Reasons why your sales team isn’t performing
November 26, 2019, written by margaritaRunning a sales team for a media owner can be difficult and stressful. You’re constantly battling with cost cutting and a reduced headcount in your team. Coupled with ambitious YoY sales targets.
It’s a tough challenge when your team isn’t high-performing. It becomes even more difficult and simply unachievable when your sales team is struggling and under-performing. These are the signs you should look out for when your team isn’t hitting their targets.
1. Follow ups are being missed
According to a Harvard Business Review study, there was a 400% increase in lead response when a lead was contacted within the first five minutes.
Another study found that just 2% of deals are done when the parties meet in person for the first time. The vast majority of deals (80% in fact) take five follow ups or more to close.
This suggests, it’s essential to follow up with your leads quickly (automation is key) and to keep going with your leads, especially the ones of real value to your business. However, a sales team working with an over complicated and stressful process may well miss these opportunities. It’s therefore crucial to strip things back.
2. Too much time is spent selling (and not listening)
The benefits of automation and sales AI mean that your team should be spending their time selling, rather than taking on unnecessary admin. That’s a given.
But that valuable time selling, shouldn’t just focus on what your product can do.
When engaging with leads, your salespeople need to get to know their prospects’ requirements and tailor their solutions to solve their challenges. If an advertiser can see the value and what it would mean for their business from your product, whether that’s geotargeting, dynamic creative or advanced insights reporting, they’ll be much more likely to sign off on their budget being spent with you.
3. Leads aren’t being qualified properly
It’s one thing filling up your pipeline with potential leads, but for your sales team to perform well and get the right leads over the line it’s crucial that you qualify leads properly.
You need to know which of your leads are the most engaged and which potential products would be best suited to them, as well as those that will bring the right revenue into the business. Again, it’s critical to strip back your sales process and concentrate on defined metrics to understand the engagement of your leads and the potential to convert. Our sales automation engine provides real time data to do exactly that.
4. Your team is too busy and stressed
A confused sales process with a lack of clear direction will result in your sales team being extremely busy, but without the clarity on where they should really be focusing their efforts.
Face to face meetings might once have been an invaluable tactic, but in reality they take too much time. Are cold calls the best way to really engage with digital savvy prospects? Can you afford to rely on your sales team describing your proposition in the hope your potential client understands exactly what they mean?
To really sell digital products, you need to employ the creative selling techniques to enable the proposition to be brought to life for your prospects. That provides essential clarity for all parties and enables faster decision making.
By choosing a hands off approach until the most opportune moment to sell, you give your sales team the time and space to not be blindly chasing leads and to focus their energies on selling when the time is right. You also give your clients the space to make an informed decision.
However, to enable this approach, it’s vital to bring the right tools into your team blending creative selling, with automation and AI. The best tools will simplify your processes and streamline your activity, as well as drive results and enhance the efficiency of your team.
