As a sales leader, how much time do you spend thinking about how you can solve the challenges within your organization? Probably a lot. What sort of coaching tactics will help your underperforming reps the most? Are there any discounts you can give that big prospect to incentivize them to sign by end of quarter? How can you improve your forecast accuracy?
Addressing these types of issues head-on and finding the right answers is important and sure to add a lot of value to your sales team. But the truth is, the biggest dangers for your sales team are the ones you can’t see. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know it exists, and often identifying the issue is more than half the battle.
We’re pointing out three critical yet all too common sales blind spots wreaking havoc on sales teams today. Identifying these blind spots within your sales team will enable you to start focusing on solutions that can take your business to the next level.
1. Low CRM Adoption
You spent months fighting for the budget to purchase a new CRM, diligently researched dozens of potential solutions, invested major time and resources in implementation and rolled it out to the team with a flourish. And now everyone’s using it every day and capturing tons of important sales data…right?
According to a recent report from Bluewolf, more than 25% of sales people regard using Salesforce as a chore, with 27% admitting that they only enter opportunity data into the CRM to meet reporting requirements. Clearly this is not a good sign for rep CRM adoption. In fact, it has been said that 74% of sales teams using CRMs have poor adoption rates.
With a workforce that is accustomed to using consumer-facing applications that simplify their lives, clunky, decade-old platforms that require painstaking data entry just won’t cut it. Your reps will soon realize that filtering through Excel or keeping hand-written logs is easier than using your CRM – and you’ll be none the wiser. That is, until you attempt to pull a certain report and realize that your sales data has been evading your CRM for months!
Increase Your Visibility: Replace your outdated legacy CRM with an intuitive, next-generation sales platform built to drive rep adoption through ease of use. Also, search for a solution that enables you to monitor the health of your CRM data and see when reps fail to fill out important data fields. For more tips on how to improve CRM adoption, check out this blog.
2. Missed Process Steps
If you’re a successful business, chances are you have some sort of sales process in place to outline the steps reps need to take before moving a deal from one stage of the sales pipeline to the next. But the question is, are your reps consistently following these steps and capturing the required information and exit criteria?
If you’re not sure, the answer is probably no. And while this may not seem to have any immediate implications, it’s been proven that companies with a formalized sales process see 18% more revenue growth that companies without one. That’s because, when reps follow a given sales process, they create a series of consistent data points that can be measured to understand, predict and improve performance over time.
For example, there is probably a step in your sales process to identify a decision maker. If your reps follow this process and enter information around the decision makers in their deals into your CRM, you will soon be able to identify the ideal profiles for the decision makers you should be pursuing based on the win rates of these deals. What’s more, you will then be able to pinpoint reps that are having a hard time identifying the right decision makers and provide them with the appropriate training.
Increase Your Visibility: Make it easy for reps to enter information necessary to the sales process with custom fields and tags. Automated capture for calls and emails further streamlines this task, while some sales platforms even allow you to set up prompts for reps to enter specific information when a deal is moved to a new pipeline stage. If you’d like more information around building a scientific sales process, download this free eBook.
3. Lost Leads and Relationships
Sales is all about building relationships, so details matter. Conferences, client dinners and airplane flights are all ripe for introductions, sales discussions and relationship cultivation. But when reps can’t track these conversations right away, the details get lost in the delay to get this information into your CRM. That is, if the information gets there at all.
When reps forget or are unable to document new leads or important details on the go, you have no way of knowing how this information may have impacted your sales pipeline and performance. But trust us, it does matter: research shows that 65% of sales reps who have adopted mobile CRM achieve their sales quotas, compared to just 22% of reps who have not. Making reps wait until they are back at their desks to add or update contacts essentially turns the entire sales field into one giant potential blind spot.
Increase Your Visibility: Next-generation CRMs provide native mobile experiences that give reps the same capabilities that they get from their desktops optimized for tablets and smartphones. They even offer mobile-first features built specifically for outside sales teams, like offline access, geolocation and visit tracking.
Does your sales organization suffer from any of these three sales blind spots? To help find a CRM that minimizes blind spots like these and improves both rep and management visibility, download this free CRM Buyer’s Kit.
The post 3 Sales Blind Spots You Didn’t Know You Had appeared first on Base CRM Blog.
