Top 5 ways to increase your sales team productivity

To excel in a domain, you need to have a good understanding of the domain itself. To keep your productivity at high levels, you need to understand productivity before diving into popular ways of increasing productivity in your sales teams.

So why increase your sales team productivity when you are expanding your sales teams and successfully chasing down aggressive sales and revenue goals? Well, the deal is, you might be achieving your numbers, but at the same time, you might be losing on valuable clients in all the scramble. Time to look at productivity and how to enhance it, so you grow organically.

What is Productivity in Sales?

Sales team productivity, simply put, is getting the maximum output or sales revenue by putting in minimum input or resources. Your input or resources include your sales workforce, their incentives, the tools they use and all the expenses needed to secure a sale. Wouldn’t you want your sales folks to bring in valuable clients than just scramble for numbers to meet it at the end of the quarter or year?

In the sections that follow, we go through the top 5 tried and tested strategies that have been used to increase sales team productivity.

Strategy 1: Measure and Improve Quality Sales Interaction

Sales team productivity hinges greatly on the quality of sales interactions. In their enthusiasm to meet numbers, sales reps might not spend enough time on a valuable client. They might not have done enough research on the potential revenue that a client can offer in the long run. Meaningful and value-based conversations are what finally lead to a successful sale.

The quality of sales interaction depends on knowledge and experience, research and marketing content. All these should be present in the right mix to create conditions conducive for a sale. Due to this, sales leaders should put the right amount of pressure on their reps to drive numbers and stress upon the quality of this sales interaction.

Tracking their calls, emails, and meetings will give you as a leader a fair idea about how your sales reps are approaching their sales targets. You could look at the number of dials, the length of conversations at the beginning of the month and compare them with those numbers at the end of the month.

It is natural for sales reps to change gear as the month-end approaches, but good sales folks will appear consistent throughout the sales cycle. This can help maintain the sales team productivity effectively over time.

Strategy 2: Facilitate Sales With Rich Content

Sales team productivity is also dependent on how accessible the marketing and sales content is. The quality of the interaction your sales folks put into every sales conversation will only improve if you improve the tools they use to engage the client. The most important tool they employ is the marketing content. It is found that sales reps spend most of their time searching for appropriate content.

Accurate messaging and response needs content that is accurate and consistent. It is found that close to 70% of marketing and sales content goes unused as sales reps cannot find the right one at just the right time.

This is a criminal waste of the energy that sales folks put in, especially when it is known that about 95% of B2B sales are influenced by marketing and sales content.

Invest in making rich and valuable content available to your sales reps. Also, invest in tools that enable them to get to the right content when they need it. A good part of the investment should educate sales reps on where to find relevant sales and marketing content.

Strategy 3: Evaluate and Reinvent Sales Processes

While it is true that sales processes take time to settle, it is also essential that you keep reviewing, re-evaluating and reinventing your sales processes. Sales domains are fluid, and so should you.

Design and maintain your sales processes in such a way to ensure they are devoid of confusion and at the same time fluid enough to accept changes. To start,

• You could have one robust framework for your workflow that works best for you. This will be your core, and you can add and delete subprocesses around this framework, depending on how well it works for you.
• You will need to constantly be looking out for roadblocks and gaps in your sales processes.
• You should undertake regular and meaningful interaction with sales folks to identify pain areas in the processes.
• Make genuine and, more importantly, visible attempts to bridge gaps and remove roadblocks. The reason it needs to be visible is that such an exercise will only help to build confidence within the sales teams.

Strategy 4: Automation Tools to the rescue

You should review the activities that a sales rep has to go through to make a successful sale. You will find that almost 50-60% of their time goes into activities that do not add value. Bringing in automation will take care of the mundane and help them focus on what they do well, making that all-important sale.

With sales content and workflow at their fingertips, your sales team will be able to add more value to conversations and close deals much faster than they used to.

This will not only improve the quality of sales but also improve on numbers. As a result, the sales team productivity can be maintained while setting higher and more notable targets regularly.

Strategy 5: Indispensable Analytics

Invest in tools that help you discover patterns and underlying issues with your sales processes. Analytics has a reputation for unearthing the unseen. It helps you make decisions based on facts. Analytics tools feed a constant feedback mechanism that gives you a clear vision of your sales direction.

Analytics tools today are not only used to analyse historical data but also help in making sales predictions. The more data you collect and analyse over a significant period, the better the results.

You also get to explore and discover new revenue streams with the right analytical tool. These analytical tools can help you measure the sales team productivity while also helping you develop ways to enhance that for the long term.

Read Also: sales approaches

Conclusion

If you are looking for a smart sales engagement platform that can help your sales team be highly productive and enhance overall sales team productivity, we offer you NeoDove. NeoDove offers you features that include Multichannel customer engagement, Integration with multiple platforms, 360-degree lead management, Team monitoring and productivity, and Automated Progressive dialling, among others.

Along with these tips, the services of the platform can make all tasks much easier for you. To know more, request a demo on NeoDove today.