JoshSales are dropping, and you can’t figure out why. Everything seems like it’s running as it should, but is it? You might have problems in places you don’t realize. You need to make finding those problems priority one or risk losing even more sales. But where do you look?
The simple answer is everywhere. When you’re in the business of selling, you’re dealing with customers. And it’s impossible to keep everyone happy all the time. But when you have more people unhappy than satisfied, the problems stem from inside the company. Following are three areas of your business you should look into for problems.
Fulfillment Drops the Ball
Fulfillment has the job of correctly putting together orders the way the customer ordered. It’s not unusual for a mistake to get made and the wrong item sent. But when mistakes are frequent, almost common, customers won’t return for future purchases. No one wants to make their order, wait for the item to arrive and find out it’s the wrong one. Your company policy to make good on an oops only goes so far when mistakes are frequent. Get a handle on the problem, retrain staff if necessary, and implement quality control checks before boxes are sealed for shipping.
Customer Service and Out-of-Control Telecom Costs
Your customer service department typically makes outgoing calls to respond to unhappy customers. That’s on top of the usual outgoing call load from the rest of the business. It’s normal to work with different telecommunication companies to get the best deal for toll-free numbers and outgoing calls across the country. But if you wind up with too many call packages, you can lose money because you can’t track your costs properly. You don’t want to reduce customer service working hours simply to keep up with your telecom costs. Instead, streamline your telecom invoicing with Asentinel‘s electronic invoicing software. You’ll have the ability to view every last detail and charge, save money through more efficient invoicing, and keep your customer service hours stable.
Marketing and Sales Not Working Together
The whole point of the marketing department is to bring interest to the company in the form of advertising that generates inbound calls. From there, sales picks up by turning those leads into purchase orders. When neither department work together, or one isn’t doing its job properly, the company suffers in the form of lost sales. The reasons why are many: personality clashes, management issues, even poor training. You need to get to the bottom of the problems and get both departments doing their job properly. Investigate, listen and learn about the problems going on, then work on fixing them.
It’s not always easy to find the source that’s causing sales to drop. It might be one department or it’s multiple ones. Your business reputation and income is on the line if you don’t find out where the problems stem from. Don’t wait or ignore the issues. Get on top of them and turn the losses into sales.