A sales job can quickly populate with unnecessary busy work.
Your teams can easily indulge in administrative work, and their actual job of selling takes a backseat.
They might clean spreadsheets and data for hours, spend substantial time updating CRMs, or copy meeting notes into a repository. Unfortunately, none of these activities contribute to sales productivity and success.
With the remote workforce truly here, at-home distractions are pulling for a sales rep's attention every moment. For this reason, it has become even more critical that sales teams are armed with sales productivity tools and techniques to make them more successful, focused, and effective.
Let’s take a deep dive into some notable productivity strategies for sales teams to operate efficiently and effectively.
What is sales productivity?
In a general sense, productivity is all about doing more with less. It’s about finding better ways to use your time, resources, and talents to produce maximum output.
Sales productivity definition
Sales productivity is about enabling a salesperson to use their time in the most efficient way possible while hitting targets or KPIs. It contributes to the overall success of a sales team and the business.
When thinking about sales productivity, there are two main areas to consider:
Sales efficiency
Sales efficiency is about getting your sales team to maximize their time on selling to the best of their ability. Efficient salespeople spend most of their time on revenue-generating activities, minimizing the 'busy work' that can quickly fill a sales rep's day.
If a sales rep can do these necessary sales tasks as efficiently as possible, they'll achieve more output in less time.
Sales effectiveness
An effective sales rep has the skills required to do the job. This includes using available resources such as sales tools, collateral, and training to learn how to manage their sales pipeline and improve their closing skills.
Top-performing sales reps are both highly efficient and highly effective. Some of them use exceptional sales engagement tactics to close deals faster. Conversely, poor-performing sales reps spend their time on low-impact tasks, giving them low efficiency and effectiveness.
Some popular strategies for improving sales effectiveness include: providing adequate training to upskill sales reps, continuously broadening sales knowledge to learn more effective sales techniques, and sales process analysis to make pipeline management more effective.
How to calculate sales productivity
Sales productivity formula measures productivity by revenue created for each hour of work a sales rep completes. And, to work out just how productive each of your sales agents are, you can use the formula below:
Sales productivity formula: (Individual rep revenue ($) for a period) ÷ (number of hours the sales rep worked in that period)
By applying the above equation to every rep in your sales team, you can quickly work out the productivity math.
With this information, you can adjust your coaching and management efforts accordingly. You can effectively use your time as a manager by directing your attention to where it’s needed.
Did you know? Many leaders monitor their teams’ sales productivity on WhatsApp to coach their teams and improve messaging.
Key metrics to measure sales productivity
With the overall performance understood, you can start to get more micro and establish what exact metrics contribute to sales productivity in your business. Below are some popular sales productivity metrics you can monitor.
Sales efficiency metrics
Sales efficiency metrics include understanding how much time a sales rep spends on administrative tasks like updating sales systems such as CRMs and enablement platforms. This also covers time spent on creating, managing, and organizing sales assets.
These activities are necessary. However, they seldom contribute to sales outputs. For this reason, put processes in place to execute these tasks as efficiently as possible.
Sales effectiveness metrics
Sales effectiveness metrics consider critical KPIs that drive sales. They’re defined by answering what activities would contribute the most to generating more revenue.
Sales effectiveness metrics include the number of calls, connections, meetings booked, proposals delivered, and social media interactions. These metrics could be considered the 'doing' of sales. Ensure your sales team is doing enough sales activities to generate the desired result.
Sales performance metrics
Sales performance metrics relate to the actual skill of the rep in question. For example, their current closing rates, conversation-to-booking ratio, and more.
You can improve their sales performance through training and development. Enhancing your reps' skills helps them become more effective at selling and drives higher sales productivity.
Once you understand the metrics that drive sales success and ultimately fill the sales pipeline, collate and analyze them to identify opportunities to improve sales productivity. Below are some strategies to leverage these opportunities and improve sales productivity.
How to improve sales productivity
After establishing a benchmark for sales productivity, consider these strategies to enhance further. Depending on business needs, you can focus on pipeline generation, sales process, or training.
Use sales productivity tools
Sales productivity tools help your teams do their jobs faster and more effectively. These tools become the differentiators when you want to outperform your competition.
Modern customer relationship management (CRM) software have integrated sales enablement functionality, which is particularly useful for sales productivity.
Answer these questions to understand the functionalities of your CRM:
- Does your CRM come with an autodialer, and can the rep make calls directly from within the CRM?
- Can sales sequences and sales processes be automated? This functionality is beneficial for automating sales activities like sending emails. Although mundane, they're a necessary part of the sales process.
- What is the exact process for updating records and contacts within the CRM?
Cooby allows sales reps to update contacts and conversations on their CRM directly from WhatsApp Web. It saves a sales rep’s time as they don’t need to update WhatsApp conversations manually by taking screenshots and uploading them to the CRM or copy-pasting conversation history. Add Cooby's Chrome extension to your browser and increase your productivity on WhatsApp.
The more administrative tasks you can take away from the salesperson, the better. This makes up for more time spent on lead generation, and sales calls – activities that contribute to sales success!
Did you know? Many reps schedule WhatsApp reminders to complete their sales activities amid increasing administrative tasks.
Implement sales training and development
Invest in providing onboarding training for new reps and regular training for all representatives as they ramp up. Sales managers should overlook and facilitate such training. However, your high-performing sales representatives can also choose to coach new team members.
You can perform performance development through regular one-on-ones, call coaching, shadowing, collaboration on product demonstrations, or via online sales training programs. Your teams will become more effective with adequate sales coaching and development.
Many businesses leverage conversation-tracking software like Cooby for WhatsApp and other call-tracking software to track conversations and coach their sales teams accordingly. This helps your team eventually achieve higher closing ratios, improve negotiation techniques, and close deals faster.
Ensure sales teams have quality leads
Sales can be extremely challenging without good lead data. It's no use having a thousand numbers to call if not one of them picks up the phone. For this reason, you must have good-quality data for your sales reps to work.
This means ensuring they have as many direct phone lines as possible and validated email addresses. There are many lead data enrichment services out there that can provide highly accurate data for an affordable price.
Pay attention to the quality of your leads to increase sales productivity. Investing in the correct lead data and entrusting your sales team to use it effectively can significantly impact your sales performance.
Bottom line
Overall, there are many strategies that you can use to improve sales productivity and boost success in your organization.
Whether it's focusing on sales development, leveraging sales productivity tools, or investing in quality lead data, it is essential to focus on the areas that will provide the most leverage for your team. With good data and the right approach, you can be sure to see results!
Learn more about how sales teams can use WhatsApp to improve productivity and close more deals.
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