Say goodbye to underperforming revenue and boost your growth with Bluefort’s cutting-edge sales automation solutions. Learn how our end-to-end system streamlines pricing models, identifies sales opportunities, breaks down silos, and maximizes customer value.
Want Your Sleep Back? How to End Underperforming Sales Revenue
You’re a SaaS CEO plagued by underperforming sales revenue. You might even have to deal with loss-making deals. So our first question is this –
How long has it been since you’ve had a good night’s sleep?
You know it all too well- it doesn’t matter what the cause of your sales problems because it’s you at the end of the day, in the boardroom, taking the rap for why things are wrong.
We’ve worked with a lot of SaaS CEOs and we’ve heard their challenges. That’s why we wrote this article on strategies for boosting underperforming sales, sharing the insights we’ve gained along the way.
The Silent Destroyers: Underperformance and Loss-Making Orders
Both are red flags on your financial dashboard. And they undermine your business and the well-being of you and your team. And it’s not just a revenue problem that manifests in staff layoffs and budget cuts. These challenges can put a ton of stress on you and your teams which means longer hours. Tougher expectations.
That’s when the sleepless nights kick in. And possibility anxiety. All stuff that you don’t need.
What Causes Sales Underperformance and Loss-Making Deals?
It’s only from understanding the causes of sales underperformance and loss-making deals that anything can be done about it.
Here’s what we hear CEOs talk about the most. Do any of these sound familiar?
Poor market research: Skimping on market research never works out well – it just means you waste time and money offering a product that doesn’t resonate using marketing messages customers don’t care about.
Many companies overlook research (ideally segmented research with personas) will give ideal customers’ needs or preferences. B2B buyers are researching SaaS companies before they get in touch for solutions, so when SaaS companies don’t do the same, they put themselves at a huge disadvantage.
Bad pricing: Pricing can be a nightmare in the SaaS industry because of all the factors involved. There’s a lot of complexity that can turn keeping up with customer demand and the ever-changing landscape of competitors’ pricing into an impossible ask. And we haven’t even gotten to the differences in pricing between individual customers!
Discounts and promotions can be a total killer. When pricing doesn’t reflect the value your products and services give, you’re stuck with either loss-making deals or deals that have customers jumping ship the millisecond a competitor offers something better. High Customer Acquisition Costs: This can be down to sales salaries being too high compared to the 4-5x of revenue they’re supposed to bring in. It can be down to a bad website that causes people to bounce within seconds. And it can be down to marketing. Often it’s all three. No matter what it is, it’s a costly disaster.
Subpar CX: There’s no denying that customer experience is one of the most important factors in sales (and customer retention!). SaaS businesses ignore this at their peril, even if they’ve got an exclusive or genius product.
Why? There’s simply too much competition out there who will swoop in, and give customers the well-designed user interface, simple navigation, targeted offering and messaging, and knowledgeable and organized sales and service that get them to say yes.
Admin: Soul-sapping, repetitive tasks are everyone’s natural enemy, but this is particularly true with sales teams. According to McKinsey, only 39% of a sales rep’s time is spent selling or interacting with prospects and customers. The rest is admin. If they don’t have tools that sort admin, revenue will never be what it could be.
It can all be a mess that you constantly mop up. Fortunately, there are ways of turning it around.
Strategies for Boosting Sales and Preventing Loss-Making Deals
When you’re ready to boost your underperforming sales and bring in more of that sweet, sweet cash, there are strategies you can use. Here are some of the most effective:
- Get to know who your customers are: Research your ideal segments to shape your products, services, pricing, and how to best reach them.
- Optimize that pricing: The best pricing strategies are flexible and tailored. They’re easy to keep track of no matter how complex. And they reflect the true value of your products and services.
- Cut down on customer acquisition cost: Boost the relationship between sales team salaries and incoming revenue by giving them the support they need to sell as much as possible. Ensure your website performance is excellent. And invest in marketing that uses SEO, social media marketing, content marketing, and influencer marketing to boost your reach and credibility.
- Enhance customer experience: Give your existing and your potential customers the best experience possible. Make it easy for them to learn what you’re all about. Communicate with them on their terms. Give your sales and customer relations people the time they need to grow those relationships.
- Train your sales team: Your sales team should have a solid foundation in your product and service offering and how to know what to pitch to potential customers. They should also be trained in building long-term relationships with customers. And they should know how to work with your revenue and customer service teams to keep information accurate and streamlined.
- Monitor your competitors: It’s absolutely vital to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing all the time. It’s a big ask, but how else will you know what’s out there attracting your potential customers? The great thing is that you can keep an eye on their failures just as much as their successes. You’ll learn from both.
All these strategies do take a lot of time and resources, but if you need to boost these sales, they’ll have to be done.
If it feels like too much of a drain on your time and resources, there is one option you can do that takes care of almost everything in one fell swoop.
The Game Changer: Automation
Automation is a powerful tool that can completely change how you and your people do sales. It can also revolutionise your results. High-performing companies are 2x as likely to have automated sales processes (Velocify).
Here’s how it can make underperforming sales a thing of the past:
Operations are streamlined: Repetitive tasks that sales, revenue, and customer service teams have to do are eliminated, freeing teams to focus on strategic tasks that drive sales. Automation can cut those business costs by 60-70% and transaction times by up to 80% (Forrester).
Customer experience is improved: Automation keeps you in touch with your customers. They get instant responses and offerings specifically tailored to them when they need it.
Your data is enhanced: AI-driven automation collects, manages, and analyzes data much more effectively. You’ll know your customer better. And insights are available 24-7 to whoever needs them.
No more lost sales opportunities: Automation creates new sales opportunities and spots upselling and cross-selling opportunities. It also identifies the best time for the sale and feeds them directly to the right salesperson.
The best pricing: Automation constantly monitors the landscape and creates and keeps track of the best pricing possible.
Reduced Errors: Automation cuts down costly errors in sales and billing because it eliminates silos between the revenue, sales, and billings teams.
Your numbers are reliable: Because everything is streamlined, customers are kept track of between departments, and errors cut down, you can rest assured knowing your revenue numbers are reliable and will adjust when things change.
All this means you and your teams are less stressed, happier, and more productive.
And you’re finally sleeping at night.
Conclusion
It can be overwhelming to have to tackle underperforming sales.
But knowing the root causes and most effective strategies certainly makes things easier for you to turn things around. And the best news of all is that you can let automation take care of all the problems so that you can reap the rewards of boosted sales performance.
You’re a SaaS business. You exist because you give your customers cutting-edge solutions to your problems.
So why not do the same for you and your teams?
SaaS discounting lowers customer LTV by 30%.
-Paddle
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