What is the Cost of a Bad Sales Experience?

By Pieterjan Bouten - CEO, Showpad

Today Showpad announced the results of a study commissioned by Demand Metric on the impact of a bad in-person sales experience. The study surveyed 250 sales and marketing executives for their opinions both on delivering and receiving a sales experience. While the news may seem bad:

• 60% of respondents regularly had bad sales experiences.
• 72% of those bad experiences resulted in an immediate loss of revenue for the business.

It actually represents a significant opportunity for businesses regardless of industry. If you dig deeper into the reasons why bad experiences occur, the aggregate rankings from both audiences identified these three key areas:

• Lack of customer understanding
• Lack of time or resources
• Lack of alignment

While not easy to fix, they can be improved with the right information. But, before we talk about a solution, let’s identify why the areas mentioned above play such an important role in the performance of sales and marketing teams.

In the age of big data, businesses have an abundance of metrics on almost every part of their business with the exception of one: how sales collateral is used at in-person meetings. If you start by looking at marketing, this can impact the way content is built for field or channel sales teams. Are the materials effective? Does the message resonate with their prospects? Do distributors need different material than direct sellers? Unless you have a sales team that has time for detailed documentation and a clear structure for measurement in your CRM system, marketers will be flying blind.

Even if your sales team has the right materials—which is often not the case—they have to find, and deliver those materials throughout multiple conversations every day. These interactions may take place in an office setting but more and more are occurring in coffee shops, on construction sites or in hospital hallways. To complicate the matter, salespeople have to understand and be effective with the delivery of the content, often without any documentation or clear direction. These bits and pieces of content struggle add-up and directly impact their productivity.

Ass many of us know CRM systems have become something of barrier between sales and marketing. Even the best CRM products require integrations with marketing automation, content management, and a host of other applications that can be found both on and off the Salesforce AppExchange. These integrations can be complicated and often still require a high degree of human interaction to document valuable intelligence, but that’s changing.

Unlocking that valuable information around in-person sales interactions can be achieved using a mobile sales enablement platform like Showpad. This means your sales and marketing team can use analytics to gain insight in how sales collateral is impacting sales, improving productivity and content effectiveness while delivering a great sales experience

To that end, Showpad also announced today a partnership with GoodData that will extend the capabilities of our current product reporting to include better visualizations and provide marketing and sales professionals with a deeper level of insight into the content that resonates with customers and prospects. With this improvement, we can help sales and marketing teams work better together, enabling better sales experiences and faster business growth.