Three reasons your sales team miss target

There are many reasons a sales team can miss target.  The three that we come across most often are these.  Do you suffer from any of these?

Not enough leads

Sales people generally fall into one of two categories: those that love generating their own leads and those that don’t!  Most don’t.

The rare salesperson that is comfortable generating leads also tends to be poor at qualifying those leads into the pipeline.  This person has worked hard to get leads into the pipeline so does not want to just dismiss them if they don’t quite fit.  So you will often find their pipeline full of hopefuls that are never going to turn into business.

If you are lucky enough to have a salesperson that is good at generating leads, try switching them to only generating leads for the rest of the sales team and compensate this person for lead generated.

Should you not have this person in your team, dedicate resource and budget to generating good quality leads.  You can do this by hiring into your team or use an external business like Nett Sales to bring you a regular stream of new leads for your sales team.

Poor or no CRM

How do you track your sales prospects?  Can you identify all live prospects by sales stage, next action, predicted revenue and know why you lost and won every deal within a minute or so of being asked?

If not, you’re wasting time and working inefficiently.  This information and so much more can be at your fingertips without wading through spreadsheets or lengthy reports.

CRM vendors don’t really help as most systems are complex, fully of unnecessary junk and don’t let you do what you want to do – progress prospects through a defined process and know where you are with each one.

Nett Sales deploys CRM systems that actually work, supporting sales teams to achieve their goals and giving them the information they need when they need it.  Our CRM guru is happy to spend an hour on the phone with you helping you to get the most out of your current system.

No re-engagement of old leads

This is the biggest failing of every sales department we come across.  Of the leads that you worked on in 2015, how many turned into customers?  Maybe 10%.  What about the other 90%?  They had a requirement but the time was not right or they bought from a competitor or someone just forgot to call them back.

You don’t have time to call each of these leads every month or so – and you’d probably upset them anyway.  So enrol them into a regular “engagement” strategy where you share relevant and interesting knowledge, hint and tips with them so that when they are ready to consider a purchase, you are front of mind.

When we run these campaigns for many businesses, we will do them in such a way that we know which old leads are engaging with the campaign and so can identify these to your sales team to get back in touch.  Where we run these campaigns we often get another 10% to 20% of the old leads back into live sales situations within months.

You’ve already paid for these leads either with money or the effort of your team, so why not optimise the return on them?

You will also benefit from an integrated CRM system so that leads can be scored and tracked effectively.

Helping you succeed

Above are three areas where sales teams tend to fall down.  It’s relatively easy to fix all three of these challenges with the right help.  Nett Sales was set up 9 years ago to provide sales teams precisely this support – that’s all we do.

So please do get in touch if you want to regain control of your sales team and your life.