These Are the Reasons You Are Struggling With Sales

Sales

Converting sales is a difficult task for any business but for some, it’s much harder. Whether you’re a B2C or B2B company, your sales team works tirelessly to reach their quota and help the business achieve its goals. However, no matter how hard they work, it seems like your sales team can’t lure in enough willing buyers. You know what they say, work smarter, not harder.

It doesn’t matter how much effort you are putting into the sales operation; it won’t make a difference if you’re going in the wrong direction. There are reasons why your company is struggling with making sales, and you need to understand them before coming o a solution.

You Haven’t Adapted To Change

The economic climate changes whenever a new wave of innovation and technology hits. Hence, if your business isn’t making as many sales as before, it might be because you are using obsolete systems. Ever since the proliferation of social media, analytics, and big data has come onto the scene, things have changed.

To get ahead of competitors, it’s crucial that your company adapt to these changes. Take big data and analytics, for instance. Many companies still haven’t embraced the importance of data and trends that you can derive from it. Once you do, you’ll begin to understand many things; why a sales drive failed, why you’re losing customers, and what makes a marketing campaign powerful.

You’re Putting a Cap on Commissions

For your sales team, motivation is knowing that, on a good day, they can take home a huge commission without worrying about capping. Capping commissions can stop your sales team from closing more sales and striving to go higher than a specific quota. Numerous studies prove that putting a cap on commissions can hurt overall revenue and productivity.

The results of such studies conclude that companies should remove caps from commissions. Once respective companies did so, they saw their revenue rise by almost ten percent. So don’t worry about having to pay your sales representatives large commissions, because they probably helped your company make a huge profit.

You’re Not Following Up On Every Lead

Sales representatives seem to lose their enthusiasm to follow up with every lead they come across. Instead, they only work towards ones they feel like they can convert. This guesswork makes things very confusing, especially since your sales team is relying on their gut feeling rather than an objective factor.

Take out records of how much your sales team has followed up with old leads. The reason for poor sales could be that they are ignoring certain leads, which results in your company closing fewer sales. It’s crucial that you remember how every consumer is a potential customer in one way or another, so it’s best never to ignore a lead.

Inadequate Marketing

All parts of a business have to work together to drive sales and boost customer retention. The marketing department of a company plays an integral role in giving sales representatives the leads they need. It often happens that a marketing team is unable to deliver qualified leads to sales representatives.

This step hurts your company’s numbers, and you need to improve by improving marketing efforts. This process can involve launching a well-planned Google AdWords campaign and other solutions that have the potential to boost sales.

You’re Unaware of Competition

Even though you’re looking at your competitor’s numbers, there’s a chance that you aren’t learning what they’re doing right. A large part of your understanding should come from what our competitors are doing. You need to invest in research and data about rival companies who have better sales numbers than you.

This research can provide you with valuable insight that determines what you’re doing wrong. Although you don’t have to imitate your competitors, there’s always something you can learn from them, and that’s not a bad thing.

No Training Programs

The only way for a company to go forward is if it invests significant time and resources into improving its employees. It’s unrealistic to expect your sales representatives to learn new things on a job that’s so demanding. When they’re following up on leads throughout the day, your employees won’t be interested in learning about new findings from sales research papers.

That’s why you need to build their skill set by bringing in the right expert. Sales mentors are one way that large corporations are boosting their numbers. Hiring an expert on sales is a valuable initiative that you can take, to improve your firm’s numbers. A sales mentorship also increases morale and helps your representatives develop stronger relationships with their colleagues.

Your Sales Team Lacks a Process

In every company’s sales department, leaders have to develop a process, which representatives should use to make a sale. When there’s no sales process in place, your representatives could be mindlessly trying to chase after leads without examining any weaknesses. At this point, it’s possible that your team is implementing a random process, so even an informal one will yield better results.

Instead of letting representatives do whatever they want, however, they want to do it, sales leaders should begin by establishing an informal process as to how they should get things done. Once you follow leads in a way that’s systematic and consistent, you can move from an informal process to a formal and dynamic one.

Conclusion

Therefore, now that I’ve listed out what your company’s sales team could be doing wrong, it’s time to recap what you should be doing to solve the problem. For starters, you need to adapt to changing climates of the industry by implementing new technology and software.

