5 Factors Affecting your Sales Performance

57% of salespeople are expected to miss their quota in 2021, which is a real challenge for organisations looking to increase their sales and revenues.

17:10 06 August 2021

According to Salesforce, 57% of salespeople are expected to miss their quota in 2021. And this is becoming a real challenge for organizations looking to increase their sales and revenues.

 

Constantly facing failures in achieving goals is a serious demotivating factor for all employees of the company. If you think you've done everything to solve this problem, but admit that you might have missed something, then check out these 5 important factors that affect your sales team performance!

 

Slow-paced tech evolution of the company

Invest in modern technological solutions such as business process automation or automated order booking, electronic payment services, or an electronic inventory management system; this will help you to create a good market base and increase your sales!

 

Let’s take a situation where your salespeople have to waste a lot of time switching between applications (for instance, between CRM and Inbox) as an example: imagine that they could devote this time to selling! If you use Salesforce, then you should check out the Salesforce Inbox app that gives your response seamless experience in using CRM, email, and calendar together and allows them to spend less time on routine tasks and devote it to customers, and sell smarter right from their inbox!

 

Of course, Salesforce Inbox has its shortcomings, which you probably encountered while working with the application. And if you are looking for an “advanced version” of this app, then you should check out Revenue Inbox. It’s a powerful enterprise-class yet convenient and easy-to-use tool that integrates your Outlook and/or Gmail with Salesforce, helps you gather useful insights on every email, and allows you to customize what Salesforce objects or fields you want to see.

 

Here are a few things that Revenue Inbox can do that Salesforce Inbox can’t:

 

• automatic data capture according to your needs, taking into account your personal preferences, customizations, blacklists, and Salesforce rules.
• best-in-class calendar synchronization that flawlessly works with Salesforce: share your availability, integrate your booking schedule, and save your appointments to Salesforce.
• customize the sidebar to your liking to get the crucial insights on every Gmail/Outlook email, view and update Salesforce data (views, fields, and objects, along with the custom ones) right from your inbox, simplify the creation of records with data prefill and link custom objects with your Salesforce records.
• enjoy great deployment flexibility and excellent customer service!

 

All these features bring huge benefits to your business, and this is not surprising: after all: Revenue Inbox is an innovative product offered by the Revenue Grid guided selling platform, that provides a number of features (Pipeline Visibility, Sales Forecasting, Sales Coaching, Deal Guidance and more) that work in effective tandem with many modern Salesforce products or successfully replaces them, helping you to take your business to the next level!

 

Undefined marketing strategy

The company's marketing strategy directly (and significantly!) affects its sales. Everything from the wrong target audience to the wrong pricing can ruin all your sales performance efforts. Of course, you should never forget that the qualifications and experience of the marketing team are of no less importance.

 

Conversely, if you manage to create well-thought-out and well-defined marketing strategies for product promotion ideas, use the right sales enablement platforms and constantly monitor market trends, this will help you quickly increase your sales volumes!

 

Marketing and sales are not aligned

All departments of the company are like the vital organs of a single organism; break the connection between them and the whole organism will die.

 

But, in the context of increasing sales performance, you should pay special attention to the relationship between Marketing and Sales, because the latter directly depends on the efforts and strategies of the former!

 

These departments need to be collaborating every step of the way: the right marketing strategy, aimed at reaching monthly targets along with the correct lead qualification can go a long way toward driving sales.

 

Prospecting challenges

In the face of the pandemic, companies have lost many ways like traveling, trade shows, conferences, and real-time meetings to directly introduce themselves to potential customers. This deprived salespeople of the opportunity to communicate directly with customers and, as a result, could not but lead to sales performance gaps.

 

In addition to working on your call lists, sending personalized emails, asking for referrals, building a solid social media presence, you should use modern prospecting tools to help you do all of the above-mentioned more efficiently and do even more things to grow your leads.

 

Inefficient Customer Care Service

Before contacting your sales team, potential customers can get in touch with other departments in the company — for example, its customer support. You should bear in mind that the lifetime value of those customers, who were referred to your organization and who had a positive experience is 15-25% higher than that of non-referred customers. And the mentioned positive experience depends completely on your customer care service.

 

But not all team members have the skills required to make a customer happy. And if your sales reps report that potential customers are complaining that their problems have not been properly addressed, then you are in trouble with customer service. 

 

Contact your customer experience colleagues and ask them to sort out the problem, otherwise, you will continue to miss out on potential sales opportunities among your existing customers and, therefore, will not be able to hit your sales quotas.