How to improve sales productivity and get your sales process to the next level:
- Find the roadblocks.
- Align sales and marketing.
- Invest in the right CRM tools.
- Invest in training your sales reps.
- Use data to get sales insights.
As a sales leader in a B2B organization, improving sales productivity should be at the top of your list. You know that minimizing redundancies and needless spending, while maximizing revenue does wonders for your bottom line. Yet, it’s not always clear how to achieve this. We can give you a hand with that. Here’s how you can improve sales productivity and your sales cycle.
So, here’s some tips on improving sales productivity and increasing sales:
1) Find the Roadblocks
How much time each rep invests in selling? How many meetings do they attend? Are all meetings important for all the reps to attend? How many inbound calls get missed and why?
Getting answers to all these questions may be tough without seeming like a micromanaging jailer and hurting your team’s morale. Luckily, there are activity tracking tools that can make the process easy and painless. Improving productivity without sacrificing trust. Now that’s a jackpot!
Once the activity tracking is set up, you can easily identify the roadblocks and remove them.
2) Align Sales and Marketing Teams
Who updates the marketing materials and personalizes the email content?
That’s not the job of your sales reps if marketing team exists in your organization. Let the sales reps brief the marketing about the needs and requirements of the prospects.
Based on this feedback marketing will know what kind of content would be appropriate for a particular sales rep’s needs. This is one area you can work on with your sales and marketing departments to improve productivity. Edited and updated content will have powerful impact by getting strong, qualified and filtered leads for the sales reps.
3) Invest in Right CRM Tools
How many times have sales reps interacted with particular prospects? Or with various stakeholders in that account? How long was the sales cycle? What is the history of the customer? Why did a customer leave? What were the various interactions?
Obviously, a sales rep will not remember every detail and every piece of history associated with a prospect – lost or won. So, investing in CRM is the right thing to do as it cuts down on manual and admin work.
Besides you have access to historical data at any given point of time. Implementing CRM and CRM training for your sales reps are one time job. There are a plethora of CRM tools on the market, most of which are web based and can be accessed from anywhere.
4) Invest in Training Your Sales Reps
Do you listen to the recorded conversation between your sales reps and prospects?
If not, start doing it. This is an effective way to train and give feedback to your subordinates. However, don’t overtrain or waste too much time in training.
5) Use Data to Get Sales Insights
How do you gauge the interest of your prospect? How does your sales reps prioritize their leads? When is the right time to call or mail them? How do you know if the stakeholder on other side has read your mail or not?
Data has an answer to all these questions. Using data saves you from doing guess work and takes your business to new heights.
