Optimizing your sales team is key to company-wide success. However, even the highest-performing sales teams encounter challenges when developing buyer relationships. Successfully overcoming sales challenges is what sets a company that is just drifting along apart from a successful one.
Luckily, many of these problems have straightforward solutions.
Let’s discuss how your company can avoid these crippling issues, and optimize your sales team through hiring remote appointment setters.
Not Enough Time Spent Selling
According to SalesLoft, sales reps spend 64.3% of their time on non-selling activities. That’s a majority of company time- for which you’re paying them- spent on not making you more money. Let that sink in for a minute. What if a cab driver only drove on duty a third of the time? What if a graphic designer only produced work for 13 hours of every workweek? These shouldn’t be the figures your company is working with.
Modern telecommunications tools allow salespeople to work more effectively than ever. All of that time your sales team is spending on not effectively selling can be outsourced to remote appointment-setters. Remote appointment setters function as the middleman to cut out all of that time your in-house sales team is spending on cold-calling and looking for leads, so that they spend the maximum amount of time on selling.
Consider food delivery apps such as Grubhub or Postmates. You’re hungry and looking for restaurant delivery and go on Grubhub. The app already has categories of food sorted for you; Italian, Chinese, Burgers. As you swipe through, the app is essentially directing people who want the type of food each restaurant offers to the restaurant. They even take care of the delivery. All the restaurant has to do is sell, without wasting any time.
Selling To Unqualified Leads (the Wrong People)
Why waste time barking up the wrong tree? Your sales reps can make plenty of calls and send lots of great emails, but if they’re targeting the wrong prospects, they won’t be able to close the deal. Appointment setters make sure your salespeople are always hitting the mark, as they qualify leads and essentially act as a filter to give only the most qualified leads to their closers. This means your sales team will be able to focus on closing, rather than waste time qualifying their leads. The key to a solid sales process is formulating well-defined prospect criteria in order to efficiently qualify prospects. Without qualifying prospects, it is impossible to determine if the prospect even understands your original value proposition.
Not only do poorly qualified candidates waste company money and time, they also lower sales-team morale and can frustrate your employees. When your candidates have been qualified ahead of time, you can avoid demotivating your sales team. You can now see the importance of a defined sales process, which leads us to the next point:
Absence of a Defined Sales Process
One major, and unfortunately common, problem with many organizations is that they never take the time to define a consistent sales process and establish a common sales language. A sales process that is not properly defined will cause your sales team to improve their own methods, resulting in variation, confusion, and haphazard end points. This inconsistency will be noticed by customers, with severe results. If your team is out of sync and communicating different sales messages, it can degrade your brand and reduce your ability to predict revenue. Prior to hiring remotely, it is essential to streamline your sales process and keep everybody on the same page.
Failing To Align Marketing With Sales
Aligning different departments within your organization is crucial to good results, along with company morale. Marketing may be annoyed with sales for not following up on the leads they send them, while the sales team is frustrated that marketing is sending them unqualified leads. Look at these numbers:
● Companies who have strong sales and marketing alignment hit an average annual growth rate of 20%
● On average, the revenue of companies who don’t achieve sales and marketing alignment see a revenue decline of 4%
● Sales and marketing alignment can boost marketing revenue by 209%
● Companies see 36% higher customer retention and 38% higher sales win rates when sales and marketing teams are cohesive
Overpass is a marketplace where you can find remote appointment setters with relevant industry experience. Remote appointment setters assist in departmental alignment by making sure all the leads your sales and marketing department are processing are, in fact, the right ones.
The Overpass software makes it easy to hire, monitor, and pay appointment setters. All hires will work on the browser-based calling software at all times. This means there is full transparency. You can listen to calls to monitor quality, give feedback, and get key insights to help improve your campaign success. Think about the awkwardness saved at company Christmas parties!
Problems With Getting Leads
Just having tons of new leads isn’t always the right way to go. Any prospects your team hits needs to be a good fit for your products and services. One huge problem sales experts often see in potential clients is a lack of qualified leads to begin with. Before you take the next step of hiring remote workers to qualify your leads, make sure your company already has the flour that is the basis of the dough you bake with. You won’t get white bread from wheat flour.
You Can’t Reach Your Sales Prospects
You’ve identified your best buyers, perfected the outreach process, and have an unfailing sales process in place. But wait. You can't get your prospects on the phone. In this case, you should follow up, not give up. Overpass helps find freelance appointment setters to do the heavy lifting and line up appointments for your sales team to close. We create a reliable pipeline to ensure that bad timing doesn’t ruin any opportunities for your business.