Anybody can sell (just need to follow the process)

Last summer during my daughters’ high-school graduation ceremony, I had the chance to engage in a conversation with another proud parent attending the event. We were talking about the career paths different students had chosen to continue with their journey.
As the owner of a pharmaceutical business, he was pleased when her daughter decided to become a pharmacist. He was excited about potentially having her taking over the family business. We were talking about technical skills, and I suggested it might be a good idea to complement with soft skills and learning how to develop a sales process. I will never forget his response: “Sales Process? Nobody needs a sales process. Anybody can sell.”
I understood where he was coming from; I’ve heard this before but having spent time developing sales processes you can imagine what went through my mind during our interaction. I replied by saying, “I agree with you; anybody can sell; they just need to follow the process.”
Selling is a process, or at least, it should be. Selling is not an opportunistic event when all the planets align and suddenly, we have what people want, where they want it, how they want it and at the price, they are willing to pay which would be highly profitable for us. Selling is not that easy, and although sometimes we get lucky, for the most part, there are many variables at play and we don’t fully understand all of them most of the time.
Selling should be approached with the rigor of any other repetitive process. Sales process should be part of the go to market strategy as defined in the marketing plan, which is a major factor of a successful  business plan.
Every step of the sales process should have a measurable outcome, and the set of steps (activities) should bring us close to reaching the go to market goal. Sales are not going to improve if you don’t have a robust process in place.
I’m in favor of technology, but a CRM is not going to increase sales or help you uncover customer needs if you fail to recognize this premise. It is as important to identify a good opportunity early in the process as it is to drop a bad one and let your sales team to focus on the high probability ones. In order to know the difference, you need to have the definition of both first.