Surveys can be a great tool to understand your sales team’s approach. So let’s talk about sales survey questions.
One of the most important teams to learn from is your sales team. When you’re running a company, your sales team is your eyes and ears. They’re the ones facing the customer, and they know what sells.
So it is crucial that you constantly learn from them. Whether you are looking to refine your sales process, understand the challenges that they face or overcome a sales growth slump, these sales team survey questions will give you some insights.
The 6 Most Important Sales Survey Questions For Your Sales Team
Here’s a sample sales survey created using SurveySparrow:
Let’s cover each of the sales team survey questions above.
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- CSAT surveys for customer support analysis. Get numbers you can namedrop.
- NPS surveys for customer loyalty. Again, more numbers you can quote.
- 360 degree performance reviews for high-performance sales teams.
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- What’s the biggest obstacle while adding new customers?
- What are the most common questions customers ask?
- What does the customer’s typical buying process look like? How long does it last?
- How do you define a sales-ready lead?
- What is the information you find yourself looking for quite often? And why?
- Information you wish you had about your customers
Like we’ve said above, giving your sales team a survey is a great idea. The success of this survey though depends completely on the sales survey questions. So here are the 6 questions that you should not miss in your sales survey questionnaire.
1. What’s The Biggest Obstacle While Adding New Customers?
This is not a tough question for any sales team to answer. Your salespeople have likely been through countless experiences of not being able to convert leads. Eventually, they are likely to have noticed a pattern.
At one particular step, things are not going so smoothly and that’s how you lose them. Or a competitor is doing more aggressive marketing or offering a better product. In their calls with prospective customers, salespeople are likely to confront such issues. There should be a proper outlet for them to voice these concerns.
An organization with good internal communications will pick up these concerns and start addressing them. But this communication needs to be facilitated. You cannot depend on teams organically coordinating with each other. This is where the sales survey questionnaire comes in.
This sales survey question is how you find out what the major obstacles to conversion are. At times, these obstacles are easily dealt with. Sometimes they’re more fundamental and need bigger changes. Either way, surveying your sales team is the first step to figuring that out.
2. What Are The Most Common Questions Customers Ask?
This sales survey question is more focused on the content side of things. Your marketing team has implemented its campaign. The lead is secured and sent to your sales team. When a salesperson contacts the lead, what questions do they still have? Is there a way for marketing to address any of the most commonly asked questions? This would save a lot of time for both the customer and the sales team, and help you process more leads.
It is also generally helpful to know what your customers are most curious about. Is your product or service looking great before they hear the price? If pricing is the most common question leads have, it’s likely that that’s what their decision depends on.
Are customers routinely asking for a specific feature? Are they asking how you’re better than the competition? Sales teams know what most customers are curious about. Think about it like feedback for your marketing campaign. For any good marketer, this information is gold.
A content strategy that makes the effort to regularly incorporate feedback is likely to be more successful. That is why it’s a great idea to find out what your sales team is being asked about. This sales survey question is your way of doing that.
3. What Does The Customer’s Typical Buying Process Look Like? How Long Does It Last?
A successful marketing team needs to understand what it’s like to be the customer. Often, campaigns fail because marketers can’t put themselves in the customer’s shoes. Understanding the buying process for the customer is an important part of that.
How long does it take to finalize a product? Do customers usually have to go through a procurement cell? Is it a particularly tedious process, or done in a few clicks? Your sales team will have answers to all these questions, and this sales survey question will let them tell you. If you’re going to make a great campaign, these answers are crucial.
Knowing what the buying process looks like will tell you how to attract leads. Is it a one-click, impulsive buy kind of thing? Or do you need to aim for a more long-term, brand awareness strategy? For enterprise clients where the process is especially tedious, a different campaign might be required.
A sales survey question like this one also helps you find out what you can do better. Perhaps the conversion process is more tedious than it should be. Is there a way you can make it easier? If you let them, your sales team will be able to show you the red flags. An online survey tool like SurveySparrow can make it way easier to create and design surveys to ask your sales team.
4. How Do You Define A Sales-Ready Lead?
This is a great question to help you turn in better leads to your sales team. Having processed a number of customers, salespeople notice patterns. There are just some common features that make a lead ripe for conversion. ‘If only all of them were like this!’ they must say to themselves. They can be if you use their insights to target better.
This sales survey question helps you find out the features of your ideal lead. Maybe they are usually in a position of authority. Or maybe they’re usually from a certain type of company. If that’s the case, you should design your marketing strategy around attracting leads with similar features. Use your sales survey questionnaire to find insights like these. They will transform your marketing approach for the better.
5. What is the Information You Find Yourself Looking For Quite Often? And Why?
This sales survey question checks in on how much the sales team knows about the product. It’s similar to the question about common customer queries. But it finds out areas where the sales team might need more knowledge. It’s a measure of how well your company’s internal communications are going.
