Your company’s success depends on your sales productivity. The measure of a sales team’s productivity is how they meet the needs of customers, reach their goals and achieve the desired outcome.
This article will discuss the best strategies for increasing sales productivity within an organization.
What is sales productivity?
Sales productivity simply refers to the amount of products you sell in a given time period (e.g., a month or quarter). It is often measured in revenue, leads or clients.
This definition makes it easy to see why sales productivity should be a concern. Businesses don’t like to hear that they aren’t generating enough cash flow, or that their growth is slowing down. You need to increase the productivity of your sales team to achieve the targets you have set.
Strategies to Increase Sales Productivity
1. Value can help you get ahead of your competition.
Cold calling is one of the best ways to increase prospects’ value and drive sales.
Since the dawn of time, cold calling has been an established practice. This is exactly how it sounds when you call someone you don’t know in the hopes they will purchase your product or services.
According to stats, 69% have accepted at least one cold call in 2019. According to the same study, 82% of buyers accepted cold calls and met with salespeople.
You can create personalized cold calling scripts in advance to ensure that cold calling is successful.
Reps should also add value to the sales conversation with relevant content and insights. They need messaging and collateral that addresses the prospect’s concerns and shows their ability to solve it.
Representatives should also be able to identify the most important things for their prospects. Representatives should be able identify the needs and wants of prospects by knowing the product and any other relevant information.
This is where tools like Seismic can be of great help. It can suggest content and messages based upon specific situations and target audience. They can save time for representatives and help speed up deals.
2. Accept automation and technology tools
Automating repetitive tasks, such as data entry, can help your sales team save time and money with technology tools.
Email automation tools can help increase sales speed and improve the overall sales process. These tools trigger emails and send personalized messages at the right time for prospects.
For example, Convers.io.
It is one of the most popular Shopify email marketing apps. It sends automated cart abandonment emails and follow-up emails.
Automation can also help sales teams reach the right prospects at the right moment. Automation can increase renewals by enabling sales teams to know when contracts are ending and working proactively to retain clients.
3. Analytics for continuous improvement
Analytics play an important role in driving business strategy, making informed sales decisions and driving sales.
Sales analytics and sales insight can help organizations increase their team quotas faster than those who don’t use them.
Organizations often fail to increase sales productivity because they don’t track productivity gains and results.
It is important to identify the most important metrics such as win rate, call rates, sales cycle length, pipeline convert rate and more. These metrics can change depending on which sales function you are trying to analyze. An example of this would be an outbound call centre tracking call metrics.
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These insights and analytics can be obtained again by using sales enablement tools. These tools will allow you to visualize trends, gain valuable insight into the activities of sales reps and provide answers about what makes top performers succeed and what holds back lower performers.
4. Motivate your sales team
Selling is hard work. Salespeople are often unable to stay in business long enough to call prospects and set up appointments.
You need to ensure that your sales team is happy and understands why they do what they do.
It is especially important to keep your sales team motivated if they work remotely.
These are some ways you can do it:
- Invite them to participate in decision-making and make them feel valued.
- Give them opportunities for growth and advancement.
- Encourage them to become entrepreneurs.
- Give them space and time for their ideas, with just enough supervision.
- Even if they are small wins, celebrate them.
- You can offer incentives.
- Encourage your team to publicly praise them and track their wins.
Don’t forget about playing games. Gamification can be used to motivate sales teams. It provides context, feedback and allows you to celebrate your successes.
5. Your sales reps should be experts on your competitors and products
Your sales rep will have a difficult time making viable pitches if they don’t know how the products of your competitors stack up to yours.
Sales reps should know what they are selling. To answer customer questions about the product, sales reps should be knowledgeable. You can also consider hiring a mentor in product management to help your team understand the importance of product leadership.
You should be able to explain all benefits and then supply the product based on your prospect’s requirements. This will increase trust among prospects and help drive sales.
It is crucial that your sales reps receive product knowledge training to help them succeed. You must also curate relevant content to support sales enablement in order to properly train sales reps.
These are the things that you can help your sales reps with:
- Let them know how to spot customer needs, and how your products and services can help them.
- Demonstrate how your products helped your prospects by sharing customer stories.
- It is equally important that your sales reps are familiar with the product of your competitor and can distinguish it from yours.
