Over the years, Advantage has worked with a number of different SMEs across different industries that focus predominately on sales, marketing and customer service. With this in mind, we’ve seen many challenges that stop these businesses from both acquiring, retaining and expanding their customer bases.
In our latest blog article, we will take you through 7 sales and marketing challenges that SMEs often face regularly.
1 – Poor sales pipelines
The issue usually consists of an SMEs inability to have a unified sales and marketing platform to steer them down the customer acquisition and retention process.
The impact of this on them is the fact that they have siloed data, uncoordinated functions, poor lead quality, missed opportunities, unaligned communications as well as sales practices that means that valuable time is wasted on unqualified leads, low trust between different teams as well as impacting on the overall bottom line of the business.
2 – Lack of the required implementation skills
The issue experienced is the fact that most SMEs don’t have the technical knowledge or resources to easily implement as well as integrate the required technologies effectively and efficiently.
The impact of this is the fact that their progress stalls with CRM solutions as they can’t use it to its maximum capacity to acquire, retain or grow customers.
3 – Time consuming SME sales practices = Data carnage
The issue here is the fact that most SMEs don’t use CRMs and therefore have to work manually or off Excel spreadsheets to be able to track both sales and marketing activities.
The impact of not having a centralised CRM system is the fact that customer data is held across different sources, making it much more inaccurate. By not having this in place, it makes it almost impossible to manage contacts, accounts and opportunities, leading to the overall sales effectiveness being severely reduced.
4 – Issues with qualifying leads
The issue described is where SMEs find it hard to generate the right quality of lead.
The impact of having limited access to a marketing automation tool or a heavy reliance on email marketing is the fact that it becomes much harder to identify and qualify leads easily and effectively. Giving leads to sales before it's properly qualified based on ineffective criteria wastes time and resources. You may find that some highly qualified leads even lack the most basic information, which leads to them being disqualified too early, which hampers sales teams.
5 – Difficult & expensive sales and marketing tech stack
You will find that more often than not, SMEs find it difficult to balance and budget for the necessary marketing and sales technologies.
By not having essential technologies such as marketing automation, CRM and sales engagement in place means that SMEs have disconnected systems, increased demands for separate training, onboarding and much, much more. From this it becomes clear that the software isn't being used correctly and lacks integration, which lowers its overall value. Furthermore, keeping this technology up to date can become costly with pricing transparency concerns.
6 – Unaligned customer comms via the sales and marketing teams
Unaligned and uncoordinated actions between the sales and marketing teams of SMEs can mean disconnected communications with prospects.
This means that sales teams have no idea what marketing materials or collateral are being engaged with by prospects resulting in the buyer journey becoming distorted. With no smooth purchase pathway in place, means that disjointed messaging will lead to friction and uncertainty which leads to a poor overall buyer experience.
7 – Silos between sales and marketing
You will find that SMEs usually have multiple systems in place for marketing automation, CRM as well as for sales engagement campaigns.
The impact of this is siloed functionality and data. This can cause barriers when aligning sales and marketing efforts, meaning that all activities aren’t working as well as they should be, leading to miscommunications and inefficiencies.
So, what is the answer to resolving all of the above challenges?
You will find that the use of CRM systems can be extremely beneficial for SMEs to improve their customer relationships, however challenges as seen above can cause a great deal of pain for your business. Being able to conquer these challenges requires a more strategic mindset, quality training as well as the right technology partners. By having the right tools and partners at your disposal, SMEs are able to collate sales and marketing, improve engagement, create opportunities as well as boost revenues within your allocated budget.
That is one of the reasons as to why Advantage became a ClickDimensions PowerPack partner, if you didn’t know already, PowerPack is an all-in-one platform that smoothly integrates marketing automation, CRM and sales engagement allowing processes to be streamlined and growth to be sustainable. As well as this, PowerPack equips SMEs with the right tools needed to overcome CRM challenges, providing combined sales and marketing insights, customised automation as well as a cost-effectiveness. Furthermore, SMEs are always looking to adapt to customer demands and increase growth through PowerPack. Call our team of experts today to find out how Advantage and PowerPack can transform the way that your SME works.
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