Tag Archives: sales management

Sales Management

How to Improve Your Sales Productivity and Increase Sales Without Breaking the Bank

Leave a comment

How to improve sales productivity and get your sales process to the next level:

  1. Find the roadblocks.
  2. Align sales and marketing.
  3. Invest in the right CRM tools.
  4. Invest in training your sales reps.
  5. Use data to get sales insights.

As a sales leader in a B2B organization, improving sales productivity should be at the top of your list. You know that minimizing redundancies and needless spending, while maximizing revenue does wonders for your bottom line. Yet, it’s not always clear how to achieve this. We can give you a hand with that. Here’s how you can improve sales productivity and your sales cycle.

So, here’s some tips on improving sales productivity and increasing sales:

1) Find the Roadblocks

How much time each rep invests in selling? How many meetings do they attend? Are all meetings important for all the reps to attend? How many inbound calls get missed and why? 

Getting answers to all these questions may be tough without seeming like a micromanaging jailer and hurting your team’s morale. Luckily, there are activity tracking tools that can make the process easy and painless. Improving productivity without sacrificing trust. Now that’s a jackpot!

Once the activity tracking is set up, you can easily identify the roadblocks and remove them. 

2) Align Sales and Marketing Teams

Who updates the marketing materials and personalizes the email content?

That’s not the job of your sales reps if marketing team exists in your organization. Let the sales reps brief the marketing about the needs and requirements of the prospects. 

Based on this feedback marketing will know what kind of content would be appropriate for a particular sales rep’s needs. This is one area you can work on with your sales and marketing departments to improve productivity. Edited and updated content will have powerful impact by getting  strong, qualified and filtered leads for the sales reps.

3) Invest in Right CRM Tools

How many times have sales reps interacted with particular prospects? Or with various stakeholders in that account? How long was the sales cycle? What is the history of the customer? Why did a customer leave? What were the various interactions?

Obviously, a sales rep will not remember every detail and every piece of history associated with a prospect – lost or won. So, investing in CRM is the right thing to do as it cuts down on manual and admin work. 

Besides you have access to historical data at any given point of time. Implementing CRM and CRM training for your sales reps are one time job. There are a plethora of CRM tools on the market, most of which are web based and can be accessed from anywhere.

4) Invest in Training Your Sales Reps

Do you listen to the recorded conversation between your sales reps and prospects?

If not, start doing it. This is an effective way to train and give feedback to your subordinates. However, don’t overtrain or waste too much time in training.

5) Use Data to Get Sales Insights

How do you gauge the interest of your prospect? How does your sales reps prioritize their leads? When is the right time to call or mail them? How do you know if the stakeholder on other side has read your mail or not?

Data has an answer to all these questions. Using data saves you from doing guess work and takes your business to new heights.

Sales Management

How to Improve Sales Efficiency and Strengthen Your Organization

Leave a comment

Here’s the top 10 tips on how to improve the efficiency of your sales and strengthen your organization:

  1. Work on tightening up your sales process.
  2. Retain the best sales reps. 
  3. Use technology and data.
  4. Build the sales team brick by brick.
  5. Value your team.
  6. Training and feedback loop. 
  7. Emphasize on thorough research.
  8. Let marketing and sales work in tandem.
  9. Shun the pitch, let them talk.
  10. Communicate, coach, and optimize.

Smart use of your available resources is one of the best ways to improve your bottom line. If you remove redundancies and tighten up your pipeline, you will be surprised at how much better your end of the quarter numbers will look. Closing deals faster, needing fewer reps to do the work, and increasing your win rate will all play a huge role in getting your organization to the next level. 

Here is what you can do to improve your sales efficiency:

1) Work on tightening up your sales process

Activity tracking software would allow you to have your own eyes and ears in the field without becoming too intrusive. 

Once you implement a tool like this, it will act like a sales efficiency software. It will allow you to figure out where your reps are doing well and where they’re struggling so you can mitigate redundancies. It’s a powerful way to boost efficiency and optimize your sales process.

