The Biggest Barriers to Growing Sales
Question: How do you achieve consistently excellent sales performance?
Answer: Learn here the top 5 best practices of high-performing sales organisations – and ensure you avoid the critical mistakes that most underperforming sales teams fall into.
How? Based on researching over 2,600 sales organisations of all types in the UK and USA, this article reveals some startling discoveries about the very few *star* organisations of the sales world who consistently achieved growth in sales year on year – and in the face of ferocious competition.
We work with many organisations yearly on strategy, marketing and sales performance projects. This often allows us to spot themes and issues common to similar businesses. Of particular concern to many of our clients is the sales performance issue.
In addition to the hundreds of businesses we’ve worked with first-hand, a little while ago, we got involved in a major study to identify further the critical differences between consistently high-performing sales organisations and less successful and underperforming ones.
The research to date has included over 2,700 organisations (we’re still adding to this total) and uncovered five distinct issues familiar to the vast majority of sales operations that struggled to achieve targets and perform consistently. On the other hand, these were the very issues the small minority of top performers had managed to overcome:
Here’s a summary of the five most critical barriers to sales performance identified in the research;
Barrier No.1: The Sales Process
A poorly defined sales process that isn’t used by frontline sales teams. This wastes valuable selling time and almost always leads to missing tremendous sales opportunities.
Barrier No.2: Lack of fundamental sales skills
Failing to focus on and develop essential sales skills leads to below-average performance and, consequently below-average sales results.
Barrier No.3: The balancing act
I am not having a simple system to focus sales activities between prospecting, lead generation, converting and management.
Barrier No.4: If you think you’ll lose…
Allowing negative perceptions of opportunity and the economic climate to constrain salespeople’s performance which, in turn, severely limits sales revenues.
Barrier No.5: Super salespeople
Allowing, or even forcing, Sales Managers to become ‘super salespeople’ instead of training them to get the maximum performance out of their teams.
These five issues have a substantial negative impact on so many sales teams, but they can all be overcome with a little focus and some expert guidance. We’ll be expanding on each of these issues in more detail in future articles and providing practical advice onovercominge them.
However, if you’d like the fast track,, just get in touch,, and we’ll be happy to talk through them in more detail.