Many factors can slow down your sales performance and cause bottlenecks. Some issues are evident, while others may be hard to recognize until they wreak havoc.
Data, processes, and people are the most common factors that cause B2B sales bottlenecks. Overlooking underlying roadblocks caused by these factors can slow down long-term growth and deal closure rates.
This blog explores some of the most common B2B sales bottlenecks and solutions to eliminate them and optimize your people and processes.
Here’s a deep look into the seven recurring B2B sales bottlenecks with a practical solution for each of them:
Lead qualification takes a backseat when you’re selling to the wrong people. Chasing the wrong potential customers leads to dead ends and weeks to months of wasted effort.
A sales rep may send the most personalized emails and prepare perfect sales pitches, but if they’re targeting the wrong prospect, all these efforts are for nothing since your pipeline is not filled with worthy leads.
Considering you’ve already defined your ideal customer profile (ICP) and gathered lead information, such as website activities and direct interactions, here’s what you can do to fix this bottleneck and build a robust lead qualification process:
Apply a lead scoring system to qualify leads without any guesswork
A lead scoring system assigns a numerical value to each sales lead based on several criteria, such as website behavior, interactions with your marketing and outreach efforts, email subscriptions, or how well they align with your ICP.
Sales teams can then use leads with a high score for outreach or nurturing.
Employ data analytics
Not all prospects may fit your buyer description to the T. So it’s best to continuously refresh and improve your buyer persona and prospect behavior by analyzing data.
For example, analyze your website data by tracking how a certain group of visitors look for information and the total time they spend on a specific web page. These insights can uncover leads’ buying intent and determine whether they are worth pursuing.
Several machine learning models in AI tools use predictive algorithms to develop consumer behavior forecasts.
Picture this: You’ve identified a prospect who perfectly matches your buyer persona and have nurtured them through the early stages of the marketing and sales funnel. As they engage and ask a question about your product, you find yourself unsure how to respond effectively. This lack of clarity can impede deal progression and delay closing at a critical moment in the funnel.
Delayed response is another common bottleneck that irks leads. When a sales rep is unsure of a prospect query, it can slow down or halt a sales journey, leading to frustration among potential customers.
The disparate critical sales content makes manual information retrieval in B2B sales challenging. That’s when automating initial responses and streamlining communication can drastically cut down slow response times.
For example, AI virtual assistants like Docket can help retrieve information in seconds. Be it specific competitive data, product features, pricing details, templates, or customer testimonials, Docket can fetch it instantly, like so:
A B2B selling process involves continuous handoff between the sales and marketing teams. Often, this alignment distorts and leads to inconsistent messaging and many missed conversion opportunities.
According to some studies, companies saw a 4% decline in annual revenue growth due to poor sales and marketing alignment.
The biggest cause can be a lack of clear communication between both teams since they continue to operate in silos.
The best practical solution to tackle this bottleneck from day one is fostering better communication and collaboration between departments. You can set up a centralized knowledge base for documents and resources being used across teams for easy access.
This centralized repository will streamline access to critical information, reduce the time spent searching for documents, and ensure that all team members are working with the most up-to-date and accurate data.
A recurring bottleneck in B2B sales is that new sales reps take too long to become productive and accustomed to the sales process. The same holds true for current sales reps who sometimes take too long to learn how to sell a new product. This challenge could be due to a lack of skill set or inadequacy in your sales training and onboarding programs.
In most cases, such roadblocks lead to sales reps who are highly dependent on their higher-ups, causing further delays in pipeline movement.
Develop a structured onboarding program with continuous training opportunities because training should be ongoing, not a one-time event. Proactively evaluate the program at frequent intervals and make adjustments as you see fit.
Docket unifies sales knowledge from various content sources and integrates winning insights, such as the best objection handling responses, to provide a comprehensive training solution. Leveraging Generative AI, Docket offers instant answers to questions through an easy-to-use, chat-based interface, allowing sales reps to ask questions in plain language and receive real-time support.
This on-demand learning approach helps reps onboard quickly and efficiently, enabling them to focus on their selling tasks without delay.
Knowledge sharing can happen anywhere in a B2B setup, such as at meetings, on Slack channels, during sales training sessions, or stored as documentation.
Searching for information across such knowledge sources can often take hours. A survey of 4000 employees found that, on average, each employee spends about 3.6 hours daily searching for information—nearly 40% of their work day!
As a result, multiple delays and sales process inefficiencies crop up and hold deal progress.
A centralized, robust knowledge management system that’s easily accessible and searchable can fix this bottleneck.
Advancements in Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized knowledge management systems, making it easier than ever for sales teams to find information quickly. Beyond simply centralizing your team’s and customers’ collective knowledge, these technologies enable instant access to relevant insights and answers, saving hours that would otherwise be spent searching for information.
For example, Docket AI integrates seamlessly with your existing sales tools, unifying data within a centralized sales knowledge lake. This integration makes information retrieval effortless, allowing sales teams to quickly access the insights they need without searching through multiple sources.
Sales process efficiency is a major benchmark that measures how well your business generates revenue through various sales activities.
However, sales efficiency often suffers due to common bottlenecks, such as outdated or siloed knowledge, inaccurate content, and lengthy manual processes. For instance, the manual RFP completion process, where sales reps must frequently follow up with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to fill out questionnaires, can consume significant time and slow down the entire sales cycle if not addressed effectively.
Start reviewing and optimizing sales processes regularly. For example, measure and track your entire sales team’s performance via metrics like the average time to respond to leads, win rate, conversion rate, etc.
Based on your analysis, you can pinpoint potential inefficiencies in your sales process and plan the road ahead with additional sales training or technology to streamline routine sales team tasks.
Docket AI is one such tool that streamlines the RFP automation process, significantly reducing the time spent on filling out questionnaires and enabling sales reps to focus on more strategic activities.
Scattered data and lack of clear metrics make it hard to track performance and identify areas of improvement.
To top this off, complex B2B sales processes involving multiple customer touchpoints and longer sales cycles further strain tracking efforts.
Use data analytics and performance tracking tools to monitor sales activity performance and measure outcomes.
Tracking sales performance with the help of these two lets you make various predictions and avoid blunders right from the early stages of the sales process.
For example, tracking “Booked product demos in pipeline by each sales rep” gives you the true impact each sales rep has on the bottom line. A lower than average value lets you take the necessary steps like training the sales rep or shadowing them on calls to notice any gaps.
You may encounter these outlined B2B sales bottlenecks and others at any point in the sales process. However, the key is to find ways to overcome them and take precautionary steps to minimize the impact.
Docket AI is the perfect sales enablement platform to solve each of these B2B sales bottlenecks and drive efficiency.
