The efficiency and effectiveness of your sales team directly reflect on the success of your company. In the face of fierce competition, B2B companies are often sensing that their SDRs are unable to convey a compelling brand story that will set themselves apart. To counteract this problem, sales leaders need to find ways to identify possible sales challenges and their solutions quickly before your next sales meeting.
With that in mind, here are the top 10 most common challenges your sales team might be facing at this point in time.
2. Not enough qualified inbound leads
4. Wasting time on unqualified sales leads
5. Disagreement about new processes
7. Not getting high-quality referrals
8. Prospects don’t have enough budget
1. Problem: Long Sales Cycles Are Reducing Effectiveness
For many enterprises, the sales cycle is getting longer. There are many reasons for this, but primarily, the biggest challenge is the dependencies on a greater number of stakeholders for agreement.
Solution: Keep Prospects Engaged
While you cannot force prospects to make quick decisions, you can make sure that your brand stays at the top of mind throughout the decision-making process. Set a follow-up process just to keep the prospect engaged without pushing them to buy your product, no matter how long it takes.
2. Problem: Not Enough Inbound Web Leads to Support Sales Efforts
Inbound website leads should not supply your entire sales funnel, but they should be a vital component of it. Your website can make things easier for your sales reps. A prospect who has consumed the information on your website and then contacted you is already highly interested in your offerings. This can help you create a consistent lead generation engine.
Solution: Get A Reliable B2B Data Partner
Go through your website and try to analyze the gaps in your sales and marketing content. Make sure your web content synchronizes with your buyer personas. Simultaneously, you can partner with a reliable B2B data partner to reach prospects faster and keep sales reps motivated.
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3. Problem: Lack of Brand Reputation and Trust
You need to make sure that you have enough sales and marketing material on and off the web in place to do a lot of heavy lifting for you. Before talking to you, a prospect will explore your brand visibility, content, case studies, and more to judge your brand reputation. If the materials available leave them noncommittal or closed off, that becomes a massive hurdle for your sales team.
Solution: Create and Share Quality Content
Drive your content strategy in the right direction. Monitor the content performance to get an idea of what types of content are more shareable and engaging. Are articles optimized to help users easily search them? Is your brand active in developing its thought leadership credentials on sites like LinkedIn? If not, fix those issues – pronto.
4. Problem: You’re Spending Too Much Time on Unqualified Prospects
Sales reps spend almost one-fourth of their time chasing unqualified prospects due to inaccurate prospect data. This can have a massive demotivating effect on your sales reps, which can detrimentally impact your sales pipeline and ultimately your numbers.
Solution: Deploy Accurate Data
Use accurate data to ensure that your SDRs are spending their time nurturing the right prospects that meet your SQL and MQL criteria. Using a data platform for prospecting will work wonders for your sales team.
SalesIntel gives you access to a humongous set of accurate B2B data that includes direct dials of key decision-makers. Additionally, you can integrate SaleIntel with your CRM, allowing you to download prospect data straight to your CRM.
5. Problem: Internal Disagreement About New Processes
Every time you update your sales processes, you will experience some resistance from your sales team. Change often makes sales reps uncomfortable, especially people who have been a part of your company for a long time. This can lead to a negative environment among your peers.
Solution: Align Your Sales Process
It is important to encourage your sales team to learn new tactics. Although it is easier said than done, try to highlight the value that they will get out of your new process or new tools instead of imposing the change on them. If a new tool can help them achieve their number, you won’t see them resist the change.
6. Problem: The Sales Process Falters After On-Site Demo
Selling a high-end technology to any company requires demos at the client’s office. Most demos fail to convey how your product can help your prospect solve their needs. As a result, instead of presenting a ‘how it will help you’ demo, you present a ‘how it works’ demo. A botched demo leads to huge sales challenges.
Solution: Train Your Sales Team
You can train reps to demo properly by developing their sales skills, showing them how to deliver a demo that caters to the client’s needs, or accompanying them for the demo when the accounts are big to answer the prospects’ questions. If you cannot make it to the demo, make sure you follow-up with the prospect once the sales rep has delivered the demo.
7. Problem: Referral Business Is Low Despite Satisfied Customers
Many B2B companies are dependent on referral business as it can reduce your cost per acquisition and shorten the buying cycle due to already built-up rapport. However, there are situations where referrals can fail to show up even if your existing customers are satisfied.
Solution: Invest in Customer Success
Some customers don’t take action to refer unless you trigger them to do so. Find ways to offer them incentives such as offering them discounts or freemium service. Sometimes you need to tell them what they will be rewarded with if they suggest your brand to others.
A common objection B2B sales team face is leads who cite lack of budget or authority as common challenges. These can be extremely demotivating to reps who use so much effort to reach the final stage only to discover their prospects really don’t have the juice when it comes to making a final purchase decision.
Solution: Use Qualified Data
Start with the right prospecting from the beginning. Segment your buyer persona according to parameters like company size, annual turnover, etc. Keep your sales database clean, especially your list of sales qualified leads.
SalesIntel helps you to filter the data according to the firmography, technography, company size, annual turnover, and more. This will allow your team to spend more time selling to the right prospects.
9. Problem: Your Team Is Experiencing Sales Anxiety
Sales anxiety is one of the challenges that may go unnoticed. Sales reps often go through a lot of pressure when they are facing daunting quotas, especially while they experience rejection on a regular basis. The truth is that sales anxiety can be extremely detrimental to your business and is one of the biggest unaddressed reasons that encourages great salespeople to leave their job.
Solution: Motivate Your Sales Team
You cannot get rid of sales anxiety by asking your reps to get over it. Help your reps feel better prepared for rejection and support them on a human level. Most of all, do everything you can to help them hit quota.
10. Problem: Prospecting Efforts Are Falling Short
Unfortunately, whole efforts can go to waste if your team isn’t getting in contact with the right kinds of prospects. You should tailor your efforts to reach the right audience and forget about reaching out to contacts who are not even decision-makers by filtering the right prospects.
Solution: Use The Right Prospecting Tools
Sales reps need prospecting tools to streamline the process of finding and engaging with potential leads. Also, they should have the data about prospects to identify where potential leads’ watering holes are.
SalesIntel’s accurate B2B data gives you and your team the freedom to prospect, filter, and reach directly to the decision-makers as per your targeted persona.
Start Small Towards Big
Sales challenges come in all shapes and sizes, but the solution is usually found by going the extra mile to resolve an issue your team is facing. However, you need to start taking small steps to resolve the issues. Get a SalesIntel demo and start with helping your SDRs identify and reach the decision-makers in quick time.
