The Sales Rep Challenges and the Solutions

Sales is not what it used to be. And choosing the path of a sales career can offer you many benefits that you will not find in other fields. There are many benefits of choosing a sales career. The compensation is usually top notch, with many opportunities to earn more if you are great at your job. Having a career in sales gives you freedom in other ways as well. Basically, I am interested in sales because I have great interpersonal skills and I’m passionate about providing excellent customer service.

However, with these advantages come challenges in a sales role. Climbing to the top and being a successful sales rep is not easy. To succeed, you must learn to overcome the biggest challenges in a sales role, like the ones described below.

When faced with a challenge, look for a way, not a way out – David Weatherford

Competing with Competitors

The market has turned into a battlefield where businesses are happening to show case them as the best among their competitors. They are following the strategies such as giving many freebies like discounts and lowering the prices in order to attract the customers.

Most of the sales reps get to hear statements like “The X competitor is offering a product at a much lower price” or Y competitor is giving 4 months free subscription to their service. This is a common challenge being faced by most companies.

Solutions

• The SDR needs to analyze the strength and weakness of its competitors
• We need to find out how we are better than our competitors and explain it to your potential customers
• The company must share some case studies and testimonials of satisfied customers who chose you over the competitors

Lack of Time

Sales reps will have a greater number of deals registered under the pipeline they are working. They need to remember all the information and the current status of the leads with whom they are working, but it’s not that easy to remember all the data since they will be working with many leads on daily basis. If things aren’t organized more time is wasted in searching for information. Sales reps do not get enough time to focus on strategizing and selling.

Solutions

• Choose one platform to maintain all your customer data instead of using diaries and notes, or make a note in the tool where you are dealing the leads if that has an option
• Email templates are the standard forms that would reduce the monotonous email typing work. Say for example if you have a standard format to know about the environments details of the prospect to share the pricing. This is one simple scenario I can highlight now, but in the typical scenario, there might be many according to the business nature.

Getting response from the prospect

Getting a response from the prospect cannot be made that simple, after a few initial interactions, most of the prospects will stop responding though the tool fulfills their requirements. Several sales reps get demotivated by this silence. In those cases, they will stop having follow-ups with them very often and will focus on other deals to achieve their sales target.

Solutions

• Use multiple phone numbers to reach out to your customers as it has high opportunities to get them connected.
• Identify the customer’s pain points and address how your product fills their gap with your product by sharing documentation, whitepapers.
• Try to connect with somebody else from the prospect’s company
• Connect with the prospect at different hours
• Use different channels apart from calls and emails to connect with your prospects like text messages and social media sites

Inability to handle prospect’s questions

Most sales reps will face this situation where they will be not sure about the answers for the questions raised up by the customers where it will create a poor idea. In those cases it’s extremely important for a sales rep to know the essential concepts about the product which helps them to not rely on the other departments so then they can answer the questions confidently.

Solution

• Practice and prepare with a good response
• Don’t get emotionally hijacked, work on your EQ (Emotional Intelligence) skills
• Ask your peers to conduct a mock call session for preparing you to handle those cases
• Know the product thoroughly from business point of view
• Make a list of questions that you often get and prepare for it

Sales Training

Lack of training is the primary cause of low sales productivity. Most of the rep’s face trouble meeting their sales goals. They need to spend a good deal of time in order to train themselves.

Solution

• Find the areas where training is required and request management to invest in training
• Attend live webinars to learn from industry experts
• Ask the seniors to provide regular performance feedback

Aligning Sales and Marketing team to focus on valid prospects

Marketing departments often will provide a greater number of leads where they’re able to produce without taking a deeper look at the quality of those prospects. While generating a bunch of leads is a great thing but, it’s pointless if those prospects have no potential to become our customers.

Solutions

1. Get your sales and marketing teams to work together on the front end to create more customers on the back end
2. Have a conversation once in a week time to cross check the status of the prospects you are receiving