After years of working with companies to increase business growth and revenue, we’ve discovered the 3 most common sales growth pains and how to fix them.
Every business experiences growing pains. Every growing business trying to increase revenue is probably suffering from one or a combination of these problems. Read on to understand the problems your company might be facing and the solutions to encourage growth.
Trying to Increase Business Growth? Tackle These 3 Problems First
- The quality and amount of leads: Everyone thinks they need more and better quality leads. But too often reps churn and burn previous leads - just because they want to talk to someone and remember to follow up, does not mean the prospect does! While you might need more and better quality leads to grow your revenue, only start paying for a lead generation service if you i) do not know who to target ii) do not have a good list of leads already. Otherwise, read on, investing your marketing and sales budget dollars in the right place can help fix everything.
- An undefined sales process: Sales reps quitting? Sales reps getting fired? Sales reps working too slowly? Or getting mixed results from your sales team? All signs point to an undefined sales process. The quickest way to fix this: Set out a clearly refined and defined sales process and test it on a quarterly basis. If you don’t have Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for how you sell, you don’t have much to offer your reps for them to be successful.
- Customer retention: One of the fastest ways to grow your revenue is to assess and lengthen your customer lifetime value (CLV). If your CLV is low, consider your customer onboarding process, your customer service process, and / or your renewal process. To do all of these things, reporting and automation will be key to help you scale. If that does not make sense to you off the bat, read on.
Be ready with systems that delight people in the first 100 days.
How Do These Revenue Problems Impact New and Established Businesses?
After years of working with business and honing our own growth skills, we’ve found that new businesses are most impacted by:
- Marketing - if quality leads are your problem here’s where you need to start. You need marketing messaging that meets your prospect where they are - in their headspace - to create awareness and get net new leads; marketing automation funnels help you work smarter not harder.
- Sales process - build good habits from the start; sales automation systems that use sales enablement tools allow your team to scale efficiently, without losing sales reps every 90 days.
- CLV/Retention - imagine if you kept every customer you ever earned: how much faster would you grow? Build efficient systems now to keep your customers long term.
Established businesses experience these same problems, but usually in reverse.
- Customer retention - keeping existing customers and continuing to sell to them is the low hanging fruit that must be continually picked.
- An unclear sales process - in this situation you probably have leads but your sales team needs to work on close rates; creating efficient processes with testing built into them will do this for sales reps.
- Marketing that’s not attracting the right leads - without a solid strategy for more and better leads, within 90 days your sales team’s pipeline will run dry (if you’re wondering how to keep your pipeline full, click on the button below).
Invest Your Marketing Dollars for Company Growth
New or established, marketing is either the first or last of the barriers between you and your ability to increase business growth. Download this e-book to learn how to stop the bleed on revenue staff and customer retention AND the best way to invest your marketing budget to continue to grow your business.
