5 Reasons Your Sales Numbers Are Coming Up Short

As a sales leader, you're likely facing heavy pressures to significantly grow sales revenue. In these situations, avoid yelling at the scoreboard and help your managers avoid just telling their reps to "go out and sell more". The best sales leaders focus on defining what's working and what's not so they can quickly write the course. Here are four reasons why your sales team's numbers are coming up short and action steps to consider.

1. Sellers aren't attaching to big business pains

During your reps' sales process, it will be critical for them to articulate the correlation between their buyer’s biggest business pain and a solution that will address that specific pain. Without business pain, there is no business. Buyers who believe that their pain is clearly understood will be more willing to share critical information throughout the buying process and will work harder to understand and internally sell the solution being presented. Enable your reps to find and attach to big business pains, those that will drive urgency and funding. Here are resources you can use to determine how to move forward right now.

2. Limited access within the buyer’s organization

Getting higher and wider in a buyer's organization helps sellers create a business case that will be relevant to the economic buyer who controls the discretionary funding. Enabling salespeople to sell higher is a challenge no sales leader is immune to. When salespeople aren't selling high enough it's usually the result of being delegated down to who they sound like and/or they're unable to uncover and attach to the business problems that capture high-level attention ... and funding. Here are a few resources that share ways to counteract this problem within your sales organization:

3. Your solution is perceived as expensive

When reps focus on a laundry list of irrelevant product features during sales conversations, they create an impression that your solution is more than the buyer needs, and therefore, more expensive. Help them remember the value of the solution is in the eyes of the buyer. Here are a few resources to share with your reps and your managers to keep their conversations aligned to their buyer's specific needs:

4. The customer has difficulty differentiating between competitive offerings and defining the value they'll receive from your solution

If your numbers are behind this quarter, your sales team could be struggling with optimizing value and differentiation throughout the sales process. When customers can’t differentiate between multiple competitive offerings; they often assume that all of the solutions are similar in value. This perception reduces the decision to the lowest common denominator, price. Sellers who fail to introduce relevant differences and early in the sales cycle miss a fleeting opportunity to influence the buying criteria in their favor of your solution.

Ensure your sales team has the ability to uncover customer needs, articulate value, and differentiate solutions throughout the buying process. Enable your salespeople to execute these actions early and often in their sales conversations so they can justify a premium price. These resources share steps you can take:

Define the Fuel Your Sales Engine Need to Accelerate Growth

Sales execution challenges like these are often a result of misalignment. When organizations aren’t aligned around a common sales approach that clearly articulates and delivers their solution's value proposition, entire organizations fall victim to inefficient sales cycles, customer confusion, and brand dilution in the marketplace. Solving these challenges takes a holistic approach and company-wide buy in for the right transformation initiative. Here are the actions Segment's CRO used and how his approach helped Segment's sales organization drive a 150% increase in annual recurring revenue over a two-year period.