Everyone who has spent at least a day in sales knows how hard sales can be. You’re constantly dealing with uninterested leads, juggling your time and trying to close sales as quickly as possible.
With constant pressure from their managers and unnecessary admin work that accompanies nearly every sales, salespeople are among the most overworked and stressful professions.
In fact, 73% of salespeople report experiencing high levels of stress and pressure on their work.
We could go on, but there’s really no need. It’s obvious salespeople need help relieving their workload and increasing productivity.
That is why we will focus on providing you with actionable tips on how to simplify your sales process and improve your work conditions.
However, before we move on and explain how you can better manage your stress levels on the job, we will briefly visit the most common sales process problems.
The most common sales process problems
You focus on the wrong things
The management always wants better results. Salespeople want more sales.
No one can ignore results and everyone wants more money.
However, contacting as many leads as possible in the shortest amount of time is far from the ideal strategy. In fact, it could kill your prospects with the best leads.
Many salespeople spread themselves too thin, trying not to neglect any potential leads. But that strategy simply doesn’t work well in practice.
Instead of providing you with sales from as many leads, you will end up with no sales, as every prospect will notice your lack of preparation and focus.
The optimal way to approach sales is to focus on your best prospects. Tie up the deals that are nearly complete and forget about all leads that are neither here nor there. You can always revisit them later.
You have no real strategy
When managers want their salespeople to hit their quotas, they often leave them on their own, allowing their creativity to seal the deals.
This is an understandable strategy, but it quickly leads to chaos, especially if you operate a large sales department. With everyone laser-focused on hitting their personal quotas, it’s easy to forget about the big picture.
Software tools can help alleviate this problem. However, most of them are made for managers, rather than for salespeople, because managers are the decision-makers in most companies. This means that salespeople need to deal with sub-optimal software solutions on top of their daily sales stresses.
Busy salespeople don’t have time to deal with complex systems and discover all the intricacies of management software programs. If you want to make their work a bit more pleasurable, you will need to find a solution that is easy to use and has a beginner-friendly interface.
Simply CRM provides a clear overview of all business operations and processes within the company. If you need a system that works equally well for sales, marketing and support teams, we recommend that you test the free trial version.
Your team is overworked
This is hardly a surprise.
Sales is one of the most unforgiving career paths that anyone can take in the current economy. However, it doesn’t have to be that way.
If you make minor changes to your workflow, you can easily alleviate a lot of the pressures that your sales personnel is facing. For example, you can hire a virtual assistant that will deal with all the administrative work and enter sales into your preferred corporate software solution.
You can educate yourself and your team on the signs of stress and proactively address the most stressful situations to improve your work conditions.
How to simplify your sales process
The best salespeople in all industries share one common trait:
They all have a clear plan of action for their sales calls and pitches. They focus their efforts on only one activity, instead of spreading themselves to cover as many bases as possible.
However, this approach can be equally demanding as any other sales process. It requires a certain dose of belief and trust in your system. You need to trust the process and the actions you’re taking, and slowly guide your prospects down the sales cycle.
The best sales processes don’t put a heavy emphasis on the end results. Instead, they focus on the sales journey that will manifest itself when you perform the right actions at the right time.
However, we understand that simplifying the sales process is easier said than done.
That’s why we will present you with a few actionable pieces of advice that you can implement to improve your sales process today. Keep reading.
Assess your current sales process
Before you start changing anything, you first need to assess and evaluate your current sales process. Identify its weakest and strongest points.
This is important because you can’t make any improvements if you don’t know what works and doesn’t work.
Take your time to carefully analyze each aspect of the existing processes.
Then, try to simplify everything. Set simple, clear and objective key performance indicators (KPIs). To give each team member a clear overview of their priorities, we recommend that you examine the following metrics:
- The total number of deals
- The value of your deals
- The percentage of deals closed
- The time it takes to close a deal, on average
You can build your entire sales process around these four simple metrics. Make sure your team always understands them and allow them to prioritize the deals with the highest potential.
Focus on the best leads
Unqualified leads waste everyone’s time.
More worryingly, they frustrate your sales teams and cause them to lose confidence in their approach by decreasing their deal closing rates.
Setting up a structured approach to lead identification and qualification is crucial for the success of the business. You can do this by analyzing your existing customers and finding insights into their shared characteristics.
Considering developing buyer personas and distribute them to your sales team. Make sure your team always knows how to identify the best leads and know what prospects they should prioritize.
Automate the admin work
We already mentioned that admin work only piles more work on the stressed out and pressured sales personnel. The last thing they want is to manually research each potential lead.
Luckily, this type of work can easily be automated or outsourced.
As we suggested earlier, you can hire a virtual assistant or a data entry specialist to do the heavy lifting for the admin work. Alternatively, you can introduce Simply CRM into your business structure to create a database with the most important information easily accessible to everyone on the team.
Simply CRM will also help you automate many admin tasks, such as invoicing, sales orders, lead nurturing, customer support, etc.
Start exploring all the benefits of an automated system with a 30-day free trial. No credit card required.
Final words
There you have it! We have covered the most common sales process problems and explained how you can simplify sales by introducing a few changes to your business structure.
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