Since it has been a while since my last post I will recap quickly what the first blog was about. Three simplified high level stages of a sales process, education, buying facilitation, and closing. In this blog I will start to break down the first stage “education”.

In my experience 40% to 50% of every sales process and sales cycle is educating your prospects to get them to take action and enter into the buying facilitation process with your organization. How do most companies facilitate this education process? Through the use of human capital, a lead comes in, sales person calls, and starts throwing up all the great things their company can do for them. Sorry to say this is exactly the wrong process to follow.

Don’t feel bad, this is the way I have always done it as well, until now. After coming aboard at Infusion I realized the error of my ways. Why use human sales capital (the most expensive capital within your organization) to qualify your leads? Why not make your prospects jump through a certain number of hoops that you the buying facilitator deem appropriate before a sales rep gets engaged.

In order for this to work the business owner that is selling a product has to realize they must deliver valuable, educational, pertinent and timely information to their prospects in order to gain their trust and build the relationship.

If you are reading this blog and you are a VP or Owner in an organization I would ask you to stop reading right now and make a list of all the great things your company does for your customers.

This is your "Value" and exactly what you should be educating your suspects about. In my next blog I will cover the fundamentals of educating your suspects along with how you can automate this process.

How do you educate your suspects?