Running an enterprise sales team is no walk in the park. From the pressure of meeting revenue goals to the challenges of hiring the right people onto your team, it’s easy to miss certain blind spots that might be costing you revenue - and even harder to know where to start fixing them.
We’ve identified eight key blind spots in the enterprise sales process that you should watch out for - plus advice on how to tackle them. Let’s jump right in.
#1 Poor lead generation and filtering
Generating leads at the top of the funnel is where most sales processes kick off - and getting that process right is crucial to sustaining a healthy pipeline.
Blind spots at this stage can relate to where you’re searching for new leads, how you’re reaching out to them through outbound methods, and whether your content is optimized for visibility and usability.
Sure, you’re combing through your LinkedIn network to find you prospective clients - but have you checked out G2 and Capterra for SaaS leads that could use your product?
If your target market is startups and founders, how much time have you spent on lead generation on AngelList, ProductHunt, and Crunchbase to find prospective clients?
Beyond that, do your sales team members spend any time on Quora, relevant Facebook groups, and even on Medium looking for sales prospects?
Sometimes it’s not about what you don’t have, but what you’re not going for.
#2 Filtering your enterprise sales prospects
Lead generation and prospect filtering go hand-in-hand. It’s one thing to have a truckload of leads in your sales CRM, but if they’re not good-fit leads, your sales team will spend a lot of time chasing dead ends.
Proper prospect filtering - using BANT, MEDDIC, or any other qualification method - ensures you only invest time and energy closing prospects who are ready to buy.
#3 Optimizing your marketing and sales content
If you’re a fan of inbound marketing and sales, your content itself can be a potential blind spot.
Cranking out content is a great start, but optimizing that content for visibility (SEO) and shareability (social promotion and virality) is just as important. In fact, it’s better to err on the side of fewer, higher-quality content pieces than to become a low-quality content mill that sees little relevant traffic.
And when it comes to your sales enablement assets, it’s just as important to ensure you have all the information that will help your prospect choose the best possible product - yours.
Sure, you have a few assets describing your product’s features - but do you have competitive comparisons that customers can look through? Do your sales assets show how customers can generate positive ROI through your product or service? Do you have any relevant case studies from existing customers to sway buying decisions in your favor?
More importantly, are you using a good content management system that lets you update, tag, categorize, and share your sales assets quickly and easily?
The keys to success here are simple: expand your lead generation channels, filter your prospects better, and optimize your content for greater visibility, shareability, and competitiveness.
Lack of sales automation
Sales reps spend 64% of their time on non-sales work - which is inefficient. Much of this boils down to a lack of sales automation - a blind spot that you can easily fix with the right tools and processes.
As any sales leader understands, the sales workflow is dynamic and requires constant optimization to run smoother, faster, and more cost-effectively. There are a few aspects of the sales process that can be automated to save you time and money:
#4 Finding customers
You’d ordinarily need a few minutes to collect the correct data about each lead, such as their email addresses, titles, phone numbers, and social media profiles.
But tools like Snov.io and ZoomInfo help you capture lead data while you browse the web normally. These tools leverage their vast databases to match leads to existing data, saving you hours of manual data collection.
Investing in one of these tools is a no-brainer if you’re an enterprise sales team looking to boost your sales efficiency.
#5 Engaging sales prospects
Engaging with leads manually is fine if you’re dealing with a handful of them - but what happens when you need to interact with hundreds or thousands of leads at the same time?
There’s simply not enough time to manually track the status and progress of each conversation, and scaling your sales team to handle this process isn’t always feasible.
That’s where lead engagement tools come in.
Using tools like Mailchimp, HubSpot, Salesforce, and more, you can automate all your email communications and track open rates, automatically move prospects forward in your sales pipeline, and offer the right sales enablement assets at the right times.
If those leads want to talk to you on your website, you can use chatbots to simplify the sales query process. Chatbots allow you to define what topics you can help with and when the bot should send prospects to a salesperson for more information. This could cut your operational costs by up to 30% over time.
#6 Showcasing your product
Sure, you could do individual demos for each prospect that comes your way - but wouldn’t it be faster to create a video demo that you can host on Wistia or Vimeo and share a link to?
Better yet, you could gate your demo videos with a lead capture form - although you’ll need to experiment with this approach to avoid false MQLs.
And the best option, of course, is to provide a self-serve demo option that lets prospects play around with your product, guided by in-app instructions and tooltips. This takes your sales team out of the time-consuming demo process and lets them focus on closing clients who are ready to buy.
#7 Contracts and closing
Closing a sizable sales deal involves a lot of people, reviews, and data. The more complex the deal is in terms of pricing, feature sets, cancellation clauses, and data protection mechanisms, the more time it can take to close - especially accounting for the back-and-forth communication between all parties. Automation can ease and speed up this process.
Tools like Momentum allow for faster collaborative sales by linking critical client data in your CRM to your daily communications tool (Slack), ensuring that sales reps on your team have everything they need to move a deal forward. See Momentum in action.
Such integrations make it easy to update both platforms simultaneously, in real-time, and with as much accuracy as possible. And with multiple stakeholders involved in the deal closing process, that kind of automation is invaluable.
#8 Onboarding
You could 100% onboard every new customer personally - and if you offer a complex, high-touch product or service, that might make more sense for your business growth and customer satisfaction levels.
But if you can, build the onboarding process directly into the product. Improve the customer experience by including tooltips and onboarding flows, gamify the completion process, and deep-link to various parts of your help docs for further information.
Aim for a seamless onboarding process that customers can undertake themselves if need be. This lets you focus on improving the onboarding docs and resources, and lets your users move at a speed they’re comfortable with. Of course, there should always be customer success staff on standby to resolve any issues or provide further guidance.
Remove blind spots from your enterprise sales workflow
As a decision-maker in your organization, knowing your “unknowns” is the first step towards improving your sales performance.
Sales blind spots can cost you time and revenue growth, and taking the time to assess each stage of your sales workflow and customer journey can unearth hidden issues to fix.
Check out our essential guide to enterprise sales cycle management to get some tips on how to improve your sales workflow today.
Momentum’s collaborative sales tool helps companies like yours land bigger, better deals by integrating Slack and Salesforce in real-time. See how you can turbocharge your enterprise sales process with Momentum today.