- This can be done by having them review customer reviews for your product as well as your competitor’s. This will help your sales reps to understand the most popular features and enable them to communicate with customers during a pitch.
You should not only train your sales reps about the features and benefits of the product, but also how to sell them. You should present the training through the eyes and experiences of the customer.
6. Keep an eye on key sales KPIs
You should monitor important sales KPIs if you want to increase sales productivity. You will be able to stay focused and reach your goals if you have your key sales metrics at your fingertips at all times.
Ultimately, what you track will be what your team focuses on. You need to establish sales goals before you start.
These are the most important KPIs you can track:
- You should assess your lead qualities at each stage of the sales funnel in order to spot potential obstructions and concentrate on the most successful activities and stages.
- To determine how efficient your sales process and to predict sales better, you can measure the length of the sales cycle.
- Every sales activity and its success rate.
- Average response time for leads and follow-up attempts.
You should also track conversion rates in order to determine how effective your sales funnel and which stages or activities have the highest ROI.
Track the conversion metrics using
- To measure the effectiveness of your site’s conversion rates optimization, you can use visitor-to-lead conversion rates.
- To find out how well your site attracts the right audiences, use Lead-to-MQL Conversion Rate.
- MQL-toSQL for insights into the effectiveness of your sales and marketing team.
- Opportunity-to-customer conversion rate to measure the percentage of qualified leads that eventually convert into customers.
7. Learn your ICPs
Your most important sales productivity tool is the ICP (Ideal Client Profile). Your sales team will spend too much time and energy on prospects that don’t fit their profile if they don’t know who they are selling.
A ideal customer profile describes the customers who will be benefited by your product or services. They have the greatest customer lifetime value and are easy to sell to.
Here’s how an ICP should look like:
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Segmenting your customer base by ICPs will help you to identify the platforms that you should be investing more time on. This will help you discover the best ways to provide the best customer experience.
It is important to be on the right channels. Tik Tok can be used to target leads and sales if your customers are on Tik Tok.
Analyzing your customer base by ICP will help you to make better acquisition, retention and expansion strategies. You will be able to identify which segments are performing well. To acquire more customers like them, you can examine their buyer journeys.
Once you have created your ICPs, make sure you explain them to the relevant teams. Let them know what ICPs are and how they can be used. It will make it easier for them to complete their tasks faster and more effectively.
Your marketing team will be better able to target prospects if they have a better understanding of your ICPs. The sales team will be able to prospect and qualify leads more effectively and will be better able to identify the products that prospects are interested in. They will also be able to identify the buying roles involved in the sales process.
Your sales team can use ICPs to prospect automatically so that the service team can deal with customers who are more suitable. Service teams are able to easily create long-term growth plans, next-sell opportunities, communication speeds, and quick wins.
You might consider incorporating your ICPs in your regularly scheduled meetings such as customer support analyses or sales pipeline meetings. A customized sales funnel can be created for each ICP.
8. Smartly align your marketing and sales
Statistics show that 40% of sales professionals and marketers believe that a strong sales and marketing strategy leads to higher lead conversion rates. According to 27.7%, lack of alignment leads to lost conversions and closed deals.
According to a study, high alignment results in greater brand awareness and a larger average deal size.
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Customer satisfaction should be your first priority. This eliminates tension and competition. When both sides work together to make customers happy at every stage of their buying journey, alignment will naturally happen.
Because each team plays a different role in the sales and marketing funnel, it is important to clearly define each step. This will eliminate confusion, highlight teamwork opportunities, and ensure accountability.
Your sales team must also communicate their insights with prospects to the marketing department. This will help ensure your buyers get the information they need at the right time in the buying process.
To ensure that each team member is aware of what is coming up, it is important to schedule regular communication between the teams.
To track the performance of each team member and their individual accomplishments, establish standard metrics. Reward members of the team for any sales and recognition. You should improve your content management skills so that both sides can find and use relevant content when communicating with customers.
Scaling Facebook ads can also be a way to increase sales. Optimized Facebook ads are the best option if you’re looking for leads. These ads can be optimized according to location, age, gender and other relevant demographics.
It’s your turn to increase sales productivity
Sales professionals are always on the lookout for ways to increase sales productivity. Take the lessons learned from top salespeople to increase your sales productivity.
The post Top Strategies We Use to Drive Sales Productivity appeared originally on Scoop.it Blog.
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