In today's competitive and fast-paced business environment, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) encounter unique challenges. Our global B2B sales study, drawing insights from 1,500 industry leaders, reveals that acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones rank as the top growth priorities among SMEs, but data-driven sales steering is not far behind. Another recent report from the Harvard Business Review emphasizes that 88% of executives recognize seamless customer engagement as critical to achieving organizational success.
*Importance = Share of respondents that stated 4 (important) or 5 (highly important) among all respondents; N = 301
Source: Simon-Kucher B2B global sales study conducted in September – October 2023
How can a CRM system boost sales?
Strategic implementation of a customer relationship management (CRM) system offers SMEs a structured and transformative solution to their challenges. A properly deployed CRM enhances lead management, automates workflows, improves marketing efficiency, supports sales transparency, and ultimately increases overall sales effectiveness. This empowers sales teams to focus more on selling and less on administrative tasks.
Based on our survey findings, this article explores five key challenges identified by senior executives in B2B industries. We also discuss how CRMs can effectively address and resolve these issues.
The five biggest challenges in B2B sales
1. Lack of sales pipeline visibility
One of the primary use cases for CRM is the improvement of forecasting. Unfortunately for salespeople, in many organizations the value of this application is largely for the CFO. A major obstacle faced by the C-suite of SMEs (and their investors) is the limited visibility into their sales pipeline. Without a clear understanding of potential opportunities and their stages, accurately forecasting sales and addressing critical areas becomes challenging.
Implementing a CRM system equipped with visualization tools such as dashboards and sales funnel analysis provides real-time actionable insights into the sales pipeline. This enables executives to monitor progress, identify trends, and make informed, data-driven decisions to optimize sales performance. It should be positioned so that this also helps front line salespeople respond quickly to the inevitable management questions about forecasting, and also should help them identify where to invest their time between top of funnel (TOFU), mid-funnel (MIFU), or bottom of funnel (BOFU) activities. The ultimate KPI and outcome here should be improved sales velocity.
Common issue: Poor design of dashboards hinders the interpretation of critical data/insights and slows adoption by the front line.
2. Lengthy and unpredictable sales cycles
Faster sales cycles have higher win rates. Unpredictable sales cycles pose a significant challenge for SMEs, making it hard to plan and allocate resources effectively. Inconsistent sales timelines can lead to distractions, missed opportunities, and strained customer relationships.
A CRM system should help standardize, streamline, and automate the sales process by tracking interactions and activities, providing valuable insights into typical sales timelines. This enables businesses to predict sales cycles more accurately, allows the sales team to engage prospects systematically and promptly, and improves overall customer satisfaction. Sales managers can reinforce this process and improve pipeline accuracy by performing analysis of win rates beyond the average sales cycle length (often significantly lower) and having monthly conversations with their reps about when it is time to move on from languishing deals.
Common issue: Use of generic, out-of-the box sales process stages can fail to reflect the meaningful activities and stage gates in unique businesses and obscure details about sales cycle bottlenecks.
3. Inefficient lead management
Many businesses, especially SMEs, struggle with manual and fragmented lead management and nurturing activities. This results in lost prospects and decreased productivity. Without a centralized overview, they often miss opportunities, duplicate efforts, and face data inconsistencies. According to HubSpot, 61% of marketers find generating quality leads a significant challenge, lacking the sophisticated tools and strategies to attract and nurture high-quality leads.
An integrated CRM solution effectively addresses the challenges of manual and fragmented lead management by providing a centralized platform that streamlines efforts across sales and marketing. By implementing data-driven lead scoring mechanisms and automated nurturing processes, businesses can ensure timely follow-ups and increase conversion rates.
Centralizing lead management within a CRM consolidates lead data, simplifies tracking, and prioritizes leads based on their likelihood to convert. Additionally, integrating the CRM tools with existing office productivity tools such as email automation, as well as quote and invoice generation facilitates timely follow-ups and enhances the nurturing of high-potential leads, leading to improved productivity and better outcomes.
Common issue: Collateral used in nurture paths should follow the buyer’s journey and include a mix of media and gated/non-gated content, but many companies fail to perform the required voice of customer (VOC) research and A/B analysis to understand what is truly engaging, often due to workload/capacity.