2) Retain the best sales reps

As a sales leader, your job is to identify the best reps in your team. Give them incentives, promote them so that they grow with your organization and vice versa. You don’t want them to switch companies because if they go, they take the contacts they have made in your industry with them. 

Apart from this,  in case of Account Based Selling model you need highly skilled managers to consistently improve relationships with your existing customers. Hence, if the attrition rate is high in your sales team, you might end up losing the customer. Not to mention investing time in training new sales reps. 

3) Use technology and data

Data entry can be one of the biggest efficiency busters in sales. We all know sales reps can spend ungodly amounts of time entering data if you’re not using a CRM or other automated tools. 

Admin work shouldn’t come under sales execs scope. Using a CRM and other sales enablement tools boosts sales efficiency significantly. It not only assists your team in achieving the tasks in a timely manner but also gives an insight on sales cycle, goals, strategies, etc.

4) Build the sales team brick by brick

In case of Account Based Sales (ABS) you need a lot of resources and effort from every individual on your team to acquire one customer. These are salespeople at various echelons such as Account Managers, Sales Development Reps (SDRs) and Sales Executives. 

Every hour they spend is an investment and affects your ROI. So, it’s beneficial to figure out the most efficient way to go about it. Do you need an extensive sales team or just a few people who can wear different hats? Later based on the needs you can always expand the size.

5) Value your team

Ensure that your sales team understands their value. In terms of recognition, sales teams are often last in line. Organizational leaders tend to give more weight to product and marketing teams. 

As a sales leader, your job is to make the organization value their sales team. Make your team members feel that they are the central point, entrusted with the most difficult task in the organization. Nothing breaks a person’s morale and ability to work efficiently like feeling unappreciated. 

6) Training and feedback loop

Don’t ignore on-the-job training and feedback. It’s not a waste of time! Before you give feedback to each team member, get them to give feedback to themselves. This is much faster than you giving feedback to everyone. 

Bring your team under one roof and ask them to share their experiences in selling. Also, let them get ideas from each other on how they can handle their current prospects.

7) Emphasize on thorough research

Let the sales reps do thorough research on their prospect’s needs, requirements, history etc. Half baked knowledge doesn’t lead anywhere but towards panic, frustration and loss of time and revenue.  

Before the sales reps talk to the prospects, they need to map their needs to the features of your products/ services. This saves time. 

An outstanding and well prepared pitch delivers a powerful impression on the prospect’s psych. Yes, let the awesome customer journey begin from the very first touch-point!

8) Let marketing and sales work in tandem

For the previous point to land as targeted, it is extremely important that your marketing team is used as a tool to enable sales team to function. 

Sales reps can do research on prospects, market, competitors etc. but their time shouldn’t be wasted in updating or personalizing the marketing collaterals. Even more so, when there is always a fully functional marketing department closeby.

9) Shun the pitch, let them talk

Encourage your sales team to have a smooth conversation with the stakeholders on the other side. Don’t let the pitch come across as pitch. It should be an effortless, confident, smoothly flowing two way conversation. 

This can be honed with practice, experience and thorough research. Sales pitch can put off the prospects and interest can fizzle out.

Hence, highly efficient sales teams know how to save their time and effort. It’s about concentrating on basic things and pushing the revenue up. 

10) Communicate, coach and optimize

Communicate with your sales team as often as you can. No amount of tools will change the importance of communication. Allow reps to come to you when they have a problem. Coach them when they’re having difficulties. 

As a sales manager, it is your job to optimize your team’s performance and ensure your people are working as efficiently as they can. But you can’t achieve that without allowing them to communicate with you first. After all, they are your eyes and ears in the field. When they talk, a good sales leader listens. And then makes decisions. Not before.  

Finally, we’ll leave you with this nugget of wisdom. As John Richard II, the CEO of Venture Medical says, “As a CEO of a company with a small sales staff, I recognize that the efficiency of our sales team is one of our top priorities.”

