4 Inside Sales Director Challenges & How to Fix Them

Inside sales directors, what’s your biggest business challenge? Over the past six months here are the challenges put forward to us by inside sales directors in order of priority from one to four.

1) Lack of activity

2) Not converting into closes

3) Poor sales floor motivation

4) Ill-defined value proposition

These are the problems that we love to hear about at Natural Training.  Why?  Because we can fix all of them.  Let’s go through each one of those and talk about how you can solve them via some training and lead generation activity.

1.) Lack of Activity:

Inside sales teams are notorious for moving away from the activity which makes them great. Activity is defined as proactive, outbound approaches to strangers. Talking to strangers is still the number one way of generating a response and great telesales teams are aligned behind that message. So, in terms of fixing sales activity we’ve got to get in and put an importance back on phone calls. We’ve got to make sure that non-sales related activities take a back seat and that people know that if they’re not talking to a customer or looking at their CRM preparing to talk to a customer then they’re probably wasting their time.

**Read about our Simple Technique to Boost Your Sales Team’s Activity** 

2.) Not Converting into Closes:

Closing is one of the big problems that inside sales directors have. They need more closes along the course of the sale such as getting people along to webinars and WebExs and they need more closes of the sale, such as customers agreeing to take a booking form or to sign a contract. Now closing is usually symptomatic of what happens along the journey and the best thing to do is to listen to calls that represent each part, each milestone of the sale.

How is the initial interest set up with the prospect?  What is the next step?  How is the telesales or inside sales rep able to move that along?  What does the negotiation look like and does the inside sales rep perhaps erode revenue margin or authority by being uncertain?  When it comes to a close are there unnecessary discounts or last-minute pressures towards the end of the month?  All these things add up to an inside sales operation that may be lacking some of the ability to close.  It’s important to diagnose the problem areas so you can target just those particular areas.

3.) Poor Sales Floor Motivation:

We can usually tell within the first five minutes of entering a building whether a customer sales floor is successful. Success looks a bit like the following: people walking around talking on the phone, incentives clearly displayed, an atmosphere that feels productive and sales related, clear themes, strategies and competitions that are well communicated and that matter to teams.

A successful sales floor is also one where managers, leaders and coaches are amongst the floor not separated from it. All these are tell-tale signs of a winning telesales operation.

4.) Ill-Defined Value Proposition:

Establishing your value proposition early in the sale is absolutely critical. Yet when we record calls and listen back to them a lot of inside sales reps aren’t accurately defining the current value proposition as communicated on the website or by marketing. There’s up to seven or eight different value propositions spoken about in one day even though people are essentially talking about the same type of thing.

It’s crucial that you look at your value proposition and make it really simple for everyone to understand and be able to put it across well, from graduate to the most experienced team member.

If you’d like to learn more about how we’ve helped 100’s of inside sales teams overcome their challenges, give us a call on 020 7043 1582 or fill out this short form and we’ll get in touch.