Sales problems are no joke.
They mess with your sales processes, minimize qualified opportunities, and overall, bring your revenue potential waaaay down.
Dealing with sales challenges is a critical task for your team.
Don’t just hope that these problems will go away. Because they won’t. They’ll only get worse.
Let’s dive into some of the top sales problems you can experience, along with some advice for resolving them.
Meeting quotas. Talking to prospects. Following processes.
These are just a few of the pressures your sales team probably faces and that can cause serious anxiety.
The weight of the company’s future is on the salespeople, so some pressure is normal.
But burnout can also be the norm.
A get-over-it approach generally won’t help.
Giving your team guidance on how to deal with rejection and managing their time will help them deal with the stress of the job and position them to succeed.
Does this sound familiar? Someone on your team creates a series of fantastic emails.
You’re all slapping each other on the back.
But then you send the emails out and...crickets.
If your emails aren’t getting responses, something has to change. In most cases, timing is the key to success.
Try creating emails based on behavior or a trigger, such as a company anniversary or promotion, so you can build a connection first.
There is NOTHING more frustrating than pursuing a lead through a long sales cycle, only to find out that they don’t have the authority to pull the trigger on the purchase.
To solve this sales problem, analyze your sales funnel and discover gaps in the process where you need to gather the right data to determine if a buyer is qualified or not.
If you’re at a place where you’re getting great leads via your website (yay!), but your conversions aren’t rising at the same rate, you’re facing a huge sales challenge.
It’s time to go back to the drawing board and revamp your web and content strategy.
Be sure you address the audience’s needs at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
Create offers to entice leads to interact with you at the awareness, consideration and decision stages.
This is a frustrating sales problem.
You’re working your tail off with nothing to show for it.
Prospects are opening emails but not taking action.
They’re reading pages on your website but not downloading offers.
Ugh!
You need to get more creative in giving prospects easier ways to communicate with you during the initial stages of the buying process.
Like using a chatbot on your website. Develop small-ticket items they can purchase to start a relationship, and be sure to communicate discounts and specials as they come up.
A few bad apples really DO spoil it for everyone else.
Not all customers will have a good experience with your company, and often for reasons that are beyond your control.
If they’re making a stink on review sites, you need to engage with them.
But first, you’ll want to monitor brand mentions so you are aware of when it happens.
Then, communicate with that person. If necessary, loop in customer service or other team members to help.
The rule of thumb here is that it’s better to engage with these customers than ignore them.
Over time, unqualified prospects will consume your sales team’s time as fast as a spark in a dry forest.
Optimally, your sales strategy should weed these people out early on in the process, so you’re dealing with a majority of prospects who are qualified.
The best way to filter unqualified prospects out of the funnel is to get as many details about their company as possible, so that by the time you get on the phone, you’re only talking to people who are highly likely to become customers.
Resolve these sales challenges once and for all, and you’ll stand out from the competition as a company that provides value, lures in great customers, and has an exceptional reputation.
While many more sales problems exist other than the ones we’ve addressed above, for companies pursuing an inbound marketing strategy, you can never go wrong by creating valuable resources for everyone in your pipeline.