Sales Management

How to Improve Sales Efficiency and Strengthen Your Organization

Leave a comment

Do you measure the effectiveness of your sales team on a regular basis? Do you know that sales effectiveness can be measured and improved? To a lot of salespeople, sales effectiveness might come across as a vague term often tossed in the sales meetings. As a sales leader, the best you can do is to help the team understand the meaning of sales effectiveness and how it is related to the other elements of sales cycle such as sales productivity and sales efficiency.

Yes, educate the team not only about your product’s features but also about how to be effective in selling. It doesn’t matter if you have a nascent team or a cadre of experienced sales reps. It is important for your bottom line’s health that you reiterate and revise your sales processes and goals with the team.

Tips to Improve Sales Effectiveness

To focus on conversion is just one aspect (a major one though) of sales. The following tips can improve team’s sales effectiveness with the ability to improve the conversion plus bottom line:

1) Set the metrics to measure sales effectiveness

Carefully select those primary metrics that you will use month over month to measure your team’s effectiveness. These could be following:

  • Sales reps quotas. Are the quotas aligned to company’s sales target?
  • Conversion rate
  • Number of appointments won to demo the product
  • Length of the sales cycle from identifying to converting
  • Percentage of time spent in identifying prospects versus time spent in pitching to the prospects
  • Percentage of time spent in tailoring the marketing content
  • Number of times prospects don’t respond to your reps

Here are some of the metrics that shouldn’t be counted when setting up goals:

  • Number of calls made in a day
  • Number of emails sent in a day

These two metrics  are misleading goals. Your rep might have completed the quota of making calls and sending emails without getting any appointment! Does that mean they are effective salespeople?

2) Ensure the availability of right tailored content at the right time

Basically this means aligning your marketing team to sales so that they can fulfill the need of  sales team. Your organization depends on the performance of sales department. Make other departments work around it so that sales can focus on pitching and closing the deals. You don’t want the sales reps to waste their time in editing the sales and marketing collateral. Of course, in B2B selling the marketing content, campaigns etc need to be personalized. Let the sales rep give their input to the marketing and let marketing do the editing bit. In Account Based Selling Model it wouldn’t be wrong if you keep one copywriter and a designer at an accessible range, for a group of sales reps, to just tailor the content.

3) Provide training to strike effective conversation with stakeholders

Time you invest in listening to what your sales reps say to the decision makers in various accounts. The conversation needs to be monitored so that you could give constructive feedback to the reps. Say, your rep has sent mails to the prospects or tried to get in touch with them over the phone but all in vain.

If your team is confident that the identified prospects have a need then there is something else that needs  to be fixed from your side to get stakeholders’ attention. This could be sales collaterals, which we have discussed in the previous point. Or it could be soft skill training plus the content of the conversation, which needs to be practiced over and over again.

As part of the sales training you can bring all the reps handling various accounts under one roof and let them share their stories on how they lost or won a particular deal.

4) Feed data into the sales process

This takes us back to the first point where you set the metrics to measure the effectiveness. Now the insight from here needs to be fed back to improve and optimize the sales process. Once you tweak the process and see some result you can go back and revise the metrics again- add some more metrics to the list such as  sales meetings per month, number of training sessions etc. With the insight from every metric it becomes easier to strengthen the sales process.

5) Invest in right CRM to improve sales effectiveness

Gone are the days when sales reps used to maintain diaries and excel sheets. The market is flooded with plethora of CRM and other tools. Invest in the right kind of tool to assist your sales reps in moving fast towards conversion.

A sales team is the critical component of your organization and for the business to progress it is vital that the team is effective in selling. So, make sure that you give value and importance that sales team deserves and concentrate more on improving sales effectiveness rather than on conversion rate.

For more information about MoData offerings click here

Sales Management

8 Best Practices to Optimize Your Sales Forecast Accuracy

Leave a comment

“If you have to forecast, forecast often.”

– Edgar Fiedler

Forecasting can be useful for more than figuring out if you need an umbrella or not. In sales, a forecast is a prediction of expected sales levels for a certain period of time. Unlike fortune tellers though, sales managers use statistical analysis, historic data, strategy evaluation, and more in order to come up with their predictions. This process provides tremendous value to businesses, despite its complexity. That’s why 16% of sales managers consider optimizing sales forecast accuracy a primary aim.

