19 Reasons Why Your Sales Team Is Failing
Sales is one of the most integral departments in an organization. However, if your sales team fails, your organization could be in serious trouble. If this is the case, you must figure out what has led to this drop in performance and how you can stop it.
One effective way to combat sales team failures is through behavioral gamification. But before you can begin to implement gamification strategies, you need to figure out why your sales team is failing. Here are 19 reasons why this may be happening.
1. They Lack People-Skills
Sales is a very social job. To be successful in sales, you have to adopt the right skills and connect with people on their level. However, not everyone is born with these skills, and it may be difficult for them to adopt this attitude from the get-go. The good news is that you can use simple gamification tools to instill people skills into the sales team through fun training and assessments.
2. They Do Not Have Enough Knowledge About The Product Or Company
To sell a product or service, the sales team must be well aware of all the nitty-gritty details about both the product and the company. If your sales team is unsure about the product themselves, this doubt and lack of confidence translate into their sales pitch. This leads to unsatisfied customers who will not purchase. However, you can solve this issue by using quizzes, flashcards, and other gamification tools to ensure your team has the necessary knowledge for the job.
3. They Lack Technological Expertise
In this day and age, technology can be used as a significant resource to attract potential clients and improve sales. There are numerous advantages to digitalizing sales as much as possible. However, if the sales team lacks the necessary skills, they will be unable to use technology to their advantage. You can change this by using sales gamification to slowly introduce technology to the group.
4. They Lack Motivation
One of the biggest reasons for declining sales is the lack of motivation in the sales team. You can slowly but surely build drive and encouragement in your sales team by giving incentives and rewards through gamification. Leaderboards and appropriate rewards will help the team strive towards meeting targets.
5. Their Tasks Are Not Communicated Properly
The sales team and leadership need to be on the same page. If there is a lack of communication from sales heads or a lack of understanding on the team’s end, it would be difficult to meet targets. Using sales gamification, you can break down complex tasks into smaller assignments that are easy to understand.
6. They Do Not Learn From Their Mistakes
An essential feature to improve performance no matter what field you’re in is reviewing your work and learning from mistakes. Unfortunately, most team members find examining their work and meeting meetings tedious and often skip the learning part by skimming through work. You can improve this by using gamification tools to streamline this task. Sales gamification can help make reviewing work fun and short.
7. There Is No Forecasting
Forecasting is an essential tool to measure current performance and use it to predict future goals. If there is no forecasting, team members often become complacent with their performance without realizing its effect on the company. However, forecasting can be introduced through gamification and used to make appropriate improvements to performance and goals.
8. They Lack Communication Skills
If you’re in the sales department, then communication skills are vital. Without appropriate communication skills, you will not convince customers to buy your product or services. Although not everyone is born with the right communication skills, they can easily be taught. You can use gamification to teach sales personnel effective communication skills through fun training programs.
9. Customer Feedback Is Not Taken Into Account
Customer feedback is of utmost importance when it comes to sales. If customer feedback is not taken into account, chances of improvements are slim. However, sales team members often do not take feedback from clients because they either forget or it seems too tedious of a task. By incentivizing customer feedback, sales personnel will be more motivated to take it, generating accurate data related to the product and sales.
10. Insufficient Training
One of the main reasons for a decline in sales is insufficient training during onboarding. When team members have not trained appropriately, they will not perform to the best of their abilities. By standardizing the training process and using gamification to simplify the tasks, you can significantly improve the training process.
11. Insufficient Management
A team is only as good as its leaders. If the higher management does not provide adequate guidance and sales heads cannot manage the team, the team’s performance will be less than satisfactory. To improve this, there can be a leaderboard through sales gamification, which helps managers monitor their team’s progress and intervene where necessary.
12. No Drive To Compete
Healthy competition is a vital driving force towards meeting targets. If there is not enough competition, team members tend to become lax, and work quality suffers. You can introduce an element of competition in your team through sales gamification in the form of leaderboards and tasks with rewards.
13. Lacking Team Spirit
If the sales team lacks cohesiveness, chances are they will not be able to perform well as a team either. Teams grow by sharing information, tips, essential tricks of the trade and supporting each other during stressful times. This quality can be taught by setting teambuilding tasks through gamification and setting shared rewards.
14. Priorities Are Not In Order
It is crucial to prioritize your leads during sales. Some leads may not turn into successful sales, whereas others may. Although it is vital to give your best in sales, it is also essential to direct most of your energy into leads that may result in sales. Unfortunately, sales teams often do not realize this and lose potentially good leads in a bid to please everyone. Gamification can introduce features to help rank and distinguish sales leads for team members to focus more on to prevent this from occurring.
15. Sales Team Does Not Have The Right Behavior Towards Their Work
Having the right attitude towards work and incorporating positive work traits that can help you progress faster is the key to success in sales. However, members often forego following the right behaviors to meet sales targets quickly. This can be stopped if behavior gamification incorporates an appropriate work attitude into the team.
16. Sales Team Does Not Understand Consumer Behavior
Consumer behavior is an integral part of sales. If a sales team is not familiar with consumer behavior, they will be unable to decode what their customers are looking for and sell their product to the right market. This can be addressed by using assignments and gamified questionnaires to teach the sales team’s core values of consumer behavior.
17. The Sales Team Does Not Do Pipeline Tasks
Pipeline tasks such as calling customers, noting down critical details, closing deals, reviewing meetings are integral for efficient and effective sales. However, because of constant repetition and tediousness of the tasks, most sales members tend to skip these. This could lead to inefficiencies in sales. However, you can prevent this by gamification of such tasks and converting them into fun challenges with rewards.
18. Incentives Are Not Appealing
For a team to be driven and engaged, it must have the right motivation. Although you can introduce motivating factors in the form of incentives through gamification, they must be appealing to the team to be effective. For example, some members may prefer a raise whereas others would like some time off, so use appropriate incentives.
19. Not Using The Right Metrics
Most organizations use sales targets are their main metrics and fail to get an accurate picture of their company’s progress and employees’ attitudes. First and foremost, an organization needs to realize what drives sales. Is it phone calls? In-person visits? Or emails? Once these metrics are identified, you can set creative challenges for the team through gamification.
Conclusion
If you feel that your organization’s sales team is failing, you must first look into why this could be happening, and secondly, how you can stop this from happening in the future. There can be numerous reasons why your organization’s sales team fails, and we’ve mentioned most of them in this article.
However, one efficient way to improve your sales team’s performance is through behavioral gamification. You can use gamification to change your sales team’s behaviors, which will lead to modified activities and improved outcomes.
References:
8 Crucial Reasons Your Sales Team Is Failing
5 Reasons Why Your Sales Team Might Be Failing (and How to Help Them Succeed)
Sales Gamification: The Basics and Implementing it Successfully
Put those insights into practice.
Set your team up for success by improving their performance through gamification.
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