trusted by senior management.
The sales process is a road map helping you navigate through a landscape that could be continually changing; therefore it has an element of inaccuracy. Continual review, and measurement against actual results will help in minimizing the inaccuracy.
In part 2 the focus will be to compare your sales process to your competitors.