5 Proven Ways to Increase the Productivity of Your Sales Team
Sales is a fast-paced process that keeps sales professionals on their toes. It is hard to manage both B2B and B2C sales processes, even for advanced reps and managers.
Irrespective of their sales team’s performance, managers constantly try to take sales productivity to the next level.
This is a good practice to follow in a highly competitive business world, and managers need to do it right.
This blog outlines the keys to understanding sales productivity for businesses, factors contributing to inefficiency, the 4 pillars of productivity, ways to increase sales productivity, and how to get started.
What Is Sales Productivity for Business?
Most businesses are well-versed with the term “sales productivity,” which is the process of maximizing sales to drive revenue.
Unfortunately, many companies lose sight of how much time and resources are associated with productivity.
Sales productivity is about maximizing sales without significantly increasing resources and reducing time spent on unproductive activities. Here, resources can include anything from cost to effort.
In short, sales productivity is the rate at which your sales rep can increase revenue for your company.
Biggest Factors Contributing To Sales Inefficiency
To improve productivity, we first need to identify the factors that contribute to sales inefficiency. Here are a few:
– Excessive pressure to exceed targets
– Inconsistent sales strategies and processes
– Random or poorly planned sales coaching and training sessions
– Poor route planning and scheduling
– Lack of communication from top to bottom
- Sales activities that are not prioritized
– Resistance to new and innovative sales tools and technologies
– High turnover
– Miscommunication across teams
– Poorly established ideal customer profiles (ICP)
– Distractions from outside and irrelevant sources
– Negative sales cultures
Regardless of severity, there’s no doubt that every member of your sales team will encounter several of these challenges at any given time.
The Key Pillars of Sales Productivity
With so many hurdles of inefficiency in the way, you need to set a strong foundation before implementing strategies to overcome them.
There are 4 pillars of sales productivity:
Consistency
While sales reps have unique strengths and skills for selling, you must have the same sales process for all reps. There should be consistency in following the process.
Make sure sales reps follow one common process, though their sales strategy will be unique.
Concentration
Concentration is the key to success in sales and other fields as well. The more distractions, the more difficulties to close deals. There may be in-office distractions, unnecessary meetings, even mental distraction.
Eliminate the things that take away from your present focus or build a specific time for these tasks in your daily schedule.
Constant Innovation
Vendors are many but demands are few. The pace at which competition is rising means sales reps are having to come up with innovative ways to keep prospects engaged and close the deal.
Make sure you are introducing new tools and techniques for your sales reps and educate them about new trends in the market.
Reduce Pressure
While there’s a race to pull the deals among vendors, you should try to reduce the pressure on your sales reps at times. Even the best sales professionals are bound to have an off-month.
Be sure to keep your sales reps motivated - excessive pressure due to once-in-a-while low performance can lead to turnover, or poor customer service.
5 Ways to Improve Sales Productivity
Here are 5 proven ways to improve sales productivity.
1. Embrace Sales Tools
Sales reps have to spend more time on unproductive or administrative work. There’s a need to introduce automation sales tools for those repetitive tasks.
That makes it much easier for sales reps to spend more time selling. It also reduces human-error.
2. Track & Measure Sales Activities
You need to know where you stand if you want to start improving sales productivity. If your sales team is performing well as a group, you still need to look into individual performance.
Collecting and analyzing proper data can quickly uncover opportunities for improvement. While manual techniques take time and increase the chance of human-error, Prodoscore makes it easy for managers to gauge productivity in just a few clicks.
3. Create Daily Goals
Setting goals is a simple and easy way to increase sales productivity. You need to set long-term and short-term goals but make sure they’re realistic.
Once those goals are set, motivate your team to achieve them, and provide a sense of direction and plan of action to help them hit their targets.
4. Establish Lead Qualification
Lead qualification is the most important part of your sales process. Thus, you need to establish lead qualification criteria. A lot of sales reps invest time chasing poor quality leads. This impacts productivity and leads to a lack of motivation when their efforts don’t yield results.
A scoring framework is a methodology used by sales and marketing departments to assign values to leads based on their engagement and level of interest in your products or services.
5. Create An Effective Onboarding & Training Plan
Ongoing training is just as important as new hire training. Yet, less than 45% of companies have a formal sales training process in place post-ramp.
Equipping your team with the right skills to increase sales productivity should be as great of a focus.
Get Started with Performance Evaluation
Now that you know how to deal with the factors leading to inefficiency, and ways to improve sales productivity, get started by evaluating the individual performance of each team member.
Prodoscore can help you do it effectively by providing a tool that measures daily activity, summed up in one simple score, and accessible on an easy to use dashboard.
