Some Common Issues CEOs and Sales Chiefs report. If you recognise any of these problems
and would like to find out what others are doing to address them, call us on 01608 66 37 52

Sales Effectiveness

 getting sales people competent to make enterprise sales when they are more comfortable selling point solutions

 losing more and more of new business opportunities pitched for

 dead cert forecast sales going wrong at the last hurdle

 not knowing the real reasons you lost that deal or why you get so many stalled deals

 losing market share to competitors who have inferior offerings

 sales pipeline too thin to enable target achievement

 sales director getting overall sales forecast consistently wrong due to aggregating over–optimistic sales peoples’ forecasts

 products and services viewed by customers as commodities

 sales cycles getting longer and longer

 decision making process becoming harder to penetrate

 difficulty in getting to C executive level

 sales people uncomfortable selling at CXO level

 eating the food store; more and more of total business coming from a few key accounts

 existing customers neglected due to greater focus on winning new name business

 sales people wasting resources on prospects that are unlikely to close

 sales people lack confidence to make new calls

 sales people encountering ubiquitous voice mail – not sure whether to leave voice message or put phone down

 sales people doing a features/benefits dump on customer at first hint of interest

 best prospects stop returning calls

Negotiating Effectiveness

 some sales people are poor negotiators – get a worse deal than could have been negotiated

 often feel that they are outgunned by procurement people across the negotiating table

Sales Management

 sales managers uncertain about making the right decisions about hiring and deploying sales people

 promoting your best salesperson to sales manager ( losing best salesman and gaining a poor manager)

 sales managers have had little training for the job

 best salesperson promoted to sales manager instantly goes from great salesman to poor sales manager

 sales manager’s forecast always wrong

Training and Education

 thinking about sales training but not sure which course would work best for your team

 sales training in past did not have positive impact on sales

Product Training/Marketing

 concerned that main reason for poor results could be that value proposition and/or sales messaging are vague and unfocused

 poor lead conversion rate: marketing produces leads that sales people rate as poor

 looking to CRM system to solve your control problems

Partnering/Channels/VAR Effectiveness

 partnering/alliances not delivering results

 losing control/visibility of sales opportunities through resellers

 not finding the right partners/alliances

 partners sales and marketing not good enough to get traction

 most of channel business from one or two VARS