Overcoming the biggest sales obstacles

Pitchbound wants to empower sales reps to become sales athletes and empowerment starts with understanding the pains, the goals, and the process of sales reps, so we interviewed more than 50 sales reps with the goal of understanding how they work, what their biggest challenges was and how they picture success.

Pitchbound was built to empower sales reps to become sales athletes. We have interviewed more than 50 sales athletes to understand their pains, mindset, work processand success experiences and answer the question: How to be better at sales?

These sales athletes have different seniority and performance profiles, and they are split out on both product-based selling and service-based selling. We share our findings below!

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The first obstacle: The Sales Script

“Sales scripts in Word makes me feel like a robot and my conversations become unnatural”

Do you still pitch from a word document? We’ve found that most sales rep do and that having a static sales script creates a feeling of being a robot. Sales scripts can be amazing in the beginning and especially in terms of not forgetting what and when to say crucial phrases, doing storytelling through use-cases and overcoming objections. However, the dark side of static sales scripts are that conversations become more scripted and less natural, limits creativity and flexibility which ultimately hurts motivation and conversion rates.

Scripts should be used to support, structure and give a feeling of confidence. By using bullet points and trying to make scripts more dynamic, we can become better to personalise conversations.

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The biggest obstacles in each phase of the pitch

Overall, sales reps believe that a) knowing what prospects are interested in, b) objection handling and matching and c) having normal and smooth conversationsare their biggest obstacles in conversations. For each stage of the pitch, sales reps mention the following obstacles to high performance:

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1. Introduction

Many sales reps say that they lose conversations if they don’t build trust and likability, catch the prospects attention, or fails to establish why they are reaching out early on. Getting past the introduction phase can be a massive challenge but overcoming the obstacles above will enable you to succeed.

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2. Discovery / Qualification

In the discovery or qualification phase, depending on whether you are selling services or products, obtaining information about which pain points they have and choosing the right Unique Selling Points and Value Propositions is mentioned as the biggest obstacle of sales reps.
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3. Matching & Closing

Objection handling is the number one challenge of sales reps. Anticipating objections and devising strategies to overcome them and create an urgency that enables you to close is necessary to overcome this objection.

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The answers above came from interviewing more than 50 sales athletes – feel free todrop a comment below!