Mistakes in sales process

3 common mistakes in the sales process that may lead to customer loss

Mistakes in sales process

From generating new leads to closing deals, the entire sales process can become long and exhausting. In this, one wrong move could flick your entire house of cards tumbling towards the ground.

Every salesperson, regardless of the industry, product, or skill level, makes mistakes. And from their mistakes, they learn new thing about nourishing and turning their leads into opportunities.

But there are some common mistakes that even seasoned campaigner could be committing amidst their sales career.

While having a centralized strategy is essential, you also need to understand that each lead is different. It is crucial to have the flexibility to approach each lead individually. Also, you can say that different salespeople have different tactics.

These three common mistakes could stop salespeople dead on their tracks. It could be easily avoided and could even turn into strong points if you carefully plan and observe a clear selling pattern with clients.

Mistake 1: Messing-up the Follow-up Routines

While nourishing quality leads, you should know the significant value of follow-up with the prospects, in order to gain their trust and speed up the actual conversion process.

Simply put, the lead nourishing is often involves gaining the trust of prospect and accelerating their actual conversion.

[Learn more about the importance of follow-up calls here – The Key to Increasing Your Sales: It’s All about Following-up]

But, even after being made aware of the power of follow-up or benefiting from planned customer follow-up, salespeople frequently fail to execute proper follow-up protocols. They end up either avoiding a particular lead or excessively calling-up a particularly high-value prospect.

In both cases, you could self-destroying your prospects interest in your product/service.

There are mainly two reasons behind it-

  • Not having the complete track on sales leads
  • Excessive workload – too many meetings to attend and too many calls to do

Globally, every salesperson can relate to this situation. Due frequently receiving heavy workloads and simultaneously handling multiple clients, all salespeople suffer from the lack of future prospect planning.

Consequences

Missing follow-up calls can slow down the conversion process and severely affect your conversion rates. More importantly, it can affect your overall client relationships.

That means lots of great chances and opportunity that can confine you to get the right ROI.

Solution

Though the problem is grave, you can’t imagine how simple the solution is. Keeping track on the notepad and maintaining a contact book is too old to keep up with this competitive industry.

Instead of keeping a mental tab on each user, you could use and the call management system. This helps you evaluate the progress and arrange a call at a predisposed time.

This allows you to handle each customer interactions with the objective of driving final conversions. You can also set the right frequency and mode of internal communication.

By having a call management system, you can eradicate the unnecessary problems that could affect your sales process.

Meanwhile, you can also update your daily task on your CRM dashboard. With this system, your entire team can collaborate on preventing any potential calls to be missed-out of the workflow. This will help to sort out your hectic schedule and give a clear understanding of managing your workday.

CRM dashboard

CRM dashboard

Mistake 2: Lack of Information

Always, even the most consolidated client meetings are a thing of the doubt.

Consider that you are attending a prospect. Now your client asks you for detail about your product and you aren’t knowledgeable or don’t carry the document about that particular matter.

Or suppose, suddenly a client calls you and asks about the status of his/her enquiry and you don’t have any clue about the previous conversation since that last call was taken by someone else.

Both of these are very common in sales and marketing organizations.

Consequences

Lack of information is the major cause behind all the misunderstanding between the client and the company. Whereas clarity of information can brace the relationships with trust and loyalty, superficial product demonstration and unclear contract can lead to the vital error of communication.

Lack of information among your employees can affect-

  • Company reputation
  • Lead generation process
  • Lead conversion rate
  • Team spirit
  • Office environment and culture

Solution

Yes, even this problem has an easy solution. And the same sales CRM software can help you out of the situation.

Its valuable application gives you the opportunity to update all the information gathered about your client; you can even raise the ticket for each complaint or enquiry to follow up the status. All the team members with access to the dashboard can see and act based on the updated information.

Besides, you can have a separate section for uploading your inventory and access those data from your mobile CRM application, so that you can show to your client while having a meeting outside the office.

Mobile CRM

Mistake 3: Ignoring the Sales Pipeline

Are you aware of your high ROI lead sources? Do you know what your future sales prospect is?

Being ignorant of your sales pipeline can severely cost you. However, this issue is somewhat different from the other two. Since the sales pipeline management is a greater concern of sales executives, it has a significant role in lead generation and conversion.

44% of companies think they are ineffective at managing the sales pipeline. Though it helps you to get proper sales forecast, accurate ideas about the status of the deal, visibly distinguish between hot, cold and warm prospect, and bestow a clear vision about your business.

Consequences

Ignoring sales pipeline can directly effect on your ROI. Proper sales pipeline management helps in understanding the quality of leads. Sales reps tend to lose sight of the opportunities they should be pursuing when they waste so much time chasing poor deals.

When your vision is clouded by poor leads, you’ll spend 90% of your time filtering through bad deals to try and find the ones to coach on.

Solution

A technical problem should always have a technical solution. Only a proper sales pipeline management tool can help you differentiate between poor and good quality leads.

Your CRM dashboard is the best place where you can find every information about your prospects, the position of your lead in the sales pipeline. This gives you valuable insight into what to do to make the conversion faster.

CRM Dashboard

Conclusion

What works for some salespeople, may not work for you…It is critical to have flexibility and versatility to try-out new approaches and strategies.

As you can see these three common mistakes are easily avoidable with your sales CRM software. You do not need to install different apps or adopt difficult techniques to restrict yourself from damaging your sales opportunities. All you need to utilize your sales management system at its full.

Free CRM Trail Banner

Leave a Comment

BOOK A DEMO

Can't read this? click here to refresh.