Using the equations and measurements discussed above, you must identify the bottlenecks in your sales productivity. Then, you must remove those bottlenecks.
Here are nine doable methods, strategies, and procedures for increasing sales productivity that you can use to start closing transactions right away.
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Examine your IT stack and match it to your productivity objectives.
Without the goals and sales tools that drive it, there is no sales productivity. Therefore, the caliber of your salespeople’s tech stack has a big impact on how productive they are.
According to research from LinkedIn, 73% of salespeople utilize technology to close deals, and of those who do, 97% see it as essential to their performance.
A intelligent sales tech workflow is difficult to put together, though. The average sales firm utilizes ten tools, according to one survey, but another found that sales professionals barely use two-thirds of their tech stack, citing a lack of relevant tool integration.
It’s not necessary to be that way.
Start by assessing your company’s demands (or goals) to see whether your tech stack satisfies them in order to set together a tech stack that improves the performance of your sales people. Examining your business’s stage and the resources at your disposal is the best method to do this.
Are you now in the startup, growth, or maturity stages?
The tech stack requirements would change depending on the goals at each stage of growth, and we’ll outline them for you.
The startup phase is typically characterized by little revenue, significant initial costs, a small sales team, and constrained financial resources. In this stage, generating more leads and achieving high conversion rates should be your top priorities because doing so will help you raise capital for your company and advance to the growth stage.
Lead generating software, a CRM, and automation tools would make up an appropriate sales tech stack at this time.
Your company is at the growth stage if it has established itself in the market and has a sizable customer base. Here, you should concentrate on using demonstrations, case studies, and solution selling to close agreements more quickly.
In order to enable remote workers, your tech stack must have integrations, be scalable, and offer more functionality than free products.
A couple of our features that increase sales productivity are listed below:
- Shared templates, automated sequences, and bulk email: The days of emailing every lead on your list separately are long gone. You may customise your email (at scale) and target the prospects who will be most receptive by utilizing intelligent bulk email sending to custom lead lists based on dynamic filtering. As a result, you can easily design high-impact programs and distribute them to tens of thousands of specifically targeted prospects. Additionally, you can construct a drip series using our Email Sequences that automatically sends customisable emails to prospects and leads over the course of a few days or weeks.
- Follow-Ups: With the help of our one-click follow-up tasks, reminders, and email snoozing tools, you won’t ever forget to check up on the prospects in your pipeline, even after they have left your automated sales sequences. In order for you to concentrate on the more crucial duties, we will remind your staff when to follow up.
- Built-In Calling: Our CRM is the only one on the market with built-in calling, which keeps your reps working on all of their primary activities inside of a single application, further reducing time spent. Additionally, our predictive dialing call automation software significantly cuts down on the amount of time you spend listening to dial tones. Your sales team may now contact numerous numbers simultaneously, and the predictive dialer’s technology recognizes when a live person answers the phone and connects the conversation with the nearest available sales representative.
Additionally, you can automate multi-channel cold outreach with Reply, handle contracts with PandaDoc, manage people and resources with UpWork, and schedule meetings and demos with Demodesk.
The maturity stage is the last step. Your market would have shrunk at this point as a result of rising competition and market saturation, and you would have established yourself as one of the major players. In this case, your main priorities should be account growth, cross-selling, and up-selling.
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Invest in the onboarding procedure for the sales team.
The practice of training sales staff and integrating them into your company’s system and culture is known as the sales onboarding process.
It gives them everything they require to be successful in their new position, including knowledge of your company’s goals and operating procedures, assistance in setting up their IT infrastructure, and knowledge of your clients and your offering.
A uniform onboarding area is the best approach to reduce ramp time, increase employee retention, and increase productivity.
You can take the following actions for effective sales onboarding:
- Establish a structured sales onboarding procedure: Onboarding for sales takes more than a single day. Depending on the size and industry verticals of your organization, it can take a few weeks, several months, or even a full year. A standardized procedure will make things easier. Making a checklist of tasks that must be finished within a certain time period and providing it to new hires is one way to accomplish this.
