Top 5 Pain Points Sales Reps Face in 2022 & How to Solve Them

According to Gartner, the biggest pain point for sales reps in B2B sales today is a lack of customer confidence.

“It’s not customers’ confidence in suppliers, but customers’ confidence in themselves and their ability to make good buying decisions that is in critically short supply.

And when we put this statement into context, you will agree it is true.

Let’s take a look at the latest stats.

– 74% of modern B2B buyers do half their research online before they buy;

– What do buyers want from sales pros? 69% say, “Listen to my needs.” (Hubspot);

– 77% of B2B Buyers say their latest purchase was either “Difficult” or “Very Complex.”

Today your buyers are savvy and sophisticated. In order to win them over, you’ll need to create trust and offer value. But the B2B buyer’s journey is not an easy one.

We asked our B2B industry colleagues, sales professionals, to share with us the most occurring sales pain points they experience in their everyday workflow, and then we offer the solutions that worked for us.

You might recognize a pain point that you’re currently facing working in a B2B sales team to which you can read our suggestions on how to overcome it.

Let’s start.

Sales pain point #1.
Communication and Data Management

Richard Lubicky, Founder and CEO @ RealPeopleSearch

Data is power.

B2B data is any piece of information related to business organizations and business professionals that is of benefit to the sales, marketing, and revenue operations teams of B2B companies. This data is gathered from a variety of public and private sources and can be used in a variety of ways to provide context for cold outreach, improve business communication, team coordination and ease the overall B2B sales process for the sales reps.

We understand just how important B2B data is, and that is why our sales automation platform is built upon a huge B2B database that contains a myriad of valuable information about 115+ million companies and 200+ million business professionals from 241 countries and places around the world.

It was the first logical step. We knew we had to provide a library filled with business information in order to be able to give our customers a truly all-encompassing sales enablement tool that will assist you every step of the way, throughout the modern sales cycles. From prospecting to finding your ideal customers, to performing a cold email outreach and knowing what to say in your sales email, data is the pillar upon which all B2B sales strategies are built. Data gives meaning to all our B2B sales & marketing activities and brings leads into our sales pipeline.

Refine your sales strategy with data-driven insights 👉 Sales.Rocks in a Nutshell

Sales pain point #2. Obtaining an appointment with a prospect

…or scheduling a demo call

The average salesperson generates roughly one appointment from every 209 cold calls. (Baylor University)

Solution – “The first stage is to get your prospect’s attention in the first few minutes of your conversation. You may accomplish this by actively listening to and understanding your prospect, as well as giving him ample time to reflect on your questions.

When you’ve accomplished this, strive to pique the prospect’s interest in your product by directly addressing the prospect’s company’s pain concerns. You can begin by saying, ‘I now see how difficult it must be for your industry to maintain its development.’ However, I can try to make things easier for you by…’. The golden rule is to show real concern for your prospect.”

Tyler Martin, Founder and Certified Business Coach @ ThinkTyler

Our take on this pain point.

We completely agree with Tyler on this one! Sales conversations can indeed be one of the greatest challenges in B2B sales. Besides, the overall B2B sales cycle is much more longer, complicated, consuming, and oh well… challenging.

A survey of 886 sales leaders revealed that while it takes four months for 74.6% of businesses to sell to new business clients, a whopping 46.4% confessed that this process can take well over seven months in some cases.

Therefore, we will add a few of our suggestions that might help B2B sales professionals regarding this sales approach = which is an entire stage in the B2B buying process, just before your prospect makes a purchase decision.

Here is a small process to get you from A to Z: Obtaining an appointment & getting through it.

– Set expectations;

– Send kind reminders through different channels;

– Uncover their pain points;

– Present case studies which resulted in the same pain points being resolved;

– Ask for the budget;

– Present your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

– Close the deal: Agree on WHEN the decision will be made.

We discuss each of these steps here 👉 How to Write B2B Emails that Sell

And when it comes to Sales discovery and demo calls 👈 this is a great read on what are they and how to schedule them.

Pain point #3. Performing linear Cold Outreach Consistently 

Zachary Bernard, Co-Founder @ WeFeatureYou

I believe every sales professional out there, can resonate with this pain, more or less.

Our ideas for mitigating this pain point

We feel you, Zach. And while the cold outreach cannot be avoided altogether from the job responsibilities of any member on the B2B sales team, it can be aided by technology. 🦾🤖

There are some really powerful sales tools on the market that were specifically invented and designed to ease the pain of the manual, repetitive cold outreach in B2B sales. They assist sales reps to automate big chunks of the sales process and find the contact data they need to send personalized messages to their prospects.

👉 List of 10 Sales Tools You Need to Grow your Business

Sales pain point #4. Disruption in the SaaS company’s progress

Ben Zellner, Chief Executive Officer @ 3000MileMyth

It’s true. SaaS start-ups are notorious for having a turbulent journey on their trajectory to business growth. Especially in the early stages.

How to surpass this SaaS pain point?

1. Collecting feedback from your B2B customers is usually done by the customer success team, among the many other things they do to keep your customers happy and subscribing.

To make sure your SaaS survives the rough waters, you’ll not only need sales talent acquisition, but also an experienced customer success manager.

This is because customer’s success:

– Improves the Renewal Process;

– Increases Customer Retention Rate;

– Keeps the Churn Rate low;

– Improves Customer Lifetime Value;

and more 👉  The Power of Customer Success in B2B SaaS.

2. Regularly measure and analyze the most important SaaS sales metrics, identify both lagging and leading performance indicators so you can optimize your business’s progress, and steer the wheel of your start-up in the sustainable growth direction.

Some help with that 👉 Are you winning? 5 Brutal Truths about Saas Sales Metrics.

B2B pain point #5. Your sales reps aren’t connecting with prospects

Solution: “The first thing you should do as a manager, in my opinion, is figuring out if this is happening and how frequently. Finding a pain point in your team is similar to finding a pain point in a prospect. Take a breather, ask open-ended questions, and then offer solutions.”

Daniel Carter, SEO Manager @ Skuuudle

Final words

B2B sales pain points may have a wide range, but the solutions are plenty as well. Any B2B sales team will struggle and strife if there is an undefined sales process, technological deficiency, poor data, or lack of training. Senior executives should be able to understand that and offer potential solutions.

Besides, 61% of execs admit their sales managers aren’t properly trained in pipeline management techniques. (Harvard Business Review)

Modern B2B sales have numerous buyer stages, complex sales funnel, and common sales challenges with the modern buyers. So train your people! Sales coaching is crucial for B2B sales reps. And B2B companies that train managers to manage their sales pipelines see 9% faster revenue growth.