4 top sales challenges B2B SaaS vendors face when it comes to moving quickly

For today’s B2B SaaS vendors, there’s a growing need to move faster and more effectively. B2B buyers are navigating reduced budgets, multiple appealing options in the market, and regulatory pressure to choose vendors that have a strong security posture. As such, sales reps need to be agile and proactive if they want to successfully add to their customer base. 

In this article, we’re sharing some of the top challenges that sales reps face when it comes to the speed of the process, and what you can do to avoid them.

1. There’s a lot of noise in your lead pipeline

On average, 50% of the prospects in your pipeline won’t be a good fit for your solution. This means that your sales team is likely spending a lot of valuable time chasing down individuals that aren’t actually interested in your solution. Sure, they may have filled out a form to sign up for a webinar or download the whitepaper your marketing team published last quarter, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re looking to adopt a product like yours.

To mitigate this time wasting, there are a few things you can do: 

• Ensure there’s alignment between marketing and sales in terms of materials and events being produced
• Build a lead scoring system that immediately disqualifies prospects that are likely to not need your product
• Use automated tools to qualify leads depending on the actions they’ve taken on your site

2. Sales cycles are longer than ever

Today, the B2B sales cycle can take weeks or even months. The factors influencing this lag are various: 

• B2B buyers do a lot of research and have multiple decisions before taking their learnings to other stakeholders
• Procurement teams need inputs from various decision makers
• Many companies want to conduct software demos before making a decision
• Enterprises want to ensure that their vendors are compliant with security best practices, which often requires long questionnaires 

While there is only so much the sales team can control in this scenario, there are things that can be done to accelerate the sales cycle. For instance, becoming SOC 2 compliant can reduce the burden of proving the stability of your security posture. Crafting a comprehensive trove of sales collateral can also be useful as you can share it with the interested parties to proactively answer any questions. In addition, taking the time to build relationships with key decision makers can also help streamline the process. 

3. You team doesn’t have access to the right data

Like with many departments in your business, data has become a core function for enabling the success of a sales team. However, this data needs to be used effectively for it to be impactful. A lot of teams suffer from a lack of data hygiene and poor data sharing processes, and are therefore left with an inaccurate picture of the sales landscape for their business. This results in inaccurately qualified leads, poorly constructed customer personas, and an inefficient sales team. 

To stay ahead of this issue and streamline how your sales team goes to market, it’s important to have the right processes, analytics tools, and data systems in place — and they should all integrate with each other seamlessly to create a trusted source of truth for your team.

4. Your sales reps are held back by time-consuming tasks

According to HubSpot, sales reps spend a lot of time (69% of it) on tasks that could be automated or streamlined. Up to 21% of their time is spent on writing emails, 17% on data entry, and another 12% is spent on scheduling meetings. Meanwhile, only 34% of their time is actually spent on selling. The time burdens on sales reps mean that they can only spend a limited amount of their attention on moving sales forward, and that ultimately slows down the process. 

To address this challenge, sales teams need to take a closer look at their sales tech stack. Introducing automation where possible — as long as it doesn’t disrupt the prospect experience — will be key to helping your sales team reprioritize their time and efforts to more important tasks.

You’ve got to go slow to go fast

Speeding up your sales team isn’t going to happen overnight — and that’s ok. It’s important to take the time to assess where your gaps and bottlenecks are, and what you can change to move faster. Once you have this clarity, you can start with quick wins and then evolve to addressing more systemic issues.

At Pima, we’ve made it easier than ever for SaaS vendors to share security information quickly and securely. Learn more about our product on the homepage.