Is a disorganized sales process ruining your closing rate? The problem often starts with sales errors or a poor strategy for handling leads. Yes, sloppy lead management can make it impossible for your sales team or call center to get on the right track. You want to follow through with warm leads all the way to closing the sale. You’re instead dealing with slow sales without measurable ways to see where things are going wrong. In this article, we’ll cover how to overcome sales errors to become a more efficient closer.
These Are Your Pain Points
If you’re struggling to close deals, there’s a good chance that your sales process is painfully unorganized. There may be no clear path to follow that takes into account the “temperature” of each lead. This is what happens when a sales team has a disorganized sales process. In fact, your sales process may not just be disorganized and chaotic. It may not have an actual blueprint at all.
In addition to floundering due to a lack of direction, your sales team may also be suffering from “human error” issues. While some errors are performed purely by mistake, others are simply products of the disorganized process that has become the default “guiding light” of the sales team. Here’s a glance at the most common human-generated pain points for sales teams:
- Losing Track of a Lead: This really comes down to dropping the ball in the purest sense of the phrase. In a chaotic environment, it’s common for sales agents to simply lose track of where they are in the sales cycle with various leads. This is a tragedy regardless of where it occurs in the sales cycle. When it happens at the start, your team loses out on potential sales. When it happens at the middle or end, your team has already lost time. This means that your team loses regardless of the temperature of the lead.
- Calling Across Time Zones: What’s the fastest way to get your company labeled as a nuisance? Place sales calls at inconvenient or “rude” times. Calling outside of ideal business hours can cause your well-meaning sales team to seem aggressive and “spammy” to customers. Aligning call times with location is pivotal for extracting the highest amount of value possible from a call. Calling at a bad time of day is actually worse than not calling at all.
- Using the Wrong Mode of Contact: The truth is that modern call centers are really modern “contact” centers. While phone calls still have value for making first contact, many consumers are checking boxes for “text” and “email” when being asked about their preferred modes of communication. If your team doesn’t have that information, they may be calling leads who are more reachable by text or email.
This list represents just a sampling of all of the things that can go wrong when a sales team is working in chaos instead of thriving in a tightly controlled environment. Another major sales error that wastes time while also putting your company’s reputation in jeopardy is placing calls to numbers that are on the national do-not-call registry. Companies that violate do-not-call rules face fines and legal repercussions. How do you overcome common sales errors? An organized strategy for how to handle your leads is the first step.
Using Better Lead Management to Stop Common Sales Errors
Your sales office needs to run like a machine. Like modern machines, modern sales teams run on good data. This is where A/B testing comes into the conversation. The only way to run an effective sales team with a high closing rate is to A/B test every single data point in your sales pipeline. This means measuring every single contact point to create a clear map of interactions. When this is done properly, a blueprint can be generated for your sales team that details:
- The best time to contact clients.
- The method for contacting each client.
- How to gauge responsiveness.
That last item on the list is the big one. Tracking and measuring lead responsiveness is about more than just checking off a box when a lead says “yes” or “no” to buying. When nurturing leads, it’s important to understand the full lead journey. When leads are placed into one of two categories, the nuances of how customers interact with both your brand and sales team are missed. When a lead system is properly organized, these interactions will let you know:
- If a lead responds to calls or texts.
- When a lead responds to calls or texts.
- The method that a lead uses to respond.
If you’re struggling with low sales, you may need to pan out even wider to get answers. It’s not always the products. It’s not always your sales team. The issue often comes down to a series of sales errors that are creating chaos and disorganization.
Your sales team is probably suffering if you don’t currently have a process for qualifying leads. How do you get one? Companies that use Pipes.ai to manage leads for their call centers enjoy a simple way to qualify leads. Download our eBook called “No More Cold Calls: A Foolproof Plan to Build a List of 100% Qualified Sales Leads” today to learn the ins and outs of how this problem is holding back so many sales teams.
