The Collaborative Sale: Solution Selling in a Buyer Driven World

7 Establishing a Dynamic Sales Process

In 2012, a CSO Insights survey of more than 1,400 sales executives found that nearly nine out of every 10 organizations that implement a defined sales process report significant improvements in business performance.¹

One of our clients, Microsoft, was able to confirm and quantify the value of its sales process implementation. To accomplish this, it established a control group of sellers who utilized the Microsoft Solution Selling Process, while all other sellers did not. They then compared sellers’ performance results for each group over two years.² See Figure 7.1 for results from the comparative study.

The performance of sellers utilizing the Microsoft Solution Selling Process was far superior to the worldwide average of sellers not using the sales process. In particular, sellers using the sales process produced much better customer satisfaction ratings. Why? Those sellers were better at setting and managing customer expectations. They accomplished this through improved conversations; they had learned how to diagnose buyer problems and create visions of solutions that were realistic.

Figure 7.1 Microsoft Solution Sales Process Results

Source: Microsoft Internal Study, Summer 2006, MicrosoftCorporation, Redmond, Washington. Published with permission of Microsoft.

In addition to improved customer satisfaction, those who used the sales process ...