Tag: business 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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