Forecasting helps you gain some more clarity about the sales process. It allows you to identify potential prospects or challenges of the pipeline management. You can take appropriate measures from there. Avoiding unexpected cash flow problems and managing all aspects of the sales process become much easier with accurate sales forecasting.

Inaccurate predictions can damage your decision-making capabilities. Chances of success are much greater if you have an idea about which leads are most likely to close.

What is accuracy in forecasting?

The accuracy of a forecast is the measure of how close the prediction was to the result. It puts the quality of the estimates into a quantitative frame. The accuracy evaluation is an important part of planning and choosing a tactical approach. It is used to reinforce different hypotheses, as well as to predict various situations and their likely outcomes.

Sales forecasting essentials

You can run your business better if you utilize sales forecasts correctly. In order to do so, you need a few questions answered:

  • What is your yearly number of new customers?
  • What is your yearly number of lost customers?
  • What is your renewal rate?
  • What is the size of your average sales?
  • Are there certain periods when you get or lose more customers?

For existing businesses

Running an existing business makes creating forecasts easier. You can look at the patterns from previous years and extrapolate the numbers from there. Examining your last year’s sales figures should be your first step.

Gather all the information you can. Analyze the purchase levels of customers. Do you have any bigger clients? If you do, it might be a good idea to outreach them. Find out if they have any intentions to change the volume of their purchases for the following year. Use your sales data to make predictions and compare it to the differences in previous years.

For new businesses

The forecast game is a bit more difficult for new businesses. You don’t have sales or analytics data from previous years to rely on. You have to use market research to make your predictions.

Try to be realistic in your assessment. There are certain practices that will help you optimize your sales forecast accuracy.

Best practices to optimize your sales forecast accuracy

Any reasonable sales manager would use a sales forecast in the management process. Although it’s not an exact science, there are certain practices that can help you improve sales forecast accuracy. Not only that, but they can help you make the most out of your predictions.

1) Solid strategy

Your forecast should be connected to your strategy. This way you are basing your forecast on something tangible and realistic. It’s no longer a simple prediction. It’s a data-driven process that takes many factors into account. Integration is a great way to improve accuracy.

2) Consistency

There are different models you can use to create sales forecasts. This makes consistency important. If you choose a different model every time, you can’t get a clear picture. It prevents you from standardizing the format you use. This puts more and more challenges in front of you, lowering the accuracy of your predictions. Choose one and stick to it.

3) Keep it simple

The process doesn’t need to become overly complicated. You can use specialized sales forecast software to keep track of your sales data. This allows you to follow the day-to-day changes, access historic data, measure sales velocity, manage your pipeline, and more. The simpler you keep the process, the more accurate your predictions will be. Follow the data.

4) Understand your buyers

Sales is a two-way process. Yet, businesses focus only on their side of the fence. Sales forecasts are often based only on what sales reps do. This doesn’t give you a clear idea, because it misses half of the picture. Considering and understanding buyer behavior is a great practice for improving forecast accuracy.

5) Be flexible

Business is not a static field. Conditions change all the time. You should be prepared to re-evaluate your predictions. These adjustments will significantly increase your sales forecast accuracy.

6) Set aside time for review

Dedicate time for reviewing forecasts and results. This way you can promptly adjust your tactics or strategy if you need to. Look at the results of what you’re doing and think about your next move. Do it consistently. Choose a frequency and stick to it.

7) Involve your sales team

Involve your team in the process. They are a part of it already. Use their input to improve the accuracy of your predictions. They can help with interpreting the data, client behavior, pipeline analysis, and more.

8) Require commitment

Sales forecast accuracy means nothing if your team doesn’t commit to it. Everyone should be aware of the forecast, targets, and timings. Discuss this with your team and hear out what they have to say about it.

