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"My sales team could be so efficient if..."
"I could be making more calls and having more conversations each day, but..."
Either of those sound familiar? I’m guessing you could easily end each sentence with the issues you and your B2B sales team face on a day-to-day basis. Read on to learn about the top roadblocks in B2B sales and what you can do to make them a thing of the past. Soon, you’ll find yourself saying:
"My sales team is so efficient."
"I can’t believe the number of conversations I had today."
The B2B Sales Goal
Is there a magic number for how many sales calls and conversations a B2B sales rep should have in a day? The number can obviously vary based on your industry, product, and database. But SalesBuzz offers the following as the ideal:
“If you want to make or even break your sales goals, 60 sales calls per day (including callbacks from prospects) and or 3 hours of talk time (to prospects, not your mom) has been the best winning formula I’ve found to help me outsell my co-workers and outwork my competition.”
What is sales engagement? Read this blog.
How’s your sales team doing against those metrics? Are they surpassing them? Barely breaking even? Or missing the mark?
Our Director of Sales, Joe Cronin, sat down with Dan Gottlieb, Director Analyst in the Gartner for Sales Practice at TOPO, which is now Gartner for a webinar on “How to Build a Modern Sales Machine.” During that webinar, the two discussed B2B sales engagement, including how to define an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), why prioritization is so important, and the top B2B sales roadblocks.
11 Top Roadblocks to B2B Sales
During the Koncert and TOPO is now Gartner webinar, Gottlieb shared research about the 11 top roadblocks he saw in 2020 for hitting B2B sales quotas. The top three, which received the highest percentages, are in a sales team’s control and are what should be focused on, but we’ve listed them all here:
- Too many non-sales activities
- Not enough inbound leads
- Lack of training
- Misalignment on qualification definition
- Lack of customer/account data
- Poor sales rep or territory assignment
- Lack of content and collateral
- Poor brand awareness
- Competitive marketplace
- Product or solution
- Insufficient sales dev technology and tools
Non-Sales Activities Defined
What are the non-sales activities that make up the top B2B sales quote roadblock? Gottlieb defines non-sales activities as manual data management work; internal meetings; and time spent replying to Slack or on social media.
Get Past the B2B Sales Roadblocks
So, you know what the roadblocks are to meeting B2B sales quotas. Now how can you help your sales team overcome them?
- Time management training. Help sales reps focus more on work-related tasks versus social media while they’re at work. Although they shouldn’t avoid LinkedIn as that is the B2B sales rep’s playground for finding new prospects and promoting your company’s offerings through comments and posts.
- Prioritization. Help sales reps figure out who to reach out to and then organize the data to use when reaching out to those people. As Gottlieb said in the webinar, “this is what makes prospecting so hard right. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it is because we make it hard to identify accounts, we make it hard to source the data, and we make it hard to put it in the right engagement touch pattern.”
- Accurate data. Is your database full of old email addresses and phone numbers? If so, your sales reps don’t stand a chance of having a good connect rate. Clean up your database for reps to use in building a good list and improve their dial to connect rate.
- Integrate marketing and sales. When the two departments work together, marketing has respect for what it takes to sell to different lead sources, which leads to stronger aligned marketing and the conversion expectations for varying lead sources.
- Choose the right technology. Your B2B sales technology should help your sales team increase their productivity every day with multi-channel communication (in the form of a dialer or dialers and a cadence like Koncert Cadence), personalization (data intelligence), and relevance (getting to the right people with the right message at the right time, like our beta product, Koncert Coverage).
Prospecting really doesn’t have to be so hard. Reach out to us here at Koncert today to learn more about our entire multi-channel suite of B2B sales engagement software, including our human power dialer, Agent-Assisted Dialer. Simply click here or give us a call at 800-955-5040.