Sales teams face a wide range of challenges, and as the market changes, new technologies are developed and customers’ needs and requirements alter, new challenges will continue to present themselves to sales teams. Across the board, your sales team will face similar challenges. However, every challenge that a sales team faces can be overcome. This article will look at the common challenges that sales teams are currently facing and how your business can overcome them.
Many businesses find the process of nurturing prospects challenging. If you do not nurture your prospect effectively, your business will not be able to build long-term relationships with customers and make as many sales as they would like. The common challenges businesses have in this area are:
Deciding how often to contact leads – If you contact leads too often during the nurturing stage, they may find your business too pushy and put off. If you don’t contact your leads often enough, they may forget about your business or be more interested in shopping elsewhere. You must find a balance with how often you contact leads, with Jill Konrath suggesting that you contact your prospects every 3 to 4 days.
How long to nurture your prospects – The timeframe you should nurture your prospects in can be difficult to determine for some businesses, as it may not be clear when you should move on from a prospect that no longer seems likely to become a lead. You should try to have your prospecting timeframe similar to your sales cycle length, so if you are still nurturing a prospect after that time, it is likely you should move on to another one.
Deciding the method to focus on when nurturing a prospect – It can be challenging to know if you should give content to your prospects in the form of whitepapers, articles, or other methods. To solve this issue, you should use data on past prospects to see what they responded best to, and also vary your content enough to always try to keep prospects engaged.
Creating trust with your prospects and leads is a very important skill that businesses must always try to improve and develop. Creating high levels of trust with prospects is becoming more difficult in today’s climate with virtual communication being such a common way of interacting with clients. Common problems that occur when building trust is:
Not embracing social selling to its full extent – If you do not embrace social selling, you miss out on a chance to communicate and connect with your customers to build trust. Businesses will be able to better understand their customers to offer a more personalised service, share their beliefs and values, and share success stories and insightful information. This will create more trust with your customers and help increase sales.
Not using the right body language – Body language is a very important factor when trying to build trust with a client, and if your business does not take advantage of it, you may lose more deals than you have to. Customers will respond well to a confident, expressive, and friendly sales representative. If the communication is taking place on a virtual call, smiling at your customers, and using eye contact is a great way to still increase your customer’s trust in you through body language.
Completing sales is a time-consuming and complex process that can take a lot of time for a business. There are many different tasks that need to be completed during the sales process for sale to be completed, for example, phone calls, demonstrations, negotiations, invoice management and more. Businesses may find keeping efficiency through the sales funnel can be difficult due to the length of the process, however, adopting new technologies can help this. The common technologies that will help are:
Business process automation software (BPA) – BPA software will automate areas of your sales funnel to reduce the number of manual tasks needed to complete a sale. This will help your sales representatives direct their resources elsewhere and increase the efficiency of your business.
CRM software – Adopting CRM software is a great way to increase the efficiency of your sales process as it will streamline the management of your sales pipelines and representatives. Increased data visibility will help management and leadership make insightful decisions on the structure and processes of your business to increase your efficiency.
In today’s climate, it is very unlikely that you will just be selling to one buyer. Instead, it is much more likely that you will sell to groups of buyers, with Forrester sharing that nowadays, 63% of purchases have more than four people involved. This is especially common in B2B sales where there are multiple stakeholders, such as the decision-makers, gatekeepers, and users. To overcome this challenge, your business will need to embrace extensive research on potential customers to be able to appeal to multiple different types of stakeholders that may be involved in the deal.
Many businesses find it challenging to stand out from competitors in their market. Businesses may struggle to stand out from competitors if they:
Do not have a unique selling proposition (USP) – Offering a USP to your customers is very important as if a business does not have a USP, they may blend in with the competitors in their market. A USP can be a number of different things for a business, such as a unique product, unique customer service or something unique that comes with the product. An example of a USP is Canva, which has the unique selling point of being a design platform that is easily accessible to users and is free. To be competitive, your business should find a USP to make them stand out in the market.
Do not offer a personalised service – A personalised service can go a long way for customers. If you give a customer a personalised service and a competitor does not, that customer will be much more likely to choose you over your competitors as you will stand out from them with your service. They will trust your brand more and have a better relationship with your business, helping you increase your sales and revenue.
Win more deals, overcome your challenges and grow your business with TEB, the sales automation CRM software. The way TEB will do this is with its unique features such as:
View how TEB will help you overcome your challenges live by scheduling a free demo, where we can show you how the future of your business will be transformed.
