In the era of innovation, I
see a need for maturity in sales team which is more important than anything because
in today’s situation most of the potential sales opportunities are facing lot
of hurdles and are forcibly pushed to be called as a dead lead without even
understanding the size of an opportunity.
1) Stingy investment in sales team:
It always
takes some time to see return on Investment in sales because sales is always
connected to decision making which is based on the industry standard sales
lifecycle. The anxiety and restlessness makes the stingy investor even
stingier. A poor performance starts with poor investment and this will continue
to affect each and every part of the sales team. A poor investment is equal to
poor confidence at own cost.
2) Duplication of sales efforts:
The processes
become more important when growth becomes evident. No matter what, all
organizations will be compelled to invent or follow some process into system.
The structure of the process is always dependent on the size and demands of
your business. Inability to choose the right processes that business demands is
the key concern in today’s business environment. I see most of the prospects
were somehow contacted twice from the same organization to achieve same results
and this is even worse when they are customers.
3) Lack of customer exposure and product knowledge:
The key
skill expected out of an inside sales team is to open the customer gates towards
opportunity. Imagine a situation, when an inside sales agent got through a CIO
of a billion dollar company on a cold call but not able to explain the purpose
of the call (or) answer his questions and still trying to fix an appointment
with his sales head to meet his weekly targets. If this sounds scary, then this
is the reality which most companies face today. Most of the sales calls are being
dropped before even understanding the opportunity and sometimes they are
weighed small before understanding the actual opportunity size
4) Lack of communication - inability to position
the company services in-front of the customers:
Technology
connects the world – Accepted!! But communication always plays a key role in
leveraging the technology. In most successful businesses, 2 hours of call
opened the gates for billion dollar deals which created lakhs of employment
opportunities. The same is the reason for failure. In most companies, the agents
were not able to properly communicate the actual potential of their services but
still the need pushes the customer for a second level discussion. Here, in this
discussion, the opportunity was not understood properly and the same was
communicated to sales head. The sales head focusses only on the small
opportunity that was already identified and somehow closes the deal. Here only
a small portion of the opportunity was achieved and the rest is always open!
You can see the above 4 hurdles
are well handled in most successful companies.
