“There are few who deny at what I do, I am the best. For my talents are renowned far and wide…”
Like old Jack Skellington the Pumpkin King, from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), it is impossible to deny that salespeople and marketers are the best at what they do within any organization. The functions of sales and marketing can be equated to the twin hands of an enterprise’s body.
However, there comes a time when even the best in power are assailed by their fears. Sometimes, warm days are shadowed by the chill of a customer ghosting or an excellent email campaign getting lost in a maze of conversations.
As you go trick or treating, we bring to you ‘10 nightmares that haunt salespeople and marketers (and how to make them stop)’.
Let’s take a dive down the rabbit hole of these nightmares now, shall we?
Five nightmares that salespeople have (and how to make them stop)
The work of salespeople mostly revolves around meeting the needs of their prospects. From following up on leads and closing a deal to nurturing their accounts, salespeople work double to ensure that the accounts remain loyal customers throughout, come rain or hail.
So what are the worst fears of these adventurers?
1. Constant rejection and prospects ghosting
Among the terrors and scares, a prospect ghosting a salesperson can be haunting. More often than not, ghosting happens when leads turn cold or become disinterested in the product or service offered. Besides ghosting, salespeople also have to deal with hostility or outright rejection from prospects during their sales pitch. We know that it can be demotivating when nine out of 10 sales pitches are met with rejection.
But fear not, for we have a solution for you — sales cadence. For the uninitiated, sales cadence is a sequence of touchpoints with a prospect to establish a connection for a sale. It starts at the point of contact and continues as a sequence of interactions until the prospect becomes an opportunity or an account. Sales cadence can go a long way in helping to smooth things over with prospects. Research is an important element anywhere, be it in education or business.
Read all about sales cadence here | Sales cadence: What is it and how to do it right
If a prospect still seems disinterested or hostile, take some time to establish a rapport with them. Find out some mutual ground to serve as an ice breaker before steering the conversation towards the service or product of your organization. Do not be a pusher. Read the room and give the prospect some time to dive into the conversation. Make it two-way and not elocution.
2. Gatekeepers
In business, a gatekeeper stands between a salesperson and their prospect, and their role involves filtering sales communication before presenting the best option for the decision maker. They could be a receptionist, a secretary or an assistant. And more often than not, gatekeepers can stonewall salespeople, especially if they are overwhelmed with numerous tasks for the day.
So how exactly do we tackle this nightmare? One of the few things that can go a long way in getting through to a gatekeeper is to establish a rapport with them. Even if they do not have all day to bond with you, a few minutes of conversation on a mutual topic can make you stand out.
Besides a rapport, a reference from a prominent source can help get you through that threshold and make a sales pitch.
Keep in mind that when establishing a rapport with the gatekeeper, you follow all company protocols. Research on what they like while striking up a conversation. Being genuine and avoiding pitching to them will also go a long way. Most importantly, be a good listener.
So go ahead and take that plunge! If fortune favors you, your prospect may revert to you at the earliest.
3. Negotiations
Negotiations are like carving up a Jack-o-Lantern. Be hasty and you get a crude and passable lantern. Take it too slow and you might end up finishing the lanterns well after Christmas.
The best way to start negotiations is to open them early. Research your prospect, their needs, and resources before opening up negotiations. Make it conversational and leave room for discussion from both parties involved instead of steamrolling them. However, also keep in mind that you are not being a pushover or being pushy. As a salesperson, you need to be firm yet flexible and open to further negotiations. Make educated offers and keep the quotes within reason — do not oversell or undersell.
Building trust with the parties involved will make them more likely to engage in negotiations with you. Else you might see them signing on your competitors instead of you.
Here are some negotiation tips for you | Ten ways to get better at sales negotiations
4. Objection handling
With every acceptance comes the equal probability of a rejection. A sale falling through despite the best efforts of the salesperson is certainly a nightmare for them.
As a salesperson, you have to be prepared to face objections from prospects at various stages of the sales process. An objection could arise during the sales pitch or during the product demo. Sometimes, objections can also arise during negotiations. Instead of looking at them as a hurdle, look at objections as footholds. Learning how to handle objections can help salespeople soar even on their worst days and rise from their defeats.
READ | 10+ sales objections and how to handle them
If you find your subscriptions being canceled alarmingly, do not take it to heart. Instead, explore the reasons for this and work on customizing the offer. Take, for example, a business that is recovering from a financial loss. Do not let the financial state of your prospect stop you from selling. Alternatively, come up with solutions to work around their current state. This can also ensure customer loyalty if the prospect sees that you are willing to extend trial periods. Seize that chance wisely.
5. CRM – Trick or treat
Do more with automation. Salespeople are often caught juggling multiple tasks and not having enough organization to streamline their to-do lists.
This is where a CRM can help you boost productivity by automating everything across time zones, picking the best leads to follow up on, and prioritizing prospects. It is important to note that CRM can be a business’ best friend when it is implemented the right way. CRM optimizes resources by saving everything a prospect needs in one place.
Freshsales Suite helps businesses grow by nurturing relationships and revenue with a 360-degree view of the customer, closing deals faster, being user-friendly, and ensuring personalization. Further, the sales activities can be customized for each prospect. Its contact management helps in running campaigns that result in better engagement, which in turn helps in closing deals faster, with just the click of a button.