When facing a customer, your sales team should know the answers to everything that’s thrown at them. It’s the only way they will convince a lead to become a customer. To have all the answers, though, the sales team needs to have access to the company’s resources.
It might be the case that they’re missing some information that is impacting sales. They might be too shy to ask, or simply not take enough initiative. A sales survey questionnaire is conducted for this exact reason. You want to be proactive about these issues, and find out what’s not working.
It’s a great idea to ask your sales team what information they often have to look for. It also gives you a hint into the less common concerns your customers might have. What situations are your salespeople dealing with outside of the usual? How can you use these situations to your advantage? Use this sales survey question to help you find out.
6. Information You Wish You Had About Your Customers
It is a well-known fact that effective sales require high-quality data. Selling things impromptu might be great improv practice, but it’s not a good sales strategy. To achieve the best results, sales teams need to know the customer profile. What are their interests? What challenges do they want to solve? How can your product/service help them?
Having answers to these questions can be great to go into a call prepared. It increases your chances of conversion. Your sales team might be in desperate need of a pre-sales survey. Having more data on your customers helps sales teams prepare a well-defined strategy. This sales survey question finds out what they need to know most urgently.
What questions do you ask a lead before you pass them on to sales? You can use the insights from the responses to this question in your sales survey questionnaire. You can then pass on leads to your sales team with the data they need. This level of cooperation and smooth functioning only helps everyone.
Why Your Sales Team Needs A Set of Sales Survey Questions
We have shown you the best sales survey questions you can ask your team. Now we need to answer a more basic question: why is a sales team survey required? What good does it do?
Often, these team-coordination activities are looked over. But they could be the key to driving your organization’s growth. Here’s why.
#1. Find Weaknesses in Content Strategy
This is probably the most important objective of a sales team survey. Marketers build and implement content strategies, but their job ends there. They don’t deal with the leads that come their way. This is why they don’t know if the leads are good.
Are the customers attracted from your marketing campaigns the ideal customers? Is your campaign informing them about the important details they need to know beforehand? These are questions your sales team has answers to. A sales survey questionnaire is how you find out what’s working and what’s not.
Marketers and salespeople should also ideally work towards the same goals. Does your sales team need more leads? If yes, maybe you need to expand the marketing efforts. Are they getting too many useless leads? Then your strategy needs to focus on attracting a narrower target audience.
When sales and marketing work together, only good things happen. Sales survey questions are simply the way to make that happen.
#2. Keep Them Aligned With Your Vision
Nothing is more worrisome than a sales team that is not fully informed about the thing they’re selling. This happens more often than you think.
Sales teams may know the basics of selling your product or service. But they may not know why it’s worth selling. Or worse, they may believe it’s not worth selling at all.
It is important to use sales survey questions as an opportunity to ask the sales team how they feel about what they’re selling. It tests how well your internal communications are going.
A sales survey questionnaire might also reveal confusions the sales team might have about a product. They may be in need of a team meeting to address these issues. A good sales team survey will help you find out.
Make Them Feel Heard
As sales teams talk to customers over months and years, they gather insights about the company. They know what questions come up regularly. They know what the biggest barriers are to selling a product. But often, their insights are not given their due weight. This can lead to lower employee engagement.
Making sure that your sales team feels heard is in your organization’s own best interest. Team members will stay motivated.
More importantly, you will get the insights you desperately need. Ignoring sales teams’ experience is a grave mistake no company will want to make.
A sales survey questionnaire gives your sales team a voice. They can tell you what they know, and feel involved. Answering the sales survey questions makes teams feel like they’re a part of a larger mission. Only if they feel this way will they believe in that mission, and try to sell as best as they can.
TL;DR:
- With a set of good sales survey questions, you can get great insights from your sales team and use them to drive conversions.
- Moreover, for smooth and efficient functioning, the different teams at any organization need to learn from each other. But companies often find it hard to make different departments work together. So a good sales survey questionnaire can help ensure that both marketing and sales teams work with each other!
- It is also important to ensure that your sales team is aligned with your vision of your product. With a good set of sales survey questions, you will be able to reach all three of these goals.
Wrapping Up
Now that we’ve gone over the best sales survey questions to ask your team, you are all set. The questions listed above are the generally most important ones. You should include or exclude questions in your sales survey questionnaire based on your company’s specific needs.
Your sales team is full of precious data that you need. Cooperating with them is the key to a better marketing strategy, as well as more efficient sales. Any company that cares about efficient sales should ask their team this set of sales survey questions.
There are plenty of ways to improve cooperation and increase efficiency in organizations. The simplest, though, is simply to ask your team. What do they feel you can do better? The insights you get will surprise you. Act on these insights to prepare a sales front that is well-equipped and ready to convert those leads. Send your team a sales survey questionnaire and take the first step on that journey!
