The business world is full of ups and downs. Every single business experiences challenges that either make it stronger or break it altogether. Speaking of breaking it, having problems with sales can be exceptionally catastrophic. This can range from alarmingly low conversion from the sales funnel to losing a client per se.
Many factors may cause this. It can be from stringent competition, customer relationships, or contact and salespeople relationships.
Fortunately, contact management applications like Shared Contacts for Gmail® can help your business. This article discusses common sales mistakes and how contact management solves them.
Lead Generation
Problem: Finding Good Leads
Most of the lead’s information is generated through automatic systems. Sadly, only 40% of salespeople get value from lead scoring. This can be due to the lack of data input, demanding scoring criteria, or both.
Solution: Improve Quality of Contacts
Salespeople must be diligent in adding information regarding their leads and prospects. Ensure to add the company, job title, and even social interests if available.
Then, sort your contacts according to their common traits and create contact groups (labels) for them. This will help you personalize your marketing message to each group.
Customer Insight
Problem: Lack of In-Depth Understanding
Selling is much easier when you comprehend your prospect’s wants and needs. Prospects expect that you already understand their situation, especially during product demos. Hence, when they ask questions, you must have an on-hand solution to offer them. Failing to do so leads to your prospect’s dissuasion.
Solution: Consolidate Data Regarding the Prospects
Some problems with sales are easy to rectify. In this case, Shared Contacts for Gmail® offers notes to be written as an additional field regarding the contact. Everyone who had interacted with the lead can write non-contact information details like “she likes to talk about her cats”, etc.
Furthermore, Shared Contacts for Gmail® also allows you to tag your teammates in the comments. This feature aids team collaboration.
Finding the Decision Maker
Problem: Right Company, Wrong People
You may have reached out to the right person. Still, it might be a futile attempt to close the sales if you are talking with the wrong person. You are wasting your time speaking to the young engineer when it’s his supervisor who writes the purchase order requests. Your emails can simply be disregarded if you send them directly to the CFO.
Solution: Eagerly Probe Who Calls the Shots
It may take time to investigate. However, it’s way better than wasting time pitching sales to someone who doesn’t have a say in purchasing. That is even if he is enthusiastic about your product or service.
Tracing the target organization’s org chart can be a good start. Be attentive to the ‘job title’ field of contacts. You can also maximize the custom field on Google Contacts. Set it as a parameter to determine if one should do hard or soft sales toward this lead.
Customer Database
Problem: Contact Database Management
If you don’t have a CRM, chances are your client database is on a spreadsheet. This means the constant copy/paste for the marketing from the file generated by the sales. If you do have a CRM, is the $12 per seat per month being fully utilized or just a small fraction of it? Also, having a CRM doesn’t always mean you’ll no longer have problems with sales.
Solution: Sharing of Contacts Among Team
You don’t need a CRM if you just want to ditch the spreadsheet. Shared Contacts for Gmail® allows contact sharing, something that Google Contacts does not offer. Hence, the contact numbers for potential customers are entered only once. You can just change the tags once he progresses into the sales funnel. When the marketing and sales teams share the database, less paperwork for both. They would also have more time to do their actual job.
If you already have a CRM but you use it only for sharing the customer database, you might want to look at a hybrid solution. Shared Contacts for Gmail® allows you to access your CRM contact database for only 10% of the price. No need to pay for training costs, especially for new employees who don’t need CRM’s data analysis and sales forecasting features. Moreover, make sure the parameters on lead generation are fully optimized.
