Need More Sales? Real Reasons Why Your Sales Are Down

We place blame quite easily in today's global strife. The news media loves to pedal despair to keep their ad sales up and we oblige them by reacting to every blip in the stock market, invested or not. RhinoThroughWall-resized

Analyzing your business's sales numbers requires more than charts and numbers. It takes shifting your perspective from sales actuals to lead generation practices. Below are a few (very few) reasons your sales people are failing.

Expecting Sales to Do It All - Sales people are the face-to-face (or voice-to-voice) relationship managers that take the well-qualified leads your marketing department delivers to them to final conversion. Some sales people come with a large network of contacts to assist in this process. You may have hired them assuming many of their contacts would become your clients (foolish mortal!) If you have salespeople and do not devote a significant budget and strategy to lead generation and lead nurturing, you are expecting too much from them. They will fail, eventually. Or worse: try their best; realize they are not being supported by an effective marketing effort; and, goes to work for your competition that has support in place.

Ignoring the Importance of Lead Nurturing - If you have a commissioned sales force, you probably have a product that is either: complex; technical; expensive; consultative in nature or requires significant installation and training. Odds are the person with the ultimate ability to authorize your sale is not the only person your sales person needs to influence in order to close the deal. Also, the individual who is tasked with gathering information for that authority figure probably has absolutely no influence whatsoever in the final decision. In other words, your initial target has completely different needs than the decision maker. Without approaching that initial lead differently and working to evolve it into one your sales people can actually have an intelligent conversation with is setting them up for failure. After that initial conversion, you can use email, direct mail, phone calls to execute this migration. Expecting every lead that you get from a trade show, online form submission or call to be handled by your salespeople is a waste of their time. You need a marketing path to take these tepid leads to warm, or marketing-qualified to sales-qualified.

Allowing Sales Management to Keep the Walls Up - Sorry to say, most sales managers are shooting their own bonuses in the foot when they do not or will not take time to work with marketing on the lead generation process. Marketing needs input on the demarcation that sales wants in a lead. Sales people do not want to put marketing-qualified leads in their funnel. Far too many sales managers have stayed in their roles by keeping the status quo in place. Marketing is their excuse. If they cooperate with marketing, they may not have someone to blame when their sales people fail. I challenge any company with a marketing and sales department to try this experiment:

Ask one sales manager to work with marketing on lead qualification. Let the rest stay their course. That sales manager's team will only get leads that meet the qualifications they set together with marketing. Watch the sales cycle intervals for this team and the others. The team with sales-qualified leads will waste less time on marketing-qualified leads and the leads they do receive will be warmer and more receptive to their pitch.

Why wouldn't this be positive for everyone involved?

This could be a 30 part series, but I will leave it at these first three and invite you to add more below in comments. Sales people cannot be held to the fire if your business is not supporting them well. This combined marketing/sales strategy requires tremendous planning that should not be left to marketers inexperienced with the lead generation - lead nurturing process. There are no quick fixes, but the long-term payoff will be well worth it. You may even be able to fund the process by cutting commissions since marketing will be doing more work to provide your sales people leads they can actually close.