Drew | Business Insights

Problems in the commercial area that are causing you to lose sales

Written by Drew's editorial team | Jul 4, 2022 3:56:00 PM

Regardless of what type of industry your company is in or what its size is, you will face new challenges every day that are unique to your company and your customers. What we're going to tell you is going to be alarming, but...many companies share common problems, such as, who called to request your product or service, who was answered, where is the information of this or that customer. If any of this sounds familiar to you, we recommend you keep reading.

The main thing is to understand that you should not focus on how qualified and trained your salespeople are or buy all the books that teach you about how to increase your profits, you should not even focus on how much variety of products you are offering to your customers; you know why? Because in the commercial area, there are problems that many times have nothing to do with the customer or the employees, but which undoubtedly affect the sales of the business.

We could assure you that selling is the most important activity for most companies and the reason for being so sure of this is very simple: without them it would be impossible to exist, create jobs and, of course, obtain profits.

If you got this far, it means that your sales team is not managing to increase your profits significantly and despite your best efforts, they continue to be stuck. These are some of the problems you may be having that are preventing you from generating more sales:

  • Lack of systems integration: One of the most common problems faced by commercial teams, especially those that do not have tools that provide this possibility, is the lack of integration of their systems.

The fact that the systems of your commercial team are not connected, can prevent their increase.

<<< What should I take into account when choosing a technological tool? >>>

  • Lack of communication between the different areas: It often happens that companies have made a sale and do not have stock or service capacity to attend to it. This -and many other drawbacks- is due to a lack of communication between departments and can also be one of the reasons why sales do not increase.

Yes, sellers often think that their increase depends solely on them, but the reality is that this is the work of the entire company in general. Therefore, all departments must collaborate and work with each other.

  • Manual processes: Manual processes are the number one enemy of a sales team and one of the main causes of stagnation at the sales level.

The fact that your commercial team maintains offline processes means that:

    • Your commercial team does not have integrated and automated processes.
    • Your sellers do not have accurate information in real-time.
    • It is difficult to efficiently manage opportunities.
    • Sellers spend much of their time looking for contact information, manually preparing reports, entering information over and over again, etc.

Keep in mind that a key function of every commercial manager is to ensure that the sales time is reduced as much as possible, therefore you should ask yourself, how long do your salespeople sell? How long are they stuck in tasks that do not generate value?

  • Lack of information visibility: Information has become one of the most valuable resources for sellers, when the data is reliable and timely it can be used in favor of the company to increase sales.

When a sales team is not able to obtain a complete view of its customers' information, it is very difficult for them to devise strategies that allow them to increase their sales rates, keep track of the entire sales process, detect failures and take action on time.

  • Rigid systems: Another of the big problems in the commercial area that prevents increasing sales is having systems installed that do not adapt to your needs. It is common to observe how some companies invest a lot of money and time in installing solutions that are not even capable of operating correctly in the business, much less helping them increase their profit margins.

 

Have you felt identified with several of the previous items? If your answer is "YES", it means that it is time to start a campaign to improve the internal processes of your commercial area and maximize the effectiveness of your sales efforts.