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Apr 17, 2023 04:40 PM
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2023 is the year to do more with less. Costs are rising, as are concerns about an impending recession. If you’re a company looking for ways to keep your bottom line solid, it’s time to get creative.
Many businesses spiral at the thought of economic instability — choosing to cut expenditures and sacrifice growth. But consider this: the majority of businesses are missing out on up to 30% of their revenue because of process inefficiencies. Trimming the fat may help in the short term, but to take ownership over your full revenue potential, you’ve got to tighten up your day-to-day processes. Because the reality is, you’ll eventually hit a brick wall with cutting costs. There are only so many places to make cutbacks. But revenue optimization as an overall strategy provides a much bigger opportunity, not just to save money but to increase your earnings.
So keep reading as we reveal five common places your sales process may be breaking down — and how to stop these insidious revenue leaks.
5 Common Process Breakdowns
Any sales process is complicated. There will always be places where things go wrong. Automating your pipeline can save your team valuable admin time, but it’s critical to have human eyes (and minds) review that process regularly to see how well it’s really working.
If you’re concerned about where you’re wasting revenue potential in your sales process, these are must-review areas.
1. Lead generation
Without lead generation, there’s no pipeline — but lead generation is notoriously difficult. According to one Hubspot report, 61% of marketers rank lead generation as their number one challenge. While it’s no surprise this is a tricky spot in the sales process, your question should be: Where exactly does the disruption occur?
Say your sales team is knocking it out of the park with their cold emails and calls this quarter. They’ve scheduled numerous demos, and the cycle looks promising. But by the close of the quarter, your win rate is surprisingly low. At first you think the leads weren’t well qualified, but on reviewing your process you find there were a lot of no-shows for scheduled demos. And reps never followed up. That’s a major process breakdown that’s easily overlooked — and fixed.
Do reps know precisely what to do when demos are a no-show? Creating and monitoring these policies on a regular basis are the only way to ensure your processes are working for you as intended.
2. Response time
Response time is critical for all communications during the opportunity lifecycle. Vendors who respond first to inbound leads are up to 50% more likely to close the deal. Say your team’s goal is to respond to potential customers within 12 hours, but on reviewing your process and sales data, you find your team typically takes 3–4 days to respond. What’s the gap between “should” and “do”? More importantly, why aren’t reps following the playbook? This is an opportunity to clarify your process with each sales rep and pinpoint what’s keeping them from reaching out sooner.
3. Handoffs during the sales cycle
Anytime a handoff happens, it’s a tense moment. Remember that relay race in elementary school? When a sales development rep (SDR) passes off a lead to an account executive (AE), it’s no different. Sometimes someone drops the baton. In sales, that can amount to a lost deal.
By ensuring there’s a clear playbook for passing off leads, you greatly lower your risk of dropped leads. Your SDR and AE both know exactly what steps they need to follow, and when, in order to keep that prospect moving.
4. End of trial or Proof of Concept
Free trials and POC periods are a great way for potential customers to take your product or service for a spin. But if your trial period is particularly long, it’s all too easy to lose track of those prospects. Failing to check in during a trial to see what questions a prospect has, or not following up for weeks afterward, drastically lowers your chances for a win.
You’ll only know this if you monitor your sales team’s process to see how they handle the end of every prospect’s trial. Email automation isn’t enough if your reps don’t understand how to make a personal connection or when to reach out during a critical turning point like this. Examine, refresh, and monitor processes like this to prevent prospects from falling out of the funnel.
5. Customer Success
Never take customer retention for granted. In most industries, customer retention rates are below 20%, but your current customer base represents a massive opportunity to maintain and even grow your revenue. To reinforce the argument that your product or service is still worthwhile, you should reach out to share new developments to software or additions to your product line. Customers want to know that you continue to think and care about their needs after they sign the dotted line.
Say you notice that your renewal rates have been low this year. Upon looking into the numbers, you notice that most of these clients were sent an automated reminder to renew, but your sales team never reached out about the new software features that many of these customers had been requesting. Keep this revenue stream flowing by addressing this customer success gap, and make sure these subscribers get a personalized reminder from your sales team.
A fresh take on your sales process
The sales funnel flowing into the pipeline is a classic image for a reason. It’s a sensible way to view the influx of new leads moving through your sales process. But here’s another image to show the precarity of this process: a very long — and sometimes leaky — hose.
Imagine a long garden hose with a dozen pinpricks sprouting leaks all along its length. The five process breakdowns we listed above, as well as every weak point in your sales process, is a tiny hole where you’re losing opportunities and leaking revenue.
If you only examine the end of the hose, all you see are your results — and those results will be lackluster. If you want to plug these leaks, you need to learn how to monitor your process — not just your final revenue stream.
Getting creative about growth aligns seamlessly with revenue operations (RevOps). If your company doesn’t already have a RevOps function in place, there’s no better time to start assessing and evaluating the various steps of your sales process. This means checking in to make sure processes are not only in place, but being followed, in order to achieve results. Don’t fall short by only monitoring results. Best practices for RevOps starts with tracking your processes, not just outcomes.
Develop an ongoing process review with Gluework
With Gluework’s process monitoring tool, you’ll get eyes on exactly how your sales reps go through their regular tasks, and where significant process gaps are causing revenue leaks. If you can find out what’s not working in real time, you can save deals in real time too.
Gluework is a full-funnel product that builds an analytics process so you can monitor trends, effective behavior, and unproductive actions with real-time visibility. We help you identify and interpret correlations between bottlenecks and results, so you can execute a streamlined process and stop leaking revenue.
Discover the process breakdowns causing you to lose up to 30% of your revenue. Improve your sales process with Gluework's monitoring tool to stop leaking revenue.
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