Nearly every company faces problems in sales productivity. Such problems are exacerbated because of the increasing pressure to sustain or surpass revenue targets. Companies are growing their sales teams and pursuing more hard-hitting sales goals. But they are lagging behind in sales tools, best practices, and sales processes at the same speed.
Because of this, sales productivity tends to decline every year. Sales personnel are distracted or overwhelmed by instant access to chat messages, viral videos, and social media. With their busy activities, they simply reflect a lack of focus. This can cost millions of dollars in lost revenue.
What is meant by sales productivity?
Sales productivity can be summarized as maximizing sales results with the minimization of expenses of effort, time, and money.
The majority of your sales team has room for improvement and opportunities to enhance productivity. Mostly, optimizations of sales productivity boil down to simply streamlining workflow and getting rid of superfluous or unnecessary tasks.
Strategies
The following sales strategies can help your team overcome productivity challenges:
- Priority on ongoing sales coaching
With over 80% of training content forgotten within weeks, once-done sales training is simply not going to be effective. Also, the sales scenario is evolving continually, and the process of buying is becoming more complicated. Sales reps of your company should be trained in customer persona, products, and selling space with updated information. Hence, sales coaching must be an ongoing, proactive strategy.
- Ensure consistency
The sales structure of a firm needs to be consistent. There may be wrinkles unique to each salesperson, but the same sales process must always be followed. The mode of scheduling and structuring of the day of a sales rep matters a great deal. You must use what works and share such strategies with the complete team.
- Improve concentration
The number of distractions pulling us away from daily goals seems only to increase. Additionally, there is the factor of the shorter attention span of the current generation. Strategies must be adopted to reduce distractions and improve concentration.
- Reduce pressure
The competitive nature of the sales landscape leads to added pressure on sales reps for performance and accomplishment of their quotas. Such pressure can have a negative impact on productivity. So, you must re-evaluate your sales quotas such that they are challenging yet attainable.
- Embrace sales tools
With much time spent on administrative tasks, there is an evident need in the industry for automated tools that can take care of repetitive and unproductive tasks. Enhancing sales productivity tends to be much easier when you can put certain tasks on ‘auto-pilot’.
- Tracking and measuring
For enhancing sales productivity, you need to judge your present position. Dashboards are amazing solutions for this purpose. They help you in visualizing trends to gain valuable insights into the activity-based metrics of each sales person.
- Create daily goals
Establishing goals is an easy and simple way to enhance sales productivity since they are highly motivating. They provide sales persons a sense of direction and a plan of action to hit targets.
- Smarter prospecting
The process of researching and identifying prospects that suit your product or service is typically very time-consuming. But thankfully, there are many software or prospecting tools that can help you in this task.
- Strategic assigning of territories
Assigning territories is the game plan for how reps will pursue leads and maintain current accounts. This crucial step is where the sales process begins.
In sum, with the sales team facing many hurdles, the above tips of sales training can help in boosting sales productivity through the adoption of the right strategies.