- Assemble their IT stack and workstation: We spent a lot of time earlier discussing how to evaluate and choose a tech stack for your sales staff. Your new sales hire needs to be trained on using the tech stack efficiently, among other things. Keep in mind that inconsistent utilization of a tech stack is a major cause of financial loss and subpar sales productivity.
- Introduce them to your service and product: Include information about your product’s technical characteristics, including its features and benefits as well as its functionality and value propositions. Additionally, this is the appropriate location to describe the customer’s pain points, buyer personas, customer categories, and different product or service types. There are various ways to accomplish this, including one-on-one coaching, seminars, training materials, or matching them with another employee who has experience with the firm or the product. For future reference, you should also offer product literature such as white papers, brochures, and user manuals.
- Impart to them your sales procedure: The procedures for obtaining new leads, entering them into the CRM, nurturing leads, scoring leads, completing deals, and onboarding new clients should normally be included in sales process training. In addition, teach them how to use your CRM and how to deliver sales presentations, pitches, and product demonstrations.
- Introduce them to a mentor: This is often someone they can interact with, ask questions of, and shadow to obtain firsthand knowledge of how the job is performed. It can come from your top sales performers or the most talented team members.
- Give them their allotment: Setting unique goals and the required performance level is the next step. Inform them of the goals the sales department is currently pursuing and how their particular position fits in. Then, specify the precise metrics they must meet within a given timeframe and explain the consequences of failing to do so (as well as the reward of doing so). Instead of tracking income for new hires, you might track the number of calls to be placed, the number of demos to be scheduled, or the number of scheduled appointments.
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Plan on Continuing Sales Team Training
Sales training ought to be ongoing rather than a one-time event. Your sales representatives stay up to date on the newest methods and ideal procedures with ongoing sales training. It also aids in updating previous training.
They will improve their ability to communicate, handle rejection, and sell techniques through regular sales training.
So how does it work? Here is a detailed explanation.
- Determine their training requirements: Being aware of your team’s requirements will enable you to build training procedures that will benefit them. To accomplish this, find performance gaps to get ideas for what your training should cover, and then create training materials and modules that address those gaps.
- Create a training schedule: Determine how the training will fit with the short- and long-term needs, resources, and organizational structure of your company. The strategy should outline the training goals, the subjects to be covered, and the training techniques (e.g., in-person workshops, conferences, online course modules, and webinars).
- Request input: Request feedback on how training affects participants’ performance in order to enhance upcoming training sessions. Utilize this information to improve your sales training methods and strategies.
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Streamline Routine Tasks Using Sales Automation
Sales automation can be useful if repetitive processes are consuming a lot of important time.
As the diagram below illustrates, routine chores have a significant negative impact on your sales productivity.
Despite recent improvements, this graph reveals that sales representatives continue to waste a lot of time. The average amount of time a salesperson spends selling has climbed by 8%. Therefore, why would someone whose job is is to sell—to increase revenue—spend only 1/5 of their time executing that task?
Because most businesses are unable to maximize production. Why have salespeople not yet reached their peak productivity?
The sad fact is that most sales teams are ignorant of:
- How to efficiently automate jobs that are not required
- When to outsource tasks that can be completed by assistants or contractors that are paid less
- How to train your employees to group less time-critical tasks into blocks of downtime at the end of the day
- Learning how to recognize which tasks can be automated, outsourced, or batch processed comes first in achieving these goals.
This is how:
Automate Non-Critical Tasks for Sales Reps
Choose the activity from one of the categories in the graphic above; does it fit under planning, administration, or order processing? This will help you decide which jobs your reps should automate in the interest of sales productivity. These are the easy targets to look for while looking for automation solutions.
However, more and more sales tools are now compatible with software like Zapier, which enables you to link the various components of your tech stack and allow for easy data transfer between them while automating various operations.
