Why do business leaders often find their efforts lead their companies to the sales plateau?
Presidents, Business Owners and CEO’s all have good intent. Unfortunately, the choices are not always the most effective courses of action. Sales ineffectiveness and pipeline bottlenecks ultimately create a situation where the sales team works harder and longer yet the company fails to gain real traction. This in turn results with the organization being stuck on a sales plateau.
When faced with lack of growth sales leadership often resorts to the following self-destructive strategies:
Mistake # 1 They impact their margins by adding to their sales team opposed to solidifying their existing team currently under-performing. To add to ineffectiveness, they rely on past lackluster hiring criteria in order to increase the number of feet on the street.
Mistake # 2 They again negatively impact their margins by investing into more advertising and marketing campaigns instead of dealing with the problem of poor qualifying, poor closing skills, and poor follow up on leads previously developed. In effect they spend more to get more leads to have more opportunities to close less business!
Mistake # 3 They rely on the optimism inherent in most sales people or on their gut feel regarding sales as opposed to an objectively created system and structure. The goal is not to rely on hope that new sales will simply appear, again at a significant cost to the company, but to close the gap of inefficiency found in the under-productive sales team. Rather than implementing a proven system, they put their financial futures into the hands of sales people who have consistently proven that their own personal routine is flawed.
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