It’s no secret that a career in sales can be incredibly challenging. No two customers are alike, products are constantly changing, and there’s more competition in the market every day. In order to be successful, you need to have exceptional time management, strong systems in place, and an impressive amount of determination. Unfortunately, many salespeople don’t have the time or the resources to optimize their workday to become more effective sellers. While many salespeople might wish they had more time, it isn’t the only challenge holding them back from exceeding their quotas and taking home substantial commission checks.
In this post, we’ll discuss the five common challenges salespeople face when prospecting, and we’ll even provide a few simple tips to help your team overcome them.
Time Spent Selling
Time is the lifeblood of any salesperson, especially those in commission-based positions. The more time they can spend selling, the more sales they can expect to make. For many, every minute spent doing anything other than selling equates to lost money for themselves and your company. Your salespeople are often stuck having to juggle selling along with prospecting, quoting, customer service, data entry, pipeline management, and a variety of other business tasks. As a result, over 60% of a seller’s time is spent doing things other than selling.1
Tip: Give time back to your sellers by eliminating or automating time-consuming tasks that take them away from selling to your clients. Hundreds of softwares on the market can help streamline your employees workflow so they have more time to close deals.
Poor Lead Quality
When it comes to leads, quality is just as important as quantity, if not more so. 46% of sales reps say that poor quality leads are their top challenge.2 A lousy lead can leave a salesperson chasing their tail, trying to sell to a customer who will never buy their product or service. This wastes your salesperson’s time, the customer’s time, and leaves both parties feeling frustrated. A strong salesperson may still be able to either make the sale or know when to give up and move on to the next opportunity. A weaker or greener sales rep may continue the pursuit for too long and find themselves discouraged, unable to understand why they’re unable to close the deal. Bad leads can cause headaches on the sales floor, even more so when the contact information is missing or incorrect.
Tip: Develop a series of qualifying questions for your team so they know what to ask potential leads. Your sales team should only receive warm leads with accurate contact info so they can close the deal. Implement a lead scoring system so sales reps know what kind of lead they’re getting and how much effort they should be putting into it.
Outdated Equipment and Software
Your salespeople rely on technology for their job. If their equipment is outdated and they don’t have the latest CRM tools, performing their day-to-day sales tasks with high efficiency can be quite challenging. Even the savviest salesperson can be stuck with technology that’s not up-to-date or optimized for their needs. So much of the sales process can be automated and streamlined now that businesses need to invest in these softwares to keep their sales team competitive. Time is money, and automation gives sellers more time to sell. Higher-performing sellers and sales teams attribute much of their success to how empowering it feels to have modern tech and cutting-edge software at their fingertips.
Tip: Do your best to provide your staff with tech that can handle their workload. Slow computers and antiquated software can create a frustrating work environment for your staff. Great tech is worth the investment for the increase in morale, productivity, and confidence.
Low Productivity
Salespeople often have a difficult time maintaining high productivity levels. While there are a multitude of reasons, one of the leading complaints is the need to perform too many administrative and KPI-related tasks in addition to selling. Salespeople can experience KPI overload, which can drastically hurt their performance. Many businesses determine that the best way to increase sales is by adding metrics to the entire sales process in order to effectively monitor performance. Unfortunately, most businesses fail to automate KPI tracking, so employees are responsible for entering their own data inputs. This takes time away from selling and can even cause additional stress.
Tip: To increase productivity, take the time to connect with your employees on an individual level and find out where they’re spending most of their time. Are they spending too much time on customer service instead of prospecting? Do they often get stuck calling the wrong contacts because the information isn’t correct? Identify the challenges they’re facing when trying to prospect and work with them on possible solutions to gain more time back. In addition, try to be strategic with KPIs instead of measuring every detail. Too many metrics can make your sales team feel micromanaged.
Lack of Training and Upskilling Opportunities
Salespeople often feel like they’re walking into a sales situation blind without enough knowledge or training. As sales processes and best practices are constantly changing, the need to stay up-to-date on the latest industry developments is higher than ever. Sales managers need to ensure that company resources such as content, software, and mentoring programs exist for their employees. Many sales reps feel that they lack the knowledge to fully comprehend the data laid out before them. CRMs and customer databases are a wealth of information for any salesperson, but a lack of training can leave them struggling to access or understand the critical information.
Tip: Working in a modern world means that you can always gain the competitive edge by learning something new..Continue to provide training opportunities for your staff. Upskilling empowers your sellers with knowledge and shows that you’re investing in their success.
The Solution is Simple with SimpleSell
Your time is valuable and trying to find a different solution for every problem isn’t something sales managers have time to research. Thankfully, SimpleSell is an effective prospecting solution for many of the common challenges your reps are facing today.
With SimpleSell, sellers will have access to an innovative prospecting tool that serves as a solution to many of the challenges listed in this article. They’ll have a remote Sales Assistant at their fingertips who can help optimize their prospecting workflow as well. Our advanced software takes the hassle out of finding the next qualified lead, and sellers will be better prepared with the correct contact information every time. Salespeople need to spend more time selling and upskilling while spending less time finding leads and tracking down accurate contact information.
The SimpleSell software integrates seamlessly with CRM platforms like Salesforce so you can work more efficiently through a single dashboard.
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