Sales forecasts can help you make smarter tactical choices, distribute finances, and better manage the whole process. Use these practices to improve your sales forecast accuracy. If you do it correctly, forecasting can become a powerful tool in your toolbox. Not just a guess, but a data-driven part of your strategy. With great planning and accurate forecasts, you will take your sales game to the next level.

Sales Management

Why Your Sales Goals Are Missing the Mark and How to Set Them Right

Leave a comment

Revenue is an important yardstick to judge your sales team’s goals so that you could align them along the various routes of the sales cycle. Oftentimes sales leaders get so caught up in strategy and competition that they start thinking of revenue as the team’s major goal. However, the be-all and end-all focus on driving revenue without defining how to get there can be tough on the operations and your sales team.

While all the sales activities contribute towards your organization’s revenue, you, as an intuitive sales leader, shouldn’t be limiting your focus on amassing big numbers. You don’t want to end up in the same soup as Bausch & Lomb. In 1993 with the main focus on revenue, the company improperly booked sales of contact lenses and sunglasses, and as a result, overstated revenues and earnings.

Therefore, we suggest to treat revenue as an ultimate measurement of performance and not as a sales goal.

If revenue shouldn’t be a sales goal, what should be? Time to revisit your sales goals.

Before diving deeper into what goals you should set for your sales team, let’s first clarify what makes some goals good and other bad.

A good sales leader is one who can quantify the activities of the team. You cannot just say that you want more leads, more conversion, satisfied customers and better revenue. These are vague goals, which only waste resources.

Goals need to be SMART- specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound. So, don’t forget to glean through your data to answer questions like: number of leads getting generated, how long is the current sales cycle, which channel gives more number of leads and conversions, number of follow-ups, time taken to respond to inbound leads, prospect’s remarks, why and who is team’s star performer etc. Then after the investigation and calculation you will know what your team’s new goals should be.

Activity goals vs result oriented goals – solve the dilemma

Say, you have already revisited, reset and reiterated over the sales goal with your team during the entire course of sales cycle.  Hence, fixing the glitches, introducing the new goals and shunning the old ones that didn’t work, are all part of your important job. While doing so, you have already set SMART goals for your sales team with focus on earnings.

But oftentimes sales suffer because of too much focus on result and less on activities. We do agree that result and revenue are the numbers that throw light into your sales performance. However, these numbers are not the goals. The rule of thumb is to look at the numbers from every angle and set activity-based goals that can help drive revenue.

For example, while browsing, a prospect comes across your product’s PPC ad. S/he clicks on the ad and fills your landing page form. The information is now in your CRM. Since your prospect has directly contacted you by sharing phone number or email id, wouldn’t you think that your team should be super prompt in calling the prospect back. May be it takes somewhere between 15-20 hours for your rep to get in touch with the prospect but it is too long and by this time prospect could lose interest. So, setting up small and relevant action-oriented goal like ‘make the first contact within minutes with inbound lead’, gives clear direction to your sales rep.

How to put activity goals in action

Help your sales team shift the focus from chasing fancy revenue to a higher closing ratio. This is how it can be realistically done:

  • Know your team members and data like the back of your hand. This way you can set goals for individual members of your team. First thing first, know your data so that you can forecast. For example how many leads, in a day, do each rep in your team connects to? Just setting up a quota for sales reps on number of emails to be sent or calls to be made will not work. The important question to ask here is: how many leads respond as soon as the first contact is made either through a phone call or email? Dive deeper to get insight into your contact patterns.
  • Make use of call tracking software to know what and how your reps are talking to the prospects. After all sales is about building relationship with the prospects. Work on the pitching material with your team.
  • Ensure your prospects get the attention they want. What is the length of your sales cycle? Is it taking longer than anticipated to convert and why? Always remember that the prospects suffer from attention deficiency syndrome. So, if your sales reps are not prompt in making that initial contact as soon as some prospect has shown interest then deal can be lost to your competitor.
  • Track how many follow ups does it take before the prospect becomes your customer. Help your reps reduce the number of follow ups by constantly training them and letting them do thorough research on prospects and competitors too. Apart from this, your reps should have the deep knowledge of your product!

