In recent years, the modern customer has taken control of the sales cycle, meaning that salespeople now have to work harder than ever to ensure sales opportunities aren’t lost. This can be difficult - particularly for financial services businesses. Studies show that financial services is one of the least trusted industries in the eye of the consumer, making it even trickier to secure sales.
That’s why we’ve outlined 4 main reasons why your business may be losing opportunities, to help you identify where the issues in your sales process lie.
1) Not building sustainable relationships
2) Lack of engagement with clients
3) No real knowledge of target customers
Is your current CRM causing you to lose sales opportunities? Read our free eBook - 7 signs that financial brokers and service providers need a better CRM system:
1) Not building sustainable relationships
One of the main reasons why financial services organisations lose sales opportunities is because they aren’t building robust, long-lasting relationships with their clients and are being surpassed by their competitors.
Therefore, in order to successfully close opportunities, it is now more important than ever for salespeople to establish good relationships with their clients. Fortunately, there are a number of ways you can ensure that your sales team aren’t missing out on sales because of a breakdown in relationships.
- Identify key decision-makers
Sometimes, your sales team will have strong relationships - just not with the right people. Salespeople need to be identifying key stakeholders and decision-makers and forming a relationship with them, not just the first person that contacts your company.
- Know your team better
Often, some of the issues with client relationships happen because of internal disorganisation. For example, if your current system doesn’t allow for integration with platforms such as LinkedIn, you could be missing out on potential opportunities from those in your industry, or potential prospects your colleagues know by association but haven’t highlighted as an opportunity.
2) Lack of engagement with clients
To build and maintain a strong relationship with your clients, your sales team needs to be staying in regular contact. Often, businesses do not have an effective system in place that can remind salespeople to make contact, or recommend optimal times to reach out. When 82% of consumers expect an immediate response when they ask a question, delaying in reply can be fatal.
Many customers will make a buying decision based on how responsive a company is, and if your competitor tends to make contact much faster than your business, it could be causing a significant loss in sales opportunities. For example, if a salesperson forgets to complete due diligence (or other key onboarding tasks) and has to delay the sales process as a result, it is highly likely your customer will take their business elsewhere.
This often occurs when salespeople have a huge workload and have no software in place that can effectively help them manage and prioritise it, leading them to easily forget important tasks. To rectify this, your company may need a better sales CRM system, that can remind your salespeople to communicate, and keep on top of their workload.
Find out more about increasing upselling and cross-selling opportunities for financial sales professionals with CRM.
3) No real knowledge of target customers
Traditional hard-sell tactics often don’t work for today’s customer, and it can be increasingly difficult for sales teams to identify what their customers actually want from them. This leads to salespeople promoting products or services to prospects that are never going to make a buying decision, because of a lack of knowledge and awareness of their target customers.
If you aren’t able to conduct a needs analysis of your prospects, then you won’t be able to gain insight on product/service suitability, or bring together the right members of the team for a particular opportunity. This is usually because salespeople don’t have easy access to prospect data, or the data itself is outdated. Not only does this lead to the promotion of wrong products or services, but it can also be potentially damaging.
Without a central view of up-to-date customer data, your sales team will struggle to be aware of important relating to regulatory compliance that may prevent an opportunity from progressing, such as sanctions imposed by certain countries. When your sales team aren’t able to easily discard these prospects, it leads to significant downtime and a loss of productivity due to time being wasted on opportunities that aren’t qualified.
A potential solution to this issue is implementing a system that can score your leads, through which you can identify and prioritise the prospects that have the highest chance of converting into opportunities - saving your business time and money.
4) Outdated CRM system
Most financial organisations will already have a CRM in place, however, it may not be working to your advantage. Often, legacy or outdated CRMs are inefficient and don’t work either for sales leadership or the wider team. This can lead to a direct loss in sales opportunities because when a team isn’t able to collaborate effectively, they don’t devote the necessary time to selling to prospects, or maintaining relationships with existing customers.
For example, many legacy CRMs don’t have mobility, meaning that salespeople are “chained” to their desk conducting administration, instead of out on the road selling. On top of this, even if salespeople do progress with an opportunity, data stored across disparate systems provides no central view of the customer, which increases the likelihood of a missed opportunity due to human error.
With a leading-edge sales CRM software, sales teams have a 360-degree view of all their customers in one central location, removing the need for multiple, disparate systems that often contribute to lost sales opportunities.
For sales teams in financial services organisations, reducing the amount of lost sales opportunities is difficult when you haven’t identified the root of the issue. Among other things, it could be your current sales CRM.
