A bundle of opportunities, sales, achievements, profitable deals, and challenges is how the life of a sales department looks like. Each day is like a new opportunity with some challenges. The only difference is that the way you deal with challenges get refined over time with experience.
So, if you are a sales manager or rep, this post can help you. You’ll learn about the most common challenges in sales and how to overcome them.
Common Challenges and Their Solutions
Challenges are inevitable, and it is better to deal with them than to avoid them. Here are a few sales challenges and possible solutions:
1. Cut-Throat Competition
The sales sector is highly competitive. The moment you get lax, your competitors are going to take advantage. The sales field feels more like a battlefield due to the cut-throat competition that competitors give to surpass you. Their strategies can range from offering freebies to lowering prices to giving special offers and more.
The biggest challenge is when your sales rep hears from the customers spoilt for choices. For instance, if a customer says that X company is offering the product at a lower price or Y company is offering a 3-months free subscription to their service, it leaves your sales rep blank at times. Sometimes, they promise some unrealistic offers or deals that cost the company a lot or harm its reputation if they fail to offer what they promised.
How to Overcome It
There are various ways you can deal with this challenge.
First, you need to identify your potential competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. You can browse their sites, social media accounts, etc., to find out what they are best at and where you can surpass them.
Second, find out where and how you are better than your competitors and explain your USPs to your potential customers. Convince them that your products are worth their purchase and provide the right value for money.
Finally, if a customer shows interest in your products or services but is giving a final thought, you can give the last push in helping them make their purchase decision. Share the case studies and testimonials of your customers who preferred you to your competitors and also offer some discounts or special prices if feasible.
2. Lack of Communication at Various Levels
There must be proper and effective communication between sales reps and sales managers. Understanding the importance of the matter, many businesses integrate team communication software. When sales reps have excessive workloads, they sometimes fail to report the daily progress to their managers. As a result, sales managers can’t proactively identify the loopholes and scope of improvement. The absence of timely updates about daily progress over a long time leads to further issues. This lack of visibility can cause some potential customers to drift away and cancel some almost executed deals.
Similarly, the lack of timely communication and follow-up with potential customers can also create trouble. If there are many customers with different inquiries and are at different steps of the customer journey, tracking them becomes tough. Tracing their details every time from CRM also is also cumbersome.
How to Overcome It
Various technologies and methods can help keep the communication between sales managers and their reps consistent and ongoing. You can integrate a Dynamics CRM field mapping tool to map all your CRM records right on the map.
These mapping tools also let you live-track your sales reps from within the maps and track their daily progress. Sales reps can also perform check-ins/check-outs easily and update the outcome of every activity. This will eliminate the need to manually ask about each outcome separately via email, call, or other channels. At the same time, with proper visibility of potential customers on the map, you can define, assign, and re-assign territories to your sales reps. Better territory management and proper allocation of resources according to the performance potential of territories can help enhance communication with customers.
If you are also looking to visualize your CRM records on the map, our Mappyfield 365 can be the right fit. It features live-tracking, heat maps, check-ins/check-outs, territory management, and more.
3. Inability to Accept Rejections
After a lot of effort, if a sales rep gets a NO, they find it hard to digest. It breaks them down and demoralizes them. This causes a ripple effect on the following deals as focusing on communication with the prospects becomes tough for them. The last rejection or criticism also lowers their self-confidence, which causes a bad impact.
How to Overcome It
As a sales manager, you must teach sales reps that rejections are a part of sales processes. Sales reps also must understand that rejections are not always due to a fault on the company’s site. They should accept that rejections and criticisms can help you introspect and come up with better offerings.
Besides, the sales reps should keep some fitting responses ready in case they get NO. They can ask their managers or product owners to conduct sessions on handling rejections during in-person meets or on calls. Finally, work on gathering more opportunities so that a few rejections don’t reflect in your overall target and profitability.
4. Lack of Proper Sales Training
Some of the organizations commit one common mistake nowadays. They sometimes set their expectations too high but fail to train their sales reps accordingly. Consequently, this lack of training hampers the sales figures and productivity. This is because sales reps find it hard to deal with smart customers and meet the sales goals, without proper training.
How to Overcome It
The solution lies in the problem itself. Find out which areas require more training and arrange proper training sessions for your sales reps. Sales reps can also attend webinars and read the company’s resources to find out more about the products they are going to sell. They should also keep asking their seniors for regular feedback on sales performance and suggestions to improve it, if any.
5. Staying Motivated
It may sound odd to mention here as a challenge, but it is worth considering a challenge in the cut-throat sales industry today. Sales reps have to spend a number of their daily hours talking to and dealing with prospects and existing customers. They have some days full of enthusiasm, but some other days are equally depressing. If the depressing and bad days outnumber the ebullient days for some time, it can create a psychological impact on sales reps. They start feeling a lack of motivation and can’t focus on their daily work.
How to Overcome It
It is at this time when the timely intervention of management can help. Sales resources differ from each other in various aspects. They expect incentives, credits, acknowledgment of efforts, etc., from the management in different ways. All of this helps them stay motivated and goal-driven. Therefore, it is important to understand each sales rep’s expectations and determine what would work best for them.
Don’t overload them with work and intimidate them to force them out of fear. Give them their time and pace, set some tangible goals, and encourage them to accomplish them. Once they succeed in that, celebrate their wins to boost their morale and make them feel valued. However, there is a small thing that you may need to consider here is that you can always motivate employees. The point is to provide them the guidance and energy they need to streamline the overall process.
Over to You
The sales department of any organization is full of opportunities and challenges. With the right approach and strategies, you can overcome the common challenges that we discussed easily. There are some tools and technologies that can also help you make your handling of challenges easier. And we have a tool for you – Mappyfield 365 for Dynamics.
This plugin provides you with the ability to plot and visualize all your CRM records on the map. This easy-to-integrate plugin helps you manage and streamline all your sales and marketing operations. It comes with heat map visualization, territory management, targeted location marketing, live tracking, check-in/check-out, security templates, and more that you seek in an ideal mapping plugin.
So, if you want to elevate your sales management and boost your reps’ efficiency, now is the time. Just integrate Mappyfield 365 into your Dynamics and see your sales productivity snowball!
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