4. Ineffective communication and collaboration
Communication silos and inadequate collaboration among sales teams significantly hinder knowledge sharing and synergy in B2B sales efforts. According to a Harvard Business Review study, 44% of executives feel these communication barriers are major impediments to successful customer engagement. Duplication of efforts leads to inefficiencies, poorly allocated resources, and missed cross-selling opportunities. Misalignment between sales and marketing teams prevents the effective use of collective insights and expertise to meet customer needs.
A CRM system can ideally bridge these gaps with real-time features such as shared calendars, task assignments, document sharing, and analytics tools. These capabilities help identify communication gaps and optimize team collaboration strategies, ensuring a consistent experience for both prospects and customers. In many cases, there are AI analytics suites e.g., Gong.io, Salesforce Einstein Analytics, SalesLoft, Clari etc. that will help identify which opportunities are most attractive and which sales messages are resonating and allow sharing of this information quickly and broadly across the organization to optimize performance.
Common issue: Many companies don’t set up an adequate closed loop feedback process (with an accountable owner and regular reviews) that truly evaluates return on marketing investment (ROMI), lead scoring/qualification approaches, and win rates by lead source or sales message for continuous improvement.
5. Manual and time-consuming administrative tasks
Even the best sales teams often spend half of their time on administrative tasks. This workload diverts efforts from core sales activities, hinders scalability and growth, and increases the risk of human errors and inaccuracies. Our research indicates that best-in-class sales organizations spend twice the amount of time selling versus the average company. Said another way, this represents doubling the effective size of the sales organization without spending any more money.
A CRM system can automate routine and administrative tasks such as data entry, lead assignment, and report generation. This minimizes manual input errors while maintaining data integrity. Additionally, mobile CRM applications enable sales teams to access and update information on-the-go, providing added convenience and efficiency.
Common issue: Often, designers and integrators get overly ambitious in terms of required data fields and miss out on data providers that can pre-populate or clean/update different fields, and this reduces compliance in the field by taking more time (up to 30 minutes per opportunity for one of our clients) to enter new account and contact information.
How to successfully implement a CRM solution
While CRM platforms offer numerous growth benefits, ineffective implementation can hinder progress. Simply automating inefficient processes will not resolve core issues. Here are key considerations to strategically navigate a CRM transformation:
1. Align goals and define KPIs
Develop goals that align with your company’s (and key stakeholders’) strategic objectives and establish clear expectations for the CRM's contribution. Support these goals with well-defined KPIs to monitor progress.
2. Align business requirements
Do your own internal voice of the customer (VOC) research and ensure the CRM configuration closely aligns to your actual sales processes and business requirements. This helps avoid misleading reports and ensures that salespeople find the system intuitive and easy to use.
3. Select your CRM platform
Carefully select a platform (and license level) with features that meet your specific needs. Make sure the value it provides justifies the cost of the platform and its implementation.
4. Map processes and plan your transformation
Invest time in mapping current processes across existing systems and the envisioned design. This evaluation helps create a detailed configuration plan to guide the transformation and reduce the need for rework.
5. Account for change management
Don’t underestimate what it will take to drive adoption and get quality data into the system. Work the change management from top to bottom and don’t hesitate to pay/report on activities in the early going.
6. Roll out a pilot
First impressions are crucial. Conduct a pilot rollout with a subset of users as your "promoters." Provide them with tailored onboarding guides to maximize adoption success and gather early feedback.
7. Continuously improve
Establish a feedback loop and monitor usage patterns and data reporting. Use this information for continuous refinement, reporting enhancement, further development, and integration with other existing systems.
How Simon-Kucher can help
Unlock the full potential of your CRM systems with Simon-Kucher and take your sales performance to the next level. Our experts specialize in optimizing sales pipelines and enhancing sales team productivity, helping you nurture and strengthen customer relationships.
We support sales reps in closing deals more efficiently, utilizing powerful CRM tools to streamline processes, and improving user experience. Whether you're refining your contact management or analyzing customer data for better insights, our wide range of services ensures your CRM software for sales is user-friendly and effective.
Small businesses and large enterprises alike can benefit from our expertise in customer relationship management systems and platforms. Connect with us to unlock the full potential of CRM technology and position your business for sustained growth in the competitive B2B marketplace.
