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What is a Sales Troubleshooter?
A Sales Troubleshooter is a person or business who helps other businesses to understand what is wrong with their sales function, sales team, or a specific individual. The aim is always to drive sales improvement - meaning more revenue, more wins, and fewer losses.
What does a Sales Troubleshooter look at?
Every business is different and every sales team is also different therefore how a 'troubleshooter' looks to troubleshoot will very much depend upon the individual circumstances of the business that they are working with. They might look at a few different areas:
The individual sales team - are there any gaps or weak links?
Competitor research to understand the merits of the opposition.
Market research to assess the opinion of buying population.
Win Loss Analysis - why is the sales team losing deals (or winning)?
Historical analysis - is this a blip or a continuing issue?
A vital part of the process is to listen to the business leadership. Why do they think there is a problem? What are they looking to troubleshoot? In many cases, the sales manager knows the problem but they just need help to find the metrics to prove that this is the case. Often they also need validation from an external viewpoint can give.
Impartial Perspective
Having an 'impartial perspective' is really crucial and is one of the key reasons why a Sales Troubleshooter is hired. Businesses often need a completely neutral and/or fresh pair of eyes to assess the problems in the cold light of day. They can't have any relationships to break. They can't have any axe to grind. They just need to conduct the research and then make an impartial assessment of the problems and opportunities to fix them.
Sales Team Services - Sales Troubleshooting Service
The Sales Team Service Sales Troubleshooting Service is rather unique in that we listen to the challenges as our first and most important initial priority. Once we really understand what the business issue is, we simply pull out the right tools from our Sales Consulting kitbag to meet the customer's need. What do we mean by this? Well, our services provide individual point solutions - our Sales Troubleshooting Service brings elements together as follows:
Why are we losing so many deals?
If the team is losing too many deals, we can quickly understand why that is with our Win Loss Analysis service. We interview the client and ask really difficult questions to understand why they selected another provider rather than buying from your sales team. As a separate sales consulting business, we don't carry the baggage of your sales team and we get honest answers to simple questions.
What does our market think of us?
Do you really know whether your market knows you? If they do know you, what do they think of you? Do they like you? Are they hearing from you? Are they hearing too much from you? Do you need to change your messaging?
This is where our Market Research service comes in - we go and find this out for you while you focus on what you and your team do best. We run interviews. We cold call. We run surveys. Whatever we need to do to find out what the market thinks of you and your product or service.
Are our partners up to the task?
Partners are a crucial cog in the wheel of most sales businesses. Do you know if your partner channel is operating as it should? Well, we can find out. Our Partner Reserach looks specifically at this critical part of your extended sales team.
What do we look to assess in our Partner Research? Things like:
How many partners do you have?
How many partners are they working with?
What does the sales team look like?
What do they think you can do better? Or what's working?
How do they think you can improve? What would they suggest?
Your partners are important to your success - we listen to them and report back our findings.
Are your leads being disqualified too quickly?
You spend so much money on your marketing - but are your leads being disqualified before they really should be? Our Disqualified Leads Service is where we look at the disqualified leads that are coming out of your sales funnel. We will look at them again with a fresh pair of eyes. We will look to understand if you are losing too much of your pipeline for no reason. We will speak to the customers and we will report back to your sales and marketing teams so that we can squeeze the last drops from the funnel investment.
What is your current baseline?
If you are new to the business or role and need to do a quick assessment, our Baseline Service conducts a quick assessment for you. It's a mini-sales troubleshooter service in its own right. It looks at the baseline - and once you see the results, you can then build on this baseline and measure performance against it over time. In the Baseline Service we look at things like:
What does your sales team think can be done better?
What do your partners think can be improved?
What do your customers think of you?
Why are your team currently losing deals?
And much more.
Conclusion
A Sales Troubleshooter should be all about the client. Listening to the challenges of the sales team and environment and then pulling out the right tools to do the job.
Find out more about how our Sales Team Services team can help become your Sales Troublshooter.