Subcontract Low-Vector Activities
Even with the right automation in place, if your sales reps are spending too much time on non-sales-related activities, you should either hire an in-house administrative assistant or a virtual assistant to help with the more routine tasks like scheduling demo meetings, creating pitch decks, and creating invoices.
If your sales force is spread or remote, hire a contract-based virtual assistant in a time zone that works for you to determine if that organizational setup can satisfy your demands. Having your sales assistant work in the same office as your team members (and proactively pitching in when there is a need) will probably result in a huge boost in productivity if your team is based in one place.
Less Time-Sensitive Tasks in Bulk
Batch processing is the grouping of related tasks that call for related resources (sometimes repetitively) in order to simplify them.
For instance, it would be a more effective use of your time to batch all of your sales tallying into just one block of time at the end of the week rather than manually updating your report after each new deal closes throughout your week if you were in charge of producing a weekly sales report for your manager to review.
Numerous crucial tasks connected to sales that can be batch processed. Think about scheduling your manual follow-up emails into one block of time at the start of the morning, or your sales calls into only one or two significant pieces of time. This makes it possible for you to enter a state of flow and work more effectively.
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Enhance the lead scoring procedure
Sales representatives spend less time following bad leads when the leads are better. There isn’t a common method for scoring leads, though. You must determine what is effective for you.
In addition, other elements like team size, annual income, and the source of the referral affect how a lead is rated and, consequently, how quickly our sales team contacts a lead.
Another good example is the lead scoring system used by Lead Pilot. Based on their contacts with your business—such as the material they read, the sites they visited, the actions they took on your website, their conversations with your sales team, etc.—they rate leads on a scale of 1 to 100.
They then update ratings in real time based on these encounters as well as your input. This enables you to reach out to a contact when their level of engagement is at its highest.
Here’s an illustration. Let’s say you market trip management software, and a potential customer does the following:
- Performed a web search (let’s give this a score of 4)
- Downloaded an eBook (give it a 10).
- Asked your sales representative about a potential vacation spot (let’s give this a 30)
This lead has a 44 and is more likely to close the sale than a prospect who has merely downloaded an ebook.
Include both explicit information (data points like firm size, industry segment, job title, or geographic area) and implicit information in your lead scoring model to increase its accuracy.
Implicit scores are produced by tracking and observing your prospect’s behavior in addition to what they have said about themselves, such as the actions of the prospect for trip management in the aforementioned example.
Additionally, you can now personalize your prospects’ experience on your website based on their lead score and other pertinent information you gather using website personalization tools like RightMessage. For example, you can surface the most pertinent offers, change the headlines and testimonials to better relate to their particular industry, and do a lot more.
The quality of leads that your sales staff has access to will ultimately be considerably improved by your ability to increase your lead-scoring activities. That has an immediate effect on sales productivity.
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Increased Sales and Marketing Coo
Lead generation and conversion are two crucial components of your sales productivity that are impacted by sales and marketing alignment.
Lack of alignment can lead to a cross-functional issue where salespeople are unable to efficiently convert the leads because they are the wrong leads, and marketing is confused of what types of leads to bring in. Your efforts to meet your sales targets are hampered by this.
Don’t rely on our word alone, though. According to the survey, aligning marketing and sales can boost marketing approaches by more than 200% and boost client retention by 38%.
Furthermore, as it is marketing’s responsibility to develop the tools that enable sales to perform its duties more effectively and quickly, sales will struggle with sales enablement if adequate alignment is not achieved.
Start by allowing the marketing team to communicate with the sales team on a monthly or biweekly basis to talk about lead quality and examine your channel conversion rate. Then, marketing can design tests to see if it can modify the lead source (and quality).
To create a marketing strategy that draws in the most qualified prospects, the marketing team also needs preparatory information from the sales team. Additionally, they require it to produce personalized sales enablement materials.
This is so because in a world where marketing is driven by consumer pain points, the questions, concerns, and variables of satisfaction of customers all contribute to a strong marketing foundation. Salespeople, who deal with them on a daily basis, are the only ones who are more knowledgeable about it.