When you think of Halloween, you immediately think of costumes and candy. Sales and marketing go hand in hand. Their similarities and yet differences help an organization in pushing its services or products forward.
Five nightmares that marketers have (and how to make them stop)
With the plethora of options that are available for customers today, marketers have a challenging task ahead of them to ensure that they cater to the varying interests of customers each day.
Marketers have to constantly find ways to ensure that their prospects’ interest never wanes. This involves breaking the clutter surrounding their product or service, creating a standing through marketing campaigns and emails, harnessing the power of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media, and more.
Let’s look at some nightmares that keep marketers up at night.
1. Poor click-through rates (CTRs)
Over the years, Call to Action (CTA) has become a key element in marketing communication. CTAs basically guide visitors as they visit a website, landing page, email, or digital campaign. CTAs can be buttons or links which take the customers to the next stage, be it exploring pricing, reading reviews, or signing up for a free trial. They help in creating an immersive user experience.
CTAs help in user engagement, boosting traffic and visibility. This also, in turn, can increase conversions.
So visitors not clicking on CTAs can be a nightmare for marketers.
Marketers can avoid this nightmare by ensuring that a CTA is positioned well. CTAs can be in the form of a header, a sidebar, a lightbox, an inline text, a standalone strip, or a footer. You can combine two CTAs on a page. However, keep in mind that putting too many CTAs on one page is a recipe for disaster.
CTAs also offer room for customization. So as a marketer, it is important to invest in CTAs.
READ | Call to Action (CTA) best practices: 6 strategic places to use your CTA
2. Marketing campaigns not faring well
Marketing campaigns are key for positioning a product or service in the market. A good campaign can aid the longevity of a service, while a bad campaign can retire it well before its prime. The best marketing campaigns are the ones that think out of the box and yet appeal to all age groups.
If marketers are the houses that people visit on Halloween, then the target audience is the children who go trick-or-treating. Disappoint them, and you might find your house TPed.
Any marketing campaign is good only when the marketer understands the target audience and comes up with a campaign that resonates with them. Now you would not try selling a high-end car to children. Rather, wouldn’t you try selling a model of the said car to the children and in turn, prompt their parents to invest in the real deal?
A target audience failing to react to campaigns is a nightmare for marketers. So, how do we get over this?
It is important for marketers to understand customer segmentation. Segmentation can be done based on demography, geography, and behavior to target the right audience and increase conversions. Customer segmentation can help in personalizing marketing campaigns and reaching the target audience, thus fostering better relationships with the customer.
Now that’s what we call a treat!
3. Poor social media engagement
We live in a world where online is the way of life. Online became the new normal well before the pandemic and will continue to remain so in the future. And why not? Everything you need – friends, family, food, clothes, medicines, and more – is available with a single touch or click.
In such an age, harnessing social media is important for marketing since it serves as the gateway for visitors to access an organization’s website. One of the nightmares for marketers is being unable to establish a social media presence.
So how can this be overcome?
Back in the day, when it came to looking up information, people would dash to the library and pour through books. This then evolved into newspapers, then Wikipedia, and Google. Today, it is social media. A lot of social media platforms offer social media for business, where the UI caters to organizations and helps them get a better reach. Businesses today rely on social media posts to position themselves and their products or services and tap into the target audience.
But, keep in mind that the strategy used should be adaptable to the channel. That is, the ‘one size fits all’ strategy will not work for all social media platforms. So what are you waiting for? Get posting, or there will be ghosting!
4. Email campaigns
If you have been online during the pandemic, chances are that you would have come across the meme – ‘This Zoom call could have been an email.’
While we agree, what do you do when the email turns out to be a nightmare in itself?
Marketers rely on email campaigns to inform customers about the product or service being offered. However, many times, these campaigns find themselves lost amid all the other conversations, which in turn makes marketers hesitant to send them out.
Instead of just sending out another email, customizing emails can go a long way in getting the customer’s attention and securing their loyalty. Ensure that the content of the emails is intriguing and personalized.
Email campaigns can be a shot in the arm for marketing campaigns and help customers understand the product or service better. Further, by segmenting lists, marketers can now send out emails that resonate with the prospects. Emails that take customers to the organization’s website will also boost visitor traffic and increase conversions.
5. Low ranking on search engine results page (SERP)
When it comes to another nightmare that keeps marketers up at night, it is the fear of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) not doing well, both organic and paid.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are the best friends of marketers. Given that most traffic on the internet comes through search engines, it is important to tap into this to boost visits to the organization’s website. Any organization strives to be on the first page, specifically the first two results of any organic SERP.
SEM involves paid advertisements targeting relevant keywords. With SEM, marketers can increase brand awareness, drive revenue, bring in new leads and boost traffic.
SEO involves unpaid tactics to organically rank content in SERP. It is important to focus on SEO in order to gain traction on SEM. SEO involves tapping into the right keywords, phrases, and queries to ensure that the organization’s page ranks on the SEM.
The content generated through SEO and SEM should be relatable, intriguing, and have everything that a reader is looking for. It should capture a user’s attention long enough to drive them towards pursuing the website more, click on CTAs, explore the products and services offered and end with a sign-up.
This Halloween, overcome your sales and marketing nightmares by signing up for a free trial of our Freshsales Suite and flying by your competitors in style.
