Salespeople spend less than 40% of their time selling and the rest on administrative activities, according to one research. When you combine this with uninteresting sales emails that end up in the trash (assuming they even make it past spam filters), it’s evident that broken sales productivity is squandering a lot of potential value creation.
So, how can sales spend more time doing what they do best, which is selling? How can you enhance revenue by increasing sales productivity? Let’s look at it more closely.
Sales productivity
Everyone nowadays wants to be more productive. But what exactly does that imply? That means getting a higher rate of production per unit of input, according to the dictionary definition. And what about sales?
Ensuring that your sales force has everything they require to be productive is critical to enhancing sales productivity.
Productivity starts with the right sales productivity tools
If you want to be more productive in sales, you need to spend more time selling. To do so, you’ll need to have all of the important information about a lead in one location. Instead of chasing data, you’ll be able to locate the hottest leads and close those deals.
The CRM is usually that one spot for sales. Salespeople can view data in the CRM such as email campaign engagement or which pages a prospect visits on your website when they use a CRM with marketing automation. Salespeople may rapidly determine what topics they are interested in without having to conduct more studies.
However, in order to increase sales, you must also increase marketing productivity. Companies perform best when sales and marketing are integrated rather than operating in separate silos.
That means marketers must make it as simple as possible for sales professionals to receive information about qualifying leads. You should also spend less time establishing mailing lists and getting your message out to boost marketing efficiency.
Finding and employing the correct tools for the job is critical in both sales and marketing. Marketers can focus on value-added tasks like reaching out to prospects and developing content instead of worrying about whether they’ve supplied the correct information by employing sales solutions that automatically communicate with marketing tools.
Using automation for improve productivity
In order to increase production and scale, many people resort to automation. Of course, automating the appropriate duties is critical.
Any automation should be done with the goal of making your sales team more efficient and productive, so they can spend more time on high-touch, “human” activities.
Rather than focusing on features and functionality, or automating for the sake of automating, it’s a good idea to start with the essential jobs customers want to solve.
It allows the automation to automatically sync sales and marketing data, resulting in a smooth interface. Without any manual work or additional sales training, sales are always up to date with marketing data and vice versa.
With new sales tools being introduced every day, it can also help scale other areas of the sales process, such as lead creation and outreach.
However, as much as we admire automation, it isn’t a panacea. While automation can save you time, it isn’t necessary to automate every step of the sales process. Mistakes can occur, and without your direct involvement, you may not know something is wrong until it is too late and you have lost revenue.
It’s a good idea to go through your process manually until you thoroughly grasp each phase to figure out which aspects you can safely automate.
We had already gone through our user onboarding process several times before automating it, manually vetting sign-ups and individually engaging with them. Rather than being a waste of time, it provided us with a much better insight into our possibilities and the challenges they faced.
How to measure and increase sales productivity
There are two different things to consider when gauging salesman productivity:
- The subjective experience
- The hard numbers
You need actionable information when it comes to actual statistics. When it comes to your marketing and sales team’s emails, for example, you need to know which ones your prospects open.
While this is helpful in determining the efficiency of your outreach, it is no longer sufficient.
Businesses must investigate which sales and marketing strategies produce the best results in terms of:
- Revenue
- Rates of closure
- Meetings that have been scheduled
You can get a complete picture of your funnel by integrating this type of sales data into your marketing activity. You may therefore improve your sales process and devote more time and resources to marketing efforts that have a direct impact on your bottom line.
Examine all of your closed-won and closed-lost deals on a regular basis (at least once a quarter) for common denominators. Examine the data, then adjust your sales process and how it interacts with the marketing function as necessary.
Adapting practices in sales teams
Sales teams can’t afford to remain still, even with the best automation and sales productivity software measures in place. Companies must be willing to experiment and adapt as marketplaces evolve, new technologies develop, and unanticipated challenges arise.
This is difficult for everyone, but it is especially difficult for huge, well-established companies. It requires guts and dedication to change methods and techniques that have been in place for years, if not decades, in order to boost sales productivity.
Conclusion: Salesforce productivity depends on automation and the correct sales tools.
Nobody wants to waste the majority of their time on low-value administrative tasks. The good news is that you may avoid having to do so by using a few important practices.
You can better align your sales and marketing teams and communicate data between them by using the correct technologies. You may efficiently automate the manual and time-consuming procedures by completely knowing your sales process. Finally, you can optimise your process and increase sales productivity by evaluating your productivity and correlating results to actions.
Are you ready to build continuous state of excellence for your team?
