Tag Archives: sales productivity

Sales Management

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

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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 Performance

The Difference Between Productivity, Efficiency and Effectiveness in Sales

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You would have often heard your sales leaders asking you to be “more” productive, “more” efficient and “more” effective in selling! But how many times have you heard sales leaders explaining what these terms actually mean. Or how can we quantify this “more” in the realm of sales and sales cycle. Or are these just the subjective terms? Is it like asking a graphic designer to be “more creative”?

Through this post we will let you know what your managers actually mean when they ask you to be “Productive”, “Efficient” and “Effective”. Intermixing the usage of these terms can be detrimental to performance of your sales team, especially in B2B landscape. We emphasize on B2B selling space because the sales teams here are under constant pressure to hit the target. Every single account won has a significant impact on the company’s revenue.

Hence, these terms are not mere jargons thrown at you to boost your confidence. Each of them can be measured and change the way your team functions.

What is Sales Productivity

Sales productivity gives you an idea of how your sales resources are getting utilized and if there is a possibility of increasing the revenue by shrinking the resources. For example, if in a month your net sales was worth $20,000 and your team comprised of 5 sales reps. So, each individual’s contribution on an average was $4,000 to the net sales but who was more productive. Based on this, you can justify if you need to increase or decrease the number of reps to be cost effective.

However, with the same number of resources you can try to increase the productivity by putting few things in order. This could be achieved through the following:

  • Align sales and marketing teams
  • Invest in training of sales reps
  • Automate redundant tasks
  • Keep refreshing the content
  • Invest in right CRM tools
  • Use data to get sales insights

What is Sales Effectiveness

Are you doing the right things to achieve your sales goal and targeted revenue? These right things, right tasks and right sales process fall under the sphere of sales effectiveness. If you adopted the account based selling model, it is important to sell effectively and smartly. Say, your sales reps are assigned with the task of sending N number of emails and making X number of calls and they are successfully able to meet this target. Does that mean they are effective? Unfortunately no. What matters is how many prospects during those touch points gave them appointment for demo. This is effectiveness and here are the checklists to help you improve your team’s effectiveness:

  1. Availability of right tailored content at the right time
  2. Consistently improving the sales process by setting different goals
  3. Feeding data insights into the process
  4. Providing training to strike effective conversation with stakeholders

What is Sales Efficiency

How much time and money were spent in achieving the set goals encopmasses sales efficiency. For example, how long  does it take for your sales rep to get the appointment for the first demo and how many demos does it take to make a conversion. Efficiency is to make optimal utilization of resources. Hence, it directly leads to being effective.

Relationship between sales productivity, effectiveness and efficiency

Even though these three are completely different and shouldn’t be used interchangeably, all three are the important elements of sales cycle.

So if your sales team can attain more (by being effective) but with less effort (by being efficient) then it’s a sure shot formula for  increasing productivity and getting better ROI.

For more information about MoData offerings click here

Sales Performance

Top 3 Challenges in B2B Sales and How to Overcome Them for Better Sales Productivity

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B2B sales is about longer sales cycles, bigger financial deals, fierce competition and reaching out to more than one decision maker in an organization, which unfolds different set of challenges. According to Docurated’s report called the State of Sales Productivity, organizations are investing more and more in sales productivity in search for revenue growth. Therefore, we decided to share with you how you can improve your sales productivity by resolving the following three challenges in B2B sales.

Challenge #1: Disconnect between marketing and sales teams

A good marketing strategy doesn’t end at the campaign level. Marketing builds the foundation for your sales team to perform and to get business. Hence the main focus of your marketing team should be to support sales with quality leads. However, sales productivity is not resourced as a major priority within marketing departments and this creates a significant alignment challenge for organizations.

Solution: Quality over Quantity of Leads

Marketing and sales team need to work in unison, former feeding the latter with right the number of ‘quality’ leads. As a B2B sales leader you need to make sure that both the departments talk and exchange data and information on efforts that work or don’t work. This will ensure that sales team doesn’t waste its efforts on pursuing the wrong leads.

Challenge #2: Less automation and more manual work

After your marketing and sales teams have qualified leads in their kitty, the next step is communication. In B2B sales your reps’ significant number of hours should be spent in building relationship with the identified prospect, in influencing the decision makers and not on data entry and status updating.

Solution: Invest in robust CRM

You can help your sales team in being effective and efficient by cutting down on admin and manual work, which is often data entry and going through previous remarks/ communication. Hence, invest in a CRM that gives the option to automate and setup replies, alerts and notifications in advance. However, this unfolds another set of challenge for you as a sales leader. This means training your sales team, making them adopt and understand the importance of adopting CRM in sales cycle!

Challenge #3: Where is the right content?

Having appropriate content accessible and available at the nick of time is the prerequisite for your sales teams smooth functioning. Usually it doesn’t work this way! Sales productivity gets diluted when your sales reps have to recreate the content that they need for their pitching to go well. Sales reps do their initial research on your prospects’ portfolio, needs and on what features of your products or services they might be interested in. Based on the prospect’s need sales requisite is to have access to fresh or edited or even old content created by marketing.

Solution: Focus on one central repository to store content

For improved sales revenue, make sure that your sales reps are well equipped and have all the content at their disposal to make that pitch work. They shouldn’t be wasting time in recreating or looking through multiple repositories to find the content they need because this definitely mars their productivity.

For more information about MoData offerings click here