The Cost of Not Providing the Right Tools To Your Sales Team – 10 Pitfalls Sales Leaders Must Avoid

As a leader, you want your sales team to be successful– engaging with leads, closing deals, and ultimately bringing in revenue.  Sales teams experience many sales pitfalls in their day to day work.

However, not providing your team with the tools they need can unintentionally create sales barriers. Excess costs, wasted time, and a frustrated team are all avoidable. Even if each mistake causes only a 5% loss in revenue over the year, they all add up to be an overwhelming loss of revenue.

As a sales leader, there are several ways you can prevent the sales pitfalls below:

1. Settling for inaccurate data

First and foremost, you should never have to settle for bad data. More often than not, data is machine-verified, meaning that the information is not checked for accuracy and may rely on web crawlers or artificial intelligence. 

These inaccuracies can be incredibly time-consuming for your sales team and potentially prevent them from meeting their quotas. Using tools like SalesIntel, you can rest easy knowing that your data is human-verified and is at least 95% accurate.  

2. Using outdated leads 

One of the main sales pitfalls is sales team using outdated leads. If you’re using out-of-date data, it’s bound to be riddled with errors. Maybe that person doesn’t work for the company anymore, or maybe the company recently updated their technology stack and no longer has use for your product. Whatever it may be, you’re now behind the times. 

By not having the right sales tools in place, you may have cost each of your sales representatives hours of their time each day – and the wasted time adds up quickly. Use a data provider that reverifies contacts every 90 days to ensure the data is as current as possible. 

3. Trying to get by without a CRM

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is a tool used primarily to store and manage customer information in a way that is accessible to all parties. Factors like cost, time to integrate, and fear of new technology prevent sales leaders from adopting such a system. 

Instead of relying on a spreadsheet or individual record-keeping from your sales reps, a CRM allows the entire team to access every account you interact with, streamlining communication, improving data management, and ultimately the customer experience. Having a single source of truth and record-keeping eliminates the potential for accounts being contacted redundantly and provides individualized attention for each customer. 

4. Not defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Who is it you want to sell to? While it may sound simple, many sales leaders neglect to develop a profile of the customers they want to target most. Take the time to collaborate with your team and determine a persona for your product. What is their job title? What industry are they in? How large is their company in terms of employees and revenue? Come to a consensus on what this ICP should be. 

Once you know who you’re planning to sell to, it will be easier to eliminate prospects that are only going to cost you money down the line due to being a poor fit. After you determine what your ICP should look like, you can focus on prospecting tools that allow you to filter leads by firmographic and technographic data, allowing you to focus on leads that fit within your specified parameters.  

5. Utilizing too many tools

Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. While sales barriers are diminished through the use of tools, having too many tools for your team can confuse them and end up creating more of a hassle. You’ll want to find tools that can serve multiple functions, providing your team with fewer licenses to worry about and less time sifting through multiple solutions to find the information they need. 

Productivity may suffer as well. If sales reps need to worry about training on multiple tools and mastering each of them, it can be time-consuming and cannibalize the time they could have spent selling. Consider a comprehensive solution, one that will maximize your team’s results at each step of the sales cycle. 

6. Reaching out at the wrong time

Has your team faced pushback from prospects claiming they’re not looking for new solutions at this time or that they already committed to your competitor? Your sales reps may have done their due diligence in researching the proper leads but may have missed the mark on timing, losing out on a potential deal. 

Thankfully, some tools examine buyer intent data allowing you to uncover and analyze buying signals early to engage with prospects at the start of their buying journey. After identifying the perfect time to engage through intent filters, you’ll often find you have a higher conversion rate, capitalizing on hot leads that you may have otherwise missed.

7. Not considering tool integrations

What if the tools you choose to invest in do not communicate with each other? At times, sales leaders neglect to consider that their tools may not integrate, causing confusion and the potential for data to duplicate or decay. 

Say, for example, you are working with a data tool that does not connect directly with your CRM. While that product may be valuable in providing leads, you may have to enter them manually or remember to update account info on each platform. You need tools that inherently work together. 

8. Talking to the wrong contacts

What if you don’t have a job title listed for a prospect and find out after the demo that this individual isn’t even a decision-maker? It’s incredibly frustrating, especially if it occurs repeatedly. Ideally, you’d like to connect only with a company’s decision-makers.

If you’re not seeing who you’re looking for, you can utilize a tool like SalesIntel’s Research on Demand (ROD) tool. Our dedicated global team of 1,900+ human researchers will hunt down the right contact information for the accounts you want to reach based on your established ICP.  

9. Not connecting to prospects directly 

Sometimes you call a prospect and get sent to a switchboard, gatekeeper, or even just someone random in the department. Regardless, this was not what you intended, and prevented the conversation you wanted from happening.

Thankfully, there’s a solution. Find and use direct dials and mobile numbers to give you the ability to instantly find and contact future customers, taking out all the guesswork. Your sales reps will spend their time talking to the right people, right away. 

10. Neglecting to establish a sales playbook

Last but not least sales pitfalls is not having a sales playbook. There’s a crucial tool separating competitors concerning sales efficiency – a sales playbook. A sales playbook is a collection of information that communicates your strategy and makes it readily accessible to your team, allowing them to take the proper steps, at the right time, with the correct people. 

The use of a sales strategy playbook contributes to measurable results. It enables your sales reps to perform better and faster, ultimately resulting in more leads converting to customers. Without it, you could be preventing your company from accessing new business and revenue opportunities.  By utilizing sales intelligence tools, you can easily create, implement, and integrate a sales playbook into your team’s arsenal. 

Overcoming Sales Barriers To Success

As you can see, there are many sales pitfalls for sales leaders that all have an incredibly steep cost– wasting valuable time and money. You want your team to be able to reach their quotas, have access to quality prospects, boost productivity and ultimately shorten the sales cycle. 

If you want to arm your teams with the right tools for success, consider SalesIntel. We give you peace of mind by providing your team access to quick, relevant, and accurate information, ensuring the only impact your sales intelligence tools have is a positive one.