New research from Forbes Insights, in association with Brainshark, shows that sales productivity is a top-of-mind issue for companies above (or well above) revenue targets.
What is Sales Productivity, Really?
Sales productivity can be summarized as maximizing sales results while reducing the resources expended. Resources can include anything from cost to effort to time.
Sales Team Productivity and Time are Treasured
If you’re willing to maximize your sales productivity and time, you must find more of it, and choose how you manage your time carefully.
The more both teams communicate, the stronger their work and personal relationships will become so they’ll eventually learn to trust each other. Rather than focusing on separate activities, implementing one shared vision and goal means they can rely on each other to hit their targets.
The truth is that if you’re part of a sales team and you want to maximize sales productivity you need to learn how to focus and spend time focusing on achievement, the time you spent performing your mandatory sales tasks and how to avoid flat hours.
The key to having success is to maximize your investment time in order to be productive and get the most done during it.
We can say that your sales team will accomplish a high level of productivity and efficiency if they know how to manage their time and don’t forget that their main objective is to close more deals and fulfilling their goals.
In order to maximize your sales productivity and increase sales, follow these simple 5 rules that will help your sales team:
1. Define your activities and track your time
When you know what you want to accomplish on a given day, you will be able to define which activities will be the ones that will get to achieve your sales goals. Any type of activity should have an objective that you may or may not achieve but this will not be bad if you control how much time you spent.
If you want to be productive, set a list of activities for the day and define which of these are the most important. When you have this list, choose which will be the most important activity first.
Don’t forget to track how much time you’re spending on each activity to maximize investment and be productive.
2. Spend time prospecting - The first hour is the best one!!
If you don’t have enough leads in your book of business, you’re never going to be able to close enough deals. If you don’t prospect well, lead velocity will slow down. You’ll waste time on worse leads – and run out of the great leads you need
3. Understand your ideal customer
A business cannot survive without conducting ongoing efforts to better understand customer needs. To discover if your product or service is having a positive effect and creating customer loyalty, take time to ascertain your customer's emotional and material needs, then offer valuable incentives for remaining loyal to your company. Feedback is really important in order to improve services and acquire new clients.
4. Sales and Marketing: the best team ever!
Too many companies have marketing and sales teams that barely talk to each other. You want to avoid situations where sales teams are throwing out low-quality leads from marketing. Having regular touch points between your sales and marketing teams can help you create better-qualified leads.
When your sales and marketing teams are aligned and in regular communication, information can be flown freely from department to department. Your sales team can tell the marketing team what is and isn’t working so that the marketers can adjust strategies based on what they’ve been told.
5. Technology will be your best friend
Save a few hours every month to keep your CRM updated. It will save you time in the long run! Even better, use marketing automation to update your CRM automatically and take out data entry steps entirely.
Take a look at Microsoft 365 options! Be more creative and achieve what matters with Outlook, OneDrive, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Yammer, and more.
Review tools that can help you to automate processes like Blitz, which will make easier the commission calculation and tracking. Also, is ready to connect with any system you currently use and scales to your growing needs.
NOTE: If you are using a timer on an Investment activity, but you realize you checked your email and then you check social media, read an interesting article, and lost from up to 15 minutes, subtract 10 minutes from investment, and add 10 minutes to empty time. Quality time is important but it doesn’t distract yourself if you want to be productive!
Don't wait for the perfect moment, the perfect app, or the perfect activity, the first step to maximize your sales productivity is to start!!!
Get in touch with us today to learn how Blitz can help you to increase sales! Save Time, Eliminate Commission Errors. Automate your sales commissions tracking process and maximize your sales team with Blitz: Commission management made simple.