Next, you need to rethink the cap on commissions and improve your marketing strategy. After that, you should learn about your competitor’s solutions and try to understand the theories behind them. Assign focused and dedicated sales leaders to your department so they can implement a sales process. In addition, most importantly, there should be sales training and mentorship programs in place to enhances your sales representatives’ productivity.

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3 Smart Ways to Expand Your Customer Base in 21 Days

Customer

What is Customer base?

It’s important to understand that it is far more cost-efficient and easier way to retain a customer than to gain new customers as acquiring new customers can sometimes mean an entirely new marketing strategy to be developed and adopted by the whole business, which can add to the expense. Hence, a very dynamic approach must be used to maximize sales, i.e. keep old customers and make new customers.

More two-way communication instead of just one-way communication

Customer must be treated as an asset and their feelings and suggestions towards the product must be taken into account to make it into an even more accessible and easy to use in a better way. As it is expected the old retaining customers can help bring new customers. Retained customers will feel a lot more involved with the company thus pushing their undying loyalty towards an increment.

Customer’s suggestion has helped many companies make slight changes to their product which can even help them set a USP (Unique Selling Point) as they might discover a loophole no one else might have. Some companies stopped themselves from failing miserably just by focusing on what the customer wanted, rather than what the company wanted to make. This has even led some companies that make shampoos to turn into making other products like face wash due to their customer base demand.

Maintain good after sales service and support for the customers

An effective calls support system helps the company outshine other companies. Some companies may have the most innovated product but due to some technical, usability issues and confusions have led to their termination.

A customer will always choose and trust a place that has provided all the necessary information online. Hence, It is critically important to keep fresh new content on the website with all the necessary FAQ already answered with instructions if any.

An even better option is to provide each individual as to their status of their purchased good e.g. if it is processing or has been completed and the product must be on the way with an exact date and time of receiving. This helps the company gain a little trust and patience as they could now see their purchase status. This also helps the customer support team to deal with real customers real problems that are technical.

Promote business through social media and always keep on updating fresh content

Another very innovative technique is to use bloggers on Google and vloggers on YouTube and Facebook and sponsor them to advertise your product for 10-15 seconds with very specific instructions as to what they have to say and a short how to use film. This helps reach a very vast audience with very low cost.  It is not necessary that a product that failed in the USA for technical reasons will also fail in India.

Snapchat is a very useful tool for businesses to get their product out there in the eyes of a wider audience. Snapchat helps these businesses show off different things like how their product is different, the background, production, usability and the office environment showing smiles giving the customer a sense of hard work with more smiles than sweat.

Some companies have even changed their logos and outer appearance for a better impact on the customer. By using brighter colors and short, attractive slogans can help achieve newer customers. Most small start-ups are using YouTube vloggers to introduce their product and even sometimes make them their product activist. This is a much efficient and cost-saving way than using TV advertisements which is very costly.

Some companies have even resorted to no TV advertisements but somewhat social media, e.g. Snapchat, Instagram to promote their products, e.g. Lamborghini Automotive. Newer car companies are also making their own YouTube channels to improve and show off their concept cars and newer models, e.g. Tesla, Koenigsegg .etc.

Other quick adjustments to attract new customers

Another very well known way to gain new customers is to partner up with another company that has already either been in business, is new with innovation or has a considerable following. This allows for the companies to benefit mutually from the partnership either for long-term or temporary. This has been done throughout history and is not a new idea.

It is also very imperative to know your target audience. This will help you target a specific group who will be your customer people from outside your target demographic will be a surplus. This helps the company stick with one line of action as a strategy. This will affect the way you package, color and show the overall aura of your brand, e.g.

Kids will not a buy juice box that is black and white hence, juice packaging that is aimed at kids is mostly bright in color as it catches the attention of the viewer’s eye. Similarly, if you are making extremely sweet nitrogen Ice cream, the primary customers will not cross the age of 35 or 40 at most. Similarly, Ferrari was aimed at young millionaires hence it is spaced and colored accordingly however on the other hand rolls Royce is aimed at much older gentlemen who are now retired. Therefore, it speaks luxury signifying that they made it.

 

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