In contrast, marketing can present forthcoming campaigns, blog content that is in the pipeline, deals that will be promoted throughout the coming week, and collect input from sales at each level during cross-team meetings.
Create a shared Google Doc for your sales team so they can rapidly add ideas or case study materials whenever they end a conversation with a fresh insight for marketing to run with. This will advance the content brainstorming process.
However, you are free to develop the manner of collaboration however you see fit. The true challenge is in securing the value exchange required for this alignment to succeed.
You may make that easier by allowing them to work together on the following projects:
- Developing a perfect consumer profile
- Identifying the issues that customers have
- Dividing up the leads based on conversion rate
- Monitoring sales calls
- Examining previous customer behavior to spot trends
- Surveying customers in two departments
- Sharing data and analytics
- Conversion rate analysis by channel
- Looking at the lead sources
This will provide a steady stream of higher-quality leads with a considerably higher chance of converting.
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Make use of sales scripts and templates
Any pre-written strategy, questions, talking points, and discussion structures that your sales professionals and telemarketing agents use when speaking to prospects are referred to as a sales script (also known as a cold calling script).
Because of their impersonal tone and lack of individuality, sales scripts sometimes receive a poor rap.
But when properly used, sales scripts and templates can drive sales growth. Among their numerous advantages are:
- Providing practical knowledge to sellers.
- Assisting them in responding to commonly posed questions.
- Enabling them to make a distinctive, alluring pitch for your good or service.
By enabling your ramping salesperson to make effective product pitches and steer talks with prospects, having one on hand can also help them move into action more quickly.
The important thing to remember is that it doesn’t have to be used verbatim; rather, it should be used as a general framework to help them and potential customers structure their talks.
Consequently, we strongly advise using sales scripts and templates. Our free sales scripts are available here. Here is a guide on how to use sales scripts in the meantime.
- Personalize every sales call; failing to do so will almost always result in a hang-up. To know how to start a conversation and keep it going, do your homework about the prospect before making a sales call. You can use the information they supplied as a starting point, as well as research them and their company on social media, to get a sense of additional pain areas and identify subtle and not-so-subtle items they care about.
- It should be value-driven. “You are not selling your product, yet,” as Steli Efti puts it. Get their consent to talk with you further initially, that’s the idea. Show them the importance of the call and the advantages of the following steps, such as the meeting, demo, and discovery call.
- Create an effective formula: Having a tried-and-true formula in place for various scenarios is one of the best methods to avoid stumbling while using a sales script. Sales representatives will then understand how to carry on a discussion.
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Stop Attending Pointless Meetings
When there are too many meetings, sales productivity suffers. In reality, they have the exact opposite effect, and numerous articles have been written on the drawbacks of pointless meetings.
When you do have one-on-one meetings, make the most of them by having a very clear agenda, staying on task, and avoiding side topics if you can. End the meeting early and let your rep go back to selling if you can complete everything on the schedule without missing a beat.
Setting an agenda and making sure the conversation is relevant to everyone in the room are crucial during group meetings.
Running a pipeline review, for instance, can be quite beneficial for the rep whose leads are being processed and assessed. For the rest of your sales team, it is mostly a waste of time because they can learn next to nothing by simply listening without participating in the dialogue.
When sending out meeting invitations, follow the maxim “minimal possible attendance” and consider whether a meeting may be avoided with simply an email.
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Monitor Your Development
You must monitor sales productivity if you want to know if your efforts are paying off. After each successful modification to your sales productivity approach, evaluate your results.
Remember that if you don’t measure, you can’t succeed. Using the proper equipment is the first step in precise measuring…
With the help of our reporting solutions, you may reduce the ultra-complex reporting’s distractions and focus only on the insights that will enable you to increase your revenue.
The right CRM will be built to help your team enhance sales productivity at every turn, from monitoring your complete team’s pipeline overview to zooming in and detecting gaps where prospects tend to fall out of your sales funnel, to measuring individual performance and more.
