For example, a sales process might be – send direct mail campaign, take inbound calls in call center, forward qualified leads to an outside sales rep who calls on a prospect in person, sales person performs discovery/diagnostic of issues, demo of product to key buying influences, prepare proposal, present proposal, close.

Miller Heiman’s methodology is about the “how” of doing all that. For example, the Strategic Selling sales methodology has the salesperson uncover all the buying influences, find how how and why they want to buy, find out the business results they want, find out the key personal reasons they want to buy; and a whole lot more.

The point is that regardless of your sales process, there is always an Economic Buying Influence, always a Technical Buying Influence, always a User Buying Influence, etc. (That is true even if they are all the same people!

Miller Heiman’s sales methodologies are built so they can overlay on virtually any complex sales process and are intended to map and work along with virtually any of your customer’s buying processes.

Just two additional points:

First, an out of the box sales process from any vendor isn’t the right approach. Every selling company is in a different situation: your products/services, your brand, size, capability of your people, your customers, competitors, pricing, market, sales resources available, etc. A sales process has to be built or adapted to meet those conditions (and more) or else there will be gaps between what your sales people do and what they need to do to win business. Basically, they won’t be selling to their customers in the way that their customers expect to buy. That’s a problem.

Second point. Sales training is most effective when the process(es), tools, procedures, etc., are already in place and management has been trained on supporting the new process. Reps then must be trained on the use of the process, end-to-end, not on individual discrete skills, the way training is often done today. My firm has done a lot of research about sales training. I can tell you a lot of companies get this wrong.