Why sales organizations fail
Why sales organizations fail to meet goals and what you can do about it.
There’s a few reason sales organizations fail to meet their goals
1. Poor Product Market fit
The market you’re targeting just doesnt want/need the product enough to justify the investment.
2. Bad product
If you’re selling a bad product chances are you know. This is because you know in the back of your head they won't get their money's worth out of the product.
3. Bad Market
The market simply doesnt need what you’re selling. Another market may find it highly valuable. But that this specific market doesnt.
This is what many startups struggle with. It’s not the product that’s the problem but *who* they’re targeting.
4. Bad sales leadership
Sales organizations are as good as their leaders. The sum of the org is the sum of the people leading them. If you have a bad leader it’ll have a bad culture. This is one of the most common issues outside of 1 - 3
5. Bad sales systems
You can have killer product market fit & amazing sales leadership but if you don’t have the systems to properly support the sales org it will struggle to get sales.
6. Market saturation + Sticky product
This isn’t as common as the above issues, but market saturation can be a huge problem. If you and your competitor sell a sticky product (hard to transition from/change to another) you’ll have a hard time convincing prospects to buy your software because the pain of not changing (Pain points) is less than the pain of changing to new software.
You often see this with enterprise or core systems like a CRM
Doomed from the start?
So if you have one of these issues are you doomed from the start?
Yes and No. It depends on the problem you have.
If it's 1, 2, or 6. Then yes you’re doomed if you don’t pivot ASAP. I might address this in a later post. But if it's not 1, 2, or 6 you can fix this.
Bad market
If you’re targeting a bad market then the solution is to target a good market. Simple right? Well in theory, yes but in practice it's much harder than simply picking a new market to target.
When you GTM (Go To Market) one of the hardest decisions to make is to decide who you’re targeting.
What Company size?
What industry?
Funding round?
Decision Maker?
Job change?
Company Maturity?
The list goes on. The point is there are many variables to account for. Many companies opt out of this complex process by taking the spray-and-pray approach. This will get some results. But it’ll be very difficult to generate predictable results this way + refine your approach for more sales
When targeting a new market you need to understand the problems that the market faces and how your product will relieve them. This takes industry knowledge OR the ability to ask the right questions to uncover if/what pain they are experiencing.
Do the latter by calling 250 people in the market you’re thinking about reaching out to and uncovering what pain they’re experiencing and HOW it relates to the problems your software solves. The secret is in the subtleties. They may experience the exact problem your product solves by they explain it with a different language/perspective than what your messaging/marketing team/CEO is familiar with.
For example:
Customer A. Describes their problem as "We have trouble getting sales because no one picks up the phone. But what we really struggle with is landing in spam as cold email is our main channel of outreach”
Customer B. Describes their problem as “We aren’t getting meetings because we call 100 people and only 5 pick up”
Now this is same problem described differently = not getting enough people to pick up
If your product is designed to help people make more calls you might discount Customer A. As unqualified. This is because they aren't using calls as their main form of outreach. This would be a mistake. Dig deeper. Why are they not getting picked up? Maybe the industry just has terrible phone data? Or maybe it’s because they’re calling at the wrong time? What if they’d simply get flagged as spam? You won't know unless you dig.
Don’t discount an industry before you dig. Part of being a good salesperson is your ability to understand the prospect, your product, and what it solves. If you can’t do this you’ll end up selling to a bad market because you got a couple of lucky sales.
Bad Leadership
Bad leadership is the bane of most sales peoples existence. And the truth is that if you can’t fire sales leadership you can’t fix this. Even then firing won't fix the issue. Hiring a poor sales leader is a reflection of the company's leadership itself. So I won't be addressing this issue in this post.
If you want to learn what good sales leadership looks like Follow @bowtiedsalesguy on Twitter & buy his sales course
Once you have the fundamentals on HOW to sell and WHY it works then you can teach others how to sell. And if there’s one thing that motivates salespeople and creates a killer sales culture it's success/achievement.
No one likes a stale sales culture that plays the numbers game. Sales guy fixes this.
Bad Sales Systems
This is very simple. If you don’t have a good sales systems to support your sales organization then your sales will be limited to the sum of your sales reps ability function within the current systems.
When you account for all the problems above yet still struggle to get sales than its the systems that are the problem NOT anything else.
A bad sales system will limit your reps ability to find and sell to the right people.
You can fix this by hiring someone like me to fix your outreach or by learning how to create a good sales system on your own time.
For the later, I highly recommend you read Tech Powed Sales by Justin Michael and read my MASTER Thread to get up to speed.
Great now what?
Take action. Reading it helps you understand what you need to fix. But only actively trying to fix it will give you the feedback you need to understand what your real reasons your sales organization isn’t hitting its numbers.
Many of the problems overlap with each other. So only by fixing it can you isolate what’s causing the exact problem in your org. Many times its a combination of the problem I’ve outlined above.
Bonus:
If you use Linkedin Sales Navigator and want to improve your numbers check out my course. I can assure you that you’re wasting HOURS per week inside Sales Navigator and missing out on speaking with prospects looking to buy new software without this.
Can you get similar results to my course? Of course. It’ll just take hundreds of hours of wasted time and lost revenue to get there.