Sales teams have a lot to juggle on top of closing deals. There’s not much worse than losing a deal because your salespeople were busy digging through disorganized files, manually consolidating data, and struggling to follow up with leads. These are the sales nightmares that we will be referring to. When it comes to nurturing leads, time is of the essence, and wasting time (and brain cells) stressing over these fears can set you back precious work days.
We had previously shared a post on how to avoid marketing nightmares and now we’re bringing you some solutions to your dreaded sales nightmares. While there’s no surefire way to ensure a client will go through with a sale, automation can help you meet demands, close deals, and turn your worst sales nightmares into sweet dreams.
When ghosting goes beyond the festivities
Consistency is the key to lead enrichment. That’s why ghosting is one of the most persistent sales nightmares teams find themselves in.
Ghosting can go both ways. Sales teams, often burdened with manual administrative tasks, can suddenly lose contact with the same prospects they worked so hard to find. Lack of bandwidth can turn into unreliable or inconsistent response times, which can feel a lot like being ghosted from the prospect’s side of things.
In turn, those lucrative leads may start looking elsewhere for what they need. In fact, 30-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first.
When there’s as high as a 50% chance you could lose a valuable lead because of oversight and lack of communication, response time is crucial.
Closing that sale requires consistent follow-up, and ghosting happens way too often. It takes an average of 8 cold call attempts to reach a prospect and only 27% of leads are contacted at all. The average lead response time is 47 hours. Sales teams that follow up within one hour are 7 times more likely to qualify the lead. It's easy to see how having a streamlined lead nurturing process can benefit your business.
Turning this nightmare into a sweet dream doesn’t have to be difficult. Lead Management Automation can help teams capture leads from across multiple sources, upload, and update spreadsheet data, and easily find and merge prospects between records. Automating sales processes like deduplication, lead enrichment, and data management can ensure you don’t ghost a client, and regular communication will keep you top of mind when clients are evaluating different options.
The days of ghosting great leads may be over. Automating sales processes help keep you connected with prospects and those that connect you with new ones.
Data entry, sorting, and classification, oh my!
Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest nightmares for many Sales teams is the valuable time lost to repetitive admin tasks. It’s estimated that salespeople spend 21% of their time on tasks like entering, sorting, and classifying leads in spreadsheets.
While these tasks need to be completed to keep things running smoothly, reducing one fifth of the Sales team’s bandwidth is a costly trade off.
How costly? The customer acquisition cost is estimated to have increased by nearly 50% in the past 5 years. That makes scaling your sales and lead enrichment processes is not only important for growth but crucial to future success.
Thankfully, this sales nightmare can easily become a thing of the past.
Bridge the gap in your existing lead enrichment strategy with Lead Enrichment Wrkflows. With this Wrkflow, upgrade your sales processes by integrating CRM platforms with their most used applications. Deals can be managed quickly and consistently across platforms with Wrk. It can be used with Excel, Salesforce, or one of its many integrations.
Sales nightmares can make your work day extra stressful.
This automated Wrkflow lets teams rest assured that key contact data points are continuously updated, demographic data and insights are filled in reliably, and new leads are automatically uploaded to a CRM. By automating the lead enrichment process, salespeople are able to seamlessly receive the information they need to start off on the right foot.
On top of that, Sales teams can redirect their attention from avoiding pesky data entry errors and toward data-driven decision-making to maximize their sales. Automating sales admin tasks can immediately free up time for salespeople, so they can dedicate time to analyzing the data they have and strategically pursue leads that are likely to convert to sales.
Now, time that was tied up handling common sales challenges like bad data and impersonal communication can be reallocated to those that truly require a human touch.
Lost in translation
Even once you gear up your salespeople and they are ready to nurture valuable leads, it's still possible to lose their progress. This leads to redundant sales efforts, failed marketing attempts, and missing the hand-off to Customer Success teams. Inefficiency at any point in the sales management process can lead to missed goals.
That’s why reliable interconnectivity between Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success teams is integral to retaining and nurturing prospects well into the future. It’s important to ensure your teams don’t work in silos.
Yet, chronic misalignment and siloed teams remain an obstacle for many businesses.
Sales teams must be aware of what Marketing teams are working on. They can share relevant content with prospects. Marketing teams need to be aware of what prospects may be interested in so they can target them appropriately. Similarly, Sales teams need to ensure that the hand-off of clients to their Customer Success team is smooth. Without a consistent flow of information between each team, you can lose your sales efforts in the mix.
You can avoid this sales nightmare by ensuring all of your data stays in one place. This is so your teams can work efficiently to reach their sales goals. Automating sales makes it possible to keep each team closely aligned and in pursuit of higher-level goals.
Dead deals
So you get an email from a prospect with whom you've been working. But a last-minute admin task suddenly falls on your plate, and it’s Friday before you hit reply. By the time you’re back on Monday, you discover they’ve moved on to another company.
That leads us to one of the biggest sales nightmares: Deals left dead in the water.
The probability of selling to current customers is 14 times higher than selling to new customers. The first sale can significantly impact revenue for years to come. Automated deal management helps increase the odds of closing deals by providing a more formalized sales process.
There’s no time to lose and a Deal Management Wrkflow can help Sales teams keep up with the demand. Reach out to leads automatically after a certain amount of time to keep the deal alive. You can also have personalized emails sent to prospects to invite them to follow-up calls or meetings. Once contacted, you can update your team’s CRM automatically. This guarantees that your Sales team isn't worried about the status of a given lead.
Automating your deal management process keeps things running smoothly from start to finish, so lucrative deals aren’t left dead in the water.
Say goodbye to sales nightmares with automation
You can automate your current sales steps to meet new demands. Give your teams the tools they need to hit revenue targets without the tedious paperwork getting in the way. And turn those pesky sales nightmares into sweet dreams by freeing up everyone's time. Valuable time that should be used for closing more
Want to know more about how Wrk can help you? Read more about sales automation 101!
