As a small business owner, identifying sales problems and solutions is crucial for meeting your goals to grow your company and secure a successful future. But to identify your company’s sales problems and develop solutions for growth, think about the challenges and struggles you see daily among your sales team—what roadblocks are stopping your reps from closing deals and crushing goals?
By pinpointing daily sales challenges, you can identify specific problems preventing you from growth and create unique solutions that deliver profit.
Read on to learn how to overcome your business’s biggest sales challenges.
The Biggest Sales Challenges Preventing Business Growth
To identify sales problems and create solutions, consider some of the issues that hinder today’s small businesses’ growth.
Is your sales team struggling to:
- Build trust and stand out from your competition?
- Close deals?
- Get leads to respond?
- Produce consistent sales?
- Ensure lead satisfaction?
- Meet goals?
- Overcome price objections?
If you notice any or all of these common sales challenges in your small business, now’s the time to pinpoint the problem and create a solution.
How to Overcome Your Biggest Sales Challenges
Overcoming some of today’s biggest sales challenges, like building trust and handling price objections, requires a wide range of solutions, from encouraging teamwork and implementing strategic planning to using modern sales techniques.
Below are some powerful ways to overcome your biggest sales challenges to produce greater business results that drive profit:
Build Trust and Stand Out With Scripts
If making sales calls is your primary conversion strategy, it’s challenging to connect with your prospects and stand out from the competition. But you can build trust, distinguish your brand, and overcome the virtual barrier between your sales reps and prospects with scripts based on your products and services. To increase your conversion rate, find out which member of your sales team is converting the most qualified leads to customers successfully, write a script based on what they say, and train your entire sales team to sell the same way. Developing a standard script that all your sales reps use also improves consistency in your sales processes ensuring all your salespeople are conveying your brand’s reputation, products, and services powerfully and accurately.
Close More Deals With Sales and Marketing Integration
Traditionally, sales and marketing departments work in silos, but this type of separation between two important aspects of your business’s success can have a negative impact on your sales reps’ ability to close deals. For example, sales team employees often view closing deals with tunnel vision, focusing only on traditional tactics and best practices to push for conversions. But by creating a central hub that integrates your marketing and sales teams, marketing employees can provide sales reps with your collateral, such as infographics, webinars, and training videos, to pass along to prospects. Sales and marketing integration can help your small business overcome one of today’s biggest sales challenges, closing deals, by allowing your leads to familiarize themselves with your products and services and build trust with your brand and reps.
Use Video Prospecting to Increase Lead Responses
It’s tough to get leads to respond, and even with all the different types of communication technology available, getting leads to schedule appointments and respond to emails is still one of the biggest sales challenges for small businesses. To increase your response rates, distinguish your sales employees from the competition using video prospecting. Video prospecting is simply a video of your reps delivering your sales script. Using video prospecting can increase lead responses by building your sales team’s credibility and branding your employees as trusted, reliable consultants.
Build a Team With Specific Roles to Produce Consistent Sales
If your team members are struggling to produce consistent sales, building an efficient sales team with specific roles improves consistency in your processes. When your sales processes are consistent, your employees devote more time to meeting sales goals by spending less time putting out fires. Creating specific sales team positions, such as a lead generator, meeting coordinator, and closer, ensures team members are following your processes, makes it easier to measure performance and growth, and helps produce consistent sales.
Increase Lead Satisfaction With Accountability
Converting 100% of your leads into customers may be impossible, but you can aim to get there by improving your sales team’s accountability. When you create a culture of accountability on your sales team, salespeople take ownership of their mistakes and look for solutions that result in satisfied leads that become satisfied customers. You can start holding your sales team more accountable by setting expectations, establishing a reporting routine, and holding regular accountability conversations.
Develop a Sales Plan to Meet Your Goals
One of the biggest sales challenges small businesses struggle to overcome is meeting sales goals, but by making a sales plan for your small business, you identify and track the specific activities that help your sales team meet their goals. Download this 1-page spreadsheet “The Weighted Sales Activity Plan” and modify it to help you create your small business’ customized sales plan. Identifying the activities that lead to sales results is the #1 way to ensure you accomplish your sales goals.
Overcome Price Objections With Sales Coaching
One powerful way to help your reps overcome price objections is investing in coaching for your sales team. Business coaches that specialize in sales know the best responses to the most common price objections that let prospects know your reps acknowledge their price concerns—without destroying your margins and lowering your product’s perceived value.
If you’re running into obstacles preventing you from further growth, consider partnering with a business coach.
Helping Small Businesses Overcome Their Biggest Sales Challenges
At Inspire Results Business Coaching, we help small to medium-sized businesses overcome their biggest sales challenges with expert coaching and sales training services. We can help you take your sales to the next level by teaching your reps proven methods for handling price objections, and developing one-on-one selling skills to close more deals and increase your conversion rates. Contact us today to learn how we can help you overcome that which prevents you from growing your business.