B2B Sales Consultant: When Should You Hire One?
If your business is struggling to get the bottom-line results you want, you might consider hiring a B2B sales consultant.
Hypothetically, this consultant could provide you with the insights, resources, and direction necessary to transform your business and see better sales.
But is this an essential investment? Is it worth the money? And are there other strategies you could utilize instead?
The Biggest Pain Points for B2B Sales Teams
Let’s start by looking at some of the most significant pain points for sales teams. These are usually the factors holding sales teams back from seeing their best possible results.
Lead Generation
Sometimes, the problem lies with lead generation.
Your company isn’t generating enough leads, those leads aren’t relevant enough or appropriately targeted, or you’re missing critical pieces of information that make the leads harder to work with.
In any case, this isn’t the fault of your salespeople; the problem is inherent in your lead generation strategy.
Getting Through
Creating sales emails that get a response or making phone calls that actually get picked up can be challenging.
Even with good leads in place, if your salespeople don’t have the tools or techniques necessary to start conversations with people, even the best product isn’t going to sell itself.
Closing the Sale
Your salespeople may be able to get through and start conversations with people in your target demographics.
But that’s still not a guarantee of success, even with a great product to sell. Some sales teams struggle with closing.
That could be a symptom of a lack of training, a byproduct of hiring the wrong people for the job, or something else in your business environment interfering with your potential results.
Working Efficiently
Beyond this, salespeople often struggle with personal productivity and efficiency.
If they can work with good leads, get through, and close the sale, they might struggle with closing enough sales during the day or accomplishing all their other responsibilities.
What a B2B Sales Consultant Can Do
What can a B2B sales consultant do to help you with this situation?
Analyze Your Current Efforts
Your consultant will be able to look at your current efforts with an unbiased and authoritative view.
They’ll be able to determine whether or not your strategies are working, the likely failure points within those strategies, and the most critical metrics to boost to see better results.
Revisit and Revise Your Processes
Consultants will also revisit and revise the processes you use throughout your marketing and sales efforts.
Depending on the consultant, that could mean fundamentally analyzing or changing what your brand is altogether. Or that could simply mean fine-tuning your sales process to see better results.
Define Clear Lead Generation Strategies
Marketing and lead generation are prerequisites for a successful sales strategy. Your sales consultant should be able to help you define and create much better lead generation strategies.
The goals here are to generate more leads, so your salespeople have more potential contacts to work with, but more importantly, generate better leads that are more qualified and more likely to buy from you.
Clarify Roles and Improve Your Teambuilding
Most consultants will also work to clarify individual roles within your sales team and improve your team building.
Sales teams with a strong sense of collaboration and high morale are much more likely to be productive, efficient, and effective in pursuit of more sales.
Provide Mentorship and Direction
Becoming a professional sales consultant is usually a career transition after a long and successful history within some other sales team.
Because they have such experience and knowledge to share, they are excellent for providing mentorship and direction for your team. Individual sales reps who struggle can get some advice and specific feedback, while the overall team can benefit from group coaching.
Introduce New Strategies to Improve Productivity and Efficiency
Your sales consultant will also be able to introduce new strategies to improve productivity and efficiency.
They may be able to restructure the responsibilities list for each of your sales reps, improve your workflows, and even boost productivity directly.
What a B2B Sales Consultant Can’t Do
However, there are some things that a sales consultant can’t do. For example, a B2B sales consultant cannot:
Sell for You
Your sales consultant may be willing to practice selling exercises with your salespeople.
They may even get directly involved with your sales coaching efforts. But they’re not going to sell on your behalf; it’s still up to you and your team to do the heavy lifting.
Make Up for a Totally Unmotivated Team
If your team is totally untrained, unskilled, and unmotivated, even the best B2B sales consultant will end up in over their head.
A better selection of strategies and tools isn’t going to transform your team.
Transform Your Business Overnight
Your path forward will still be full of mistakes, difficulties, and confusion, even with a B2B sales consultant helping you.
Good advice, good direction, and mentorship don’t have the ability to completely transform your business overnight. After hiring a sales consultant, you can expect several months of effort before you start seeing a total transformation in your results.
Guarantee Cost Effectiveness
Sales consultants also can’t guarantee the cost-effectiveness of hiring them.
While most sales consultants will work to make sure you get your money’s worth, there’s always a chance that you’ll end up paying more for the sales consultant than you receive in benefits.
First-Line Strategies
Before hiring a B2B sales consultant, there are several things you can try.
Identify Failure Points
Take a look at your current sales and marketing processes and analyze them for potential failure points.
Where does it seem like your strategies are going wrong? Is there something specific you can fix to make it better?
Invest in Lead Generation
Better lead generation will lead to more sales, almost without fail. That’s why one of your highest priorities should be investing in high-quality lead generation.
Work to understand what makes a quality lead, then refine your lead generation strategies to make sure you’re attracting the best possible people for your brand.
Align Sales and Marketing
Force your sales and marketing departments to work together to see better results.
Too often, these departments end up with a silo mentality, unable to collaborate, and with fundamental philosophical differences that prevent them from mutually cooperating.
Train and Educate Your Salespeople
How much time have you spent training and educating your salespeople?
It’s on you to give them the tools and the information they need to be effective in their environment.
Equip Your Salespeople with Better Tools
Today’s sales environment is equipped with all kinds of high-tech tools, from AI-based lead generation to automatic scheduling.
Most of them have the potential to help your salespeople be more productive, better organized, and more confident when selling. So make sure to equip your staff with the best tools you can.
Experiment, Measure and Adapt
Experiment with different strategies and different approaches, and make sure you objectively measure your results.
Once you have a better idea of which tactics are most effective, you can refine your approach even further and gradually adapt to become a more productive and effective sales force.
Hiring a sales consultant is usually a good move. It’s an excellent opportunity to better train and educate your team members, analyze the weaknesses of your current sales approach, and ultimately transform the business to land more sales and generate more revenue.
However, sales consultants can also be expensive, and they can’t do everything for you.
Make sure you do your research and attempt some transformative sales strategies on your own before proceeding with hiring a professional.
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