When you have a business, you have to consider the steps you take to promote your product or service best, but you also have to consider how you sell them. We’ll let you in on a little secret; most businesses make widespread mistakes, preventing them from making their sales goals each month.
The most common sales problems that businesses are facing stem from misunderstandings and miscommunications internally and externally. Here are ten of the most common sales problems being tackled by companies today.
- Spending too Much Time on Unqualified Prospects.
A lot of time and money in sales is wasted when the sales team is chasing down unqualified leads and prospects and find out that they won’t amount to an increase in company sales. A “qualified prospect/lead” is someone a potential customer that fits into your ideal customer profile (ICP) and has the intention to buy. Not every lead your team pursues will result in a sale, and unqualified leads can waste thousands of hours and prevent your sales team from achieving goals.
You can avoid this by simply pushing your team to only go after “qualified prospects” and maybe try creating a system where you can reward team members for the number of leads generated.
- Falling Short of Forecasts Each Month.
This is a very common problem in sales, and it can be a very discouraging one to sales reps and the companies they represent. Let’s face it, no one likes to feel like they’re failing to achieve a set goal, but with sales, this can happen a lot, and there are many reasons it can occur.
Trying to solve issues with sales goals can take a variety of different avenues, and there’s no way to know which one will fit your team best until you do it. If a sales rep is being too subjective and creating a false sense of optimism for the output, then your actual efforts could end up falling wide of the goal mark.
- Not Knowing What Works and What Doesn’t.
Sales efforts are trial and error in the beginning. If you don’t know what will work for you, it can create an unclear relationship between the data you put into your sales efforts and the sales revenue they generate.
It’s important to stress your reps to be realistic when you’re training them and objective and optimistic for success. If you want to track progress, you could try creating a bulletin where you can review critical feedback and use it to guide suggestions for your sales team moving forward.
- Decision Makers Don’t Answer Your Calls or Emails.
You can pull out all the stops to reach out to a prospect, but it won’t go any further if they don’t respond to your efforts. This issue can grind your sales to a halt if you can’t figure out how to proceed or change your tactics with prospects.
Everyone has a preferred method of contact; it doesn’t matter if it’s phone calls, emails, SMS, or even receiving a direct message on LinkedIn. Your sales team has to make themselves available for any form of communication to serve your prospects best.
- Issues with Onboarding New Sales Reps
No one likes trying to hire new members for your sales team. If you pick the wrong person, it can be costly to fix. The company's training and introduction can also be a problem if you leave any room for miscommunication.
When you’re hiring new reps, you need to be as straightforward and structured as possible during the onboarding process so that everyone walks into the job knowing exactly what’s expected from them. Track new sales reps' progress and see who best fits with the company and get the best results for themselves and the company.
- Your Website Isn’t Turning Visitors into Prospects.
Having a good website is vital in making sales and interacting with prospects, but is your website doing everything it can to make prospects want to buy your products and services? The traffic you receive for your website is an important statistic to improve. However, if you want to make sales, you should make sure your website encourages prospects to become customers.
Create more targeted landing pages on your website, one tailored for each product or service that your company offers. Try to drive new visitors to a mailing list for discounts and long-term interactions with the company.
- Sales Follow-up is Ineffective or Nonexistent.
It’s important to reach out to prospects and try to generate correspondence, but if your sales team doesn’t follow up with prospects to see if they’re still interested in purchasing your service or product, then you won’t get very far. Sales reps need to make sure they’re continuously building rapport with prospects and keeping up on their customers' progress and satisfaction.
Have your sales team members figure out which part of follow-up eats up the most time and resources, and try using technology to simplify those parts so your team members can work on other things.
- Team Members are Working at Cross-Purposes.
Even when sales reps work in teams, there can be some competition between members, which can cause problems if they lose out on opportunities to work together. Some friendly competition can prove beneficial in sales; however, if team cooperation isn’t stressed initially, splintering from members can cause major issues.
Ensure you’re providing every member of your team with the intelligence to be successful so seasoned sales reps can’t take advantage of things newer members don’t know. If your team uses enterprise tools, make sure everyone on your sales team knows how to use them.
- Referral Business is Low Despite Satisfied Customers.
One of the best sales promotions is word-of-mouth from existing customers and telling others to buy from your company. But if your customers are happy with your services, but don’t tell anyone about you, then you are missing out on a golden sales opportunity.
Be creative and give your customers incentive to refer your products and services to friends with special discounts or offers.
- Unclear Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
Your ideal customer profile is the foundation of finding your market segment and your target audience; you have to build a persona or archetype of who would buy your products and how you would sell to them. If your ICP isn’t specific or complete, it will be difficult for your sales team to know how to convince prospects to buy your products and services.
Create a whole picture for a customer profile and make it as clear-cut as you can so that your sales team will have a better idea of selling your products and will be more convincing when speaking to prospects.
Don’t worry if you recognize any of the problems we have mentioned; this list exists because they’re common. Sit down with your sales team to identify the roots of any issues they’re facing and work together to correct them moving forward.
