How do you overcome objections about functions at your company you cannot control

The company I work for has a great offering, that is preferred by many of our customers. However, there are back end functions performed by engineers and customer service reps that are done poorly or slowly. Additionally, our platform is clunky and has technical errors that slow every one down.


I am able to build a strong relationship and get our customers to use us more, however, these issues only seem to compound and I find myself taking two steps forward and 1-2 steps back.


Besides consistency in driving the value and building on the relationship, what have some of you done to overcome lackluster performance by the supporting staff around your sales team?


One last note, management is aware and while they are trying to improve processes, nothing tangible to change the day to day headaches has really been done.


Thank you for any help!

👑 Sales Strategy
🛢 Energy & Industrials
6
braintank
Politicker
1
Enterprise Account Executive
Are you selling SaaS? Not sure how great of an offering it is if there are manual processes slowing everything down.
Cornholio
Opinionated
0
Account Executive
FinTech for residential solar- projects get reviewed by engineers for approval and funding purposes but the process is cumbersome and inconsistent. Our platform is the largest issue which has error messages that slow down our customers. 
softwaresails
Politicker
1
Sales Manager
Yeah this is unfortunate. If the product is lacking there isn’t much you can do. 

The only suggestion I have is not to show or talk about the parts of the system that are clunky or have issues. However, I know that may not be possible. 
Cornholio
Opinionated
1
Account Executive
Agreed- they like our products so it is some give and take with the process. 

I just find myself taking them to a more expensive restaurant the next time!
softwaresails
Politicker
1
Sales Manager
As long as you are expensing that restaurant you might as well make it nice!
Beasthouse
Opinionated
1
Corporate trainer
i ask people if they remember how their salary works and then just move on

Beasthouse
Opinionated
1
Corporate trainer
honestly it sounds like sales and development need a team building event. this happens in time share all the time, sales teams over sell over promise and fuck over the fulfillment team. your management has no handled fulfillment or they lost track of their sales teams. i bet if you dropped your over selling of the features and stuck to simple benefits it would go better. I'm absolutely just assuming here sooo yea 
Ryase1113
Opinionated
0
Regional Director
One idea...  If you're super close with your customers, you can bring them into the feedback loop more closely and set up a candid call with your leadership team to get the customers feedback directly.  That helps solidify your relationship with the customer, shows your company that you're serious about fixing the issues and builds further trust between the 2 companies.  (Also takes some of the pressure from the customer off of you and onto your leadership team...  they now have a direct line of communication)


After this, if they don't make a serious effort to fix the platform, they probably aren't interested in actually fixing the issues.  Unfortunately, sometimes it's time to cut bait and run.
0
CEO
I've built over 50 sales teams and this book/summary was the best confirmation of my experiences as a leader. https://lifeclub.org/books/sales-management-simplified-mike-weinberg-review-summary
The author also built over 100 sales teams and only found four companies worth working for after many years. Change starts from the top, so it's better to find a well-run company than to keep trying to fix a poorly managed one.
38
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