Don’t set too many goals for the team. Work with individuals to identify their weakness and set goals for them accordingly.

Selling is an art and it can be mastered only with practice. Through Mo-Data’s sales analytics software, you can evaluate your best sales reps by getting insight into sales by week, time to close, repeat purchases, ranking salespeople by revenues, profitability and sales effectiveness. Monitoring of data and setting goals should go hand in hand because data helps in setting good goals apart from the bad ones.

Sales Management

Top 3 Sales Metrics to Track the Performance of Your Sales Development Reps

Leave a comment

In our article Why Sales Development Representatives Are Important to Sales, we covered what SDRs do and how they influence your potential clients in their buying decision. Now that you have a team of SDRs in place, you would be interested and curious in knowing how well they are doing the job they are hired for. In this part we will throw some light on metrics to track their performance.

More qualified leads increase conversion rates and lead to improved revenue. We’ve picked three important sales metrics to track performance of SDRs supporting field sales:

1. Time taken to schedule first appointment

SDRs primary job is to build relationship with the prospects who are business decision makers/ leaders across industry and who might see value proposition in your company’s product. So, from the time one such hot lead gets identified SDRs have to gauge when the time is right to make first contact and seek face to face meeting for a product demo.

Obviously, these outbound hot leads cannot be approached with a regular marketing emailer campaign or regular sales pitch. Based on their thorough research about client’s profile, budget and if at all they have the need to implement your solution, SDRs curtail and personalize the mail or any marketing material for instance.

If a SDR waits too long to establish that first contact there might be chances of losing this hot lead to your competitors. Hence, it is important for you to have hint of how long does it take for your SDR to make that first and right move because faster the first move, closer your sales team is to making a conversion.

This is where lead scoring comes into picture. Lead score is a method used by SDRs and sales executives to weigh the value of prospects based on certain metrics. In turn, this helps them to assign priority to leads and to have fair hint on the ideal time to move towards first appointment without moving too fast or too slow.

We’ve developed Data Scout keeping in mind the hyper specialization in the sales and marketing landscape. With the aid of Data Scout you can easily find out who your star SDR performer is and   predict opportunities which are likely to close across global sales territories and much more.

2. Lead to opportunity conversion ratio

This is a very simple but important metric. In sales classification it is also called MQL (Market Qualified Lead) to SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) conversion rate.

The basic difference between SDRs and Sales Executives  is that SDRs don’t have set targets. Sales Executives’ performance is measured by number of deals they close, while SDRs are held accountable for passing number of leads in the form of opportunities to the sales executives.

MQL is generally hot prospect who has shown interest in your product after number of touch base and contacts established by your SDR. The identified lead has moved to next stage of being called MQL. This lead now gets passed on to sales executive and is called SQL. This means that the lead is considering to purchase your product so is ready for a follow up.  Measuring just the number of MQLs presents distorted perspective because SDRs might transfer lesser qualified leads to the sales executives’ bucket. Hence, it is important to see how many qualified leads which get passed on by SDRs actually get converted.

3. Size of the deal

When it comes to fetching lead by outbound means, SDRs main goal is to bring big value opportunities, which implies better revenue for your business. This necessarily can’t be met through inbound leads in the pipeline. To achieve this SDRs have to spend substantial amount of time in doing research and gathering information about the new prospects. Pursuing starts based on the initial research work. SDRs become the face of your product when they are trying to court big deals and establish a rapport with them.

While all deals can’t be won, especially the big ones which are hardest, this doesn’t become the sole criteria for judging a SDR’s credibility. As mentioned before lot of effort and time are spent into designing numerous activities by your SDR to add one big client in your business portfolio!

Do you use data to know the size of various deals your SDRs are targeting? Which data-points do you consider to track your SDRs’ performance? What data and tool your SDR team uses to manage pipeline and time? We would love to hear that from you.

More resources on this:

Deciding What Metrics to Track for Sales Development Reps
How Can I Tell When An SDR Is Struggling?
How to Choose, Track and Improve Key Sales Development Metrics for Predictable Growth

For more information about MoData offerings click here