Do You Struggle To Manage Your Sales Team? Here’s What To Do

Hiring a salesperson or sales team is often the first recruitment decision that SMEs make, but sadly, a lot of small businesses struggle to manage their sales teams effectively. This usually isn’t due to a deficiency in the new hires or the business, but comes from a combination of structural, resource, and strategic factors that prevent the business from using their sales resources to their full potential. In this article, we’ll look at three of the main challenges faced by SMEs and what you can do about it:

Challenge One: Limited Time And Resources

A lack of time and resources often results in wasted time, missed sales opportunities, and impaired productivity.

To operate effectively, sales teams need the support infrastructure and technology to allow them to cultivate and close deals. Unfortunately, many SMEs lack the budget or time to set up a comprehensive CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system to help their salespeople track leads, access customer data, and forecast sales, forcing them to rely on manual methods such as spreadsheets, which are more inefficient and prone to error. Resource limitations can also lead to inadequate marketing-sales alignment. Without the time and budget available for a robust marketing strategy, lead generation can fall short, leaving your salespeople without sufficient sales qualified leads to pursue.

Solutions: Invest in an affordable CRM platform, such as HubSpot free CRM. A good CRM will give you lead tracking, automated data management, and analytical tools that will boost the efficiency and productivity of your sales team.

Challenge Two: Unclear (Or Non-Existent) Sales Processes

Many SMEs do not have a defined sales process in place and some don’t have one at all, which makes it difficult for salespeople and their managers to monitor performance and costs, or identify bottlenecks.

An unclear sales process is an issue because an undefined or poorly documented sales process makes it challenging for sales teams to deliver consistent results. For example, without clear information about sales funnel stages and the tasks associated with each stage, such as prospecting, qualifying leads, and closing deals etc, individual salespeople may not be clear about their responsibilities. Also, it’s only usually possible to improve a process if it is standardised and replicable. A repeatable framework empowers salespeople to identify issues so that they can improve their sales pitches, make their messages more compelling, better handle objections, and so on.

Solutions: The solution to a lack of clear processes is to define a sales pipeline, mapping out a straightforward sales funnel and making sure that everyone adheres to the same stages. Some SMEs also benefit from creating Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) or ‘playbooks’ that include standardised sales script templates for customer conversations and objection-response handling techniques.

Challenge Three: Overreliance On The Business Owner Or Senior Staff

A lopsided reliance on the business owner or other key individuals exposes SMEs to risk and prevents the development of a scalable sales structure, thereby impeding long-term growth.

Unfortunately, a lot of SMEs depend heavily on the business owner, senior directors, or high performing sales people to close the majority of their deals, which creates an unhealthy dynamic in which knowledge is concentrated in silos with no means of sharing these insights with the team. Deals can also be delayed because the key person is unavailable or overstretched. Sound familiar?

While the situation is understandable and usually develops organically from the early days of the company’s foundation, it does make your sales team vulnerable if a key individual resigns or underperforms for some reason. It also makes it difficult for you, as business owner, to step away from your sales spreadsheets and focus on other critical tasks (or take time off sick, or go on holiday, or retire!)

Solutions: if your sales process is overdependent on you or another colleague, the solution is to decentralise knowledge and responsibility as soon as possible. There are several ways to do this. Using a good sales CRM to log all client interactions, documentation, and sales information, for example, will help distribute knowledge instead of relying on face-to-face updates with individuals or the vagaries of memory. You could also consider a leadership development programme to equip junior and mid-level salespeople with the skills to take on larger roles in the future. This will help your business to grow and evolve and also give you the space to eventually step back from your own leadership responsibilities.

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