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Wednesday, August 3, 2022
14 Proven Ways to Increase Sales Productivity
Sales productivity is the measurement of how much time you spend on sales activities. Increasing sales productivity means using your available time more efficiently and effectively. When you are more productive as a salesperson, you spend less time on administrative tasks and manual procedures that don’t add value to your customers or company.
Improving sales productivity can be challenging since new sales reps need over 11 months of training to become productive. You can shorten this time if you invest in the right sales training platform, such as our Wonderway. It helps you identify skills your sales reps lack, makes your training more efficient, and allows you to track and increase conversion rates at each funnel stage.
Wonderway also helps you track your sales team progress and understand how it affects your revenue growth. You can sign up with your email and start today to see how it works.
If you want to increase productivity of your sales team, you can make many changes to see significant results. Read on to learn how to make your sales teams more productive with these 14 practical tips.
Why is sales productivity important?
Sales productivity is an indicator of how much revenue individual sales reps generate. It helps you identify strengths and weaknesses in your sales team and measure the effectiveness of your sales efforts.
For example, a sales rep with low sales skills can spend a lot of time contacting potential customers without achieving results, despite all the effort. On the other hand, poorly organized sales processes can reduce sales reps' productivity by forcing them to spend too much time on repetitive, time-consuming manual tasks. They should focus instead on what’s most important – revenue-generating tasks and achieving your sales targets.
Sales productivity also helps you understand how long it takes for your sales teams to close deals, average order values, customer lifetime value, etc. All this data can be precious when optimizing your sales process and improving sales effectiveness.
Maximizing the results and minimizing the required resources to achieve them is the best way to improve sales productivity.
How increased sales productivity affects your sales team
Increasing sales productivity can affect your sales team in several significant ways. It helps:
- Monitoring sales reps' performance more effectively
- Focusing on the most valuable prospects and leads
- Prioritizing tasks and spending time more efficiently
- Closing deals in less time and with less effort
- Achieving sales KPIs faster and increasing annual revenue
- Improving customer satisfaction and reducing churn rates
- Reducing expenses for hiring and training and other operational costs
- Reducing stress levels, leading to better overall health and wellness
These points combined result in a more effective, profitable sales organization. Now, let’s discuss the best 14 ways to increase salesman productivity.
14 ways you can help your sales reps increase their sales productivity
Now that you know what you can gain by optimizing your sales productivity, let’s focus on the things you can do to achieve that goal.
1. Defining effective sales onboarding process to reduce ramp-up
An effective sales onboarding process helps new sales representatives become productive immediately. It should guide the salesperson in the right direction from the first day in your company.
An effective onboarding experience is crucial for sales professionals, as companies employ different sales strategies and have diverse client lists, making previous sales experience only partially applicable. The sooner your salespeople grasp your company and client base, the faster they start selling effectively.
How Wonderway helps you speed up the process
Wonderway is our sales performance platform that includes sales onboarding software. It helps you optimize your existing development programs and set clear milestones to guide your sales reps to success. If you need help, our Sales Enablement Consultant will guide you each step of the way.
It also enables you to reduce the ramp-up time by 50% by providing new hires with all the tools and resources to become fully productive and meet sales quotas faster. Most importantly, you can train your sales reps remotely to prepare them before they start selling to your clients.
High-quality, interactive training content
Wonderway helps you improve your onboarding programs with valuable content and customizable templates created by the best sales professionals in the tech industry.
Also, by harnessing the power of integration, you can quickly make your existing training documents more engaging by adding interactive elements such as quizzes and video recordings. We have you covered whether you are using Confluence, Gsuite, Loom, and Office 365.
2. Identifying opportunities for improvement
By analyzing sales data and metrics, you can measure sales activities and evaluate how your sales team operates to identify areas for improvement. For example, if your lead generation goes well, but few leads convert into paying customers, it may indicate a problem with sales efficiency you need to address.
Using the right sales productivity tools, such as Wonderway, helps you collect valuable performance data automatically, boost productivity, and ultimately push your sales deal forward.
You can easily connect our solution to your CRM system to access actionable insights and eliminate negative patterns to guide your sales team to peak efficiency. What's best, Wonderway notifies you when it spots these negative patterns, so you can focus on more critical tasks.
3. Identifying skill gaps and productivity challenges
Hiring the right people is only half the story – you also need to make sure they have the right skills to succeed.
The ability to effectively identify and fill skill gaps in your sales team is critical to the success of your organization. Salespeople with the right skills can help your business win more deals, close more sales, and ultimately grow your revenue.
Wonderway helps you create a survey to collect feedback from your experienced sales leaders, sales executives, sales managers, and sales reps to see if their current skills match their roles. It lets you analyze and rate each sales rep's performance to identify skill gaps and challenges that separate top sellers from those with low results. With this overview, you can set out to fix these issues.
Start by creating a comprehensive sales training and make sure it covers all your company’s needs.
4. Conducting regular sales training
In the first tip, we mentioned onboarding as something you shouldn’t overlook, but you should also remember onboarding isn’t the end. It’s just the beginning. The first days, weeks, and months are significant, but people forget 87% of newly acquired skills a month after they learn them.
If you want your onboarding process to be truly effective, you should seamlessly transform it into an ongoing sales training program.
Wonderway can assist you with that, too – our sales training platform helps you improve close rates by 40%. We have carefully prepared sales training programs for salespeople with different skills and competencies. You can use Wonderway to increase your sales reps' skills in each stage of the sales cycle – prospecting, discovery, and negotiation, to name a few.
Our top-quality training content is created by the best sales trainers you can find in the industry. In addition to theory, our courses include practical application – the sales reps use their skills to prospect real customers and move real deals through the sales pipeline.
Thanks to fast and successful certification, you can also use the platform to make sure your team is well-aligned and cut time to market by half.
5. Tracking and analyzing team performance data
You should also gather all the essential data about your team members’ performance, as this is the only way to evaluate their progress and make informed decisions about the required training.
Wonderway sales training platform helps you track how your sales team performs over time and how their improvement affects your revenue growth. You can assess these results quarterly and show reps what they achieved to motivate them for the next challenge or help them learn from their mistakes.
Regular and sincere assessment helps you identify issues. It’ll also give you invaluable data to plan growth for your company, optimize productivity, and set reasonable goals for the future.
6. Setting daily, weekly, and monthly plans
It’s essential to have a well-defined strategy for your company, regardless of the industry. Set specific sales KPIs for each day, week, and month, so you can evaluate how sales reps spend their time selling. You can track what they accomplished and where they missed the mark and assess whether your team's productivity increased or decreased.
You'll be able to see how well you progress towards your monthly, quarterly, and annual goals. If things don't go as planned, don't be afraid to make adjustments. Plans don't have to be set in stone, but they need to exist.
7. Prioritizing tasks and defining deadlines
Always give your sales representatives specific tasks with deadlines to know which of their responsibilities have priority. Make sure you communicate these assignments well, so your sales team can easily understand them. It will help organize the workflow and remove possible obstacles, which will result in increased productivity.
8. Creating a calendar to stay on track with meetings
One solution can help you with the activities mentioned above – keeping your daily, weekly, and monthly plans and staying well ahead of deadlines. We’re talking about a company-wide calendar system.
It’s a simple yet essential tool that makes employee cooperation more straightforward. You can’t underestimate its value. You can use it to plan time for specific activities, check the availability of team members, and keep track of important meetings.
9. Creating templates for emails and proposals
Why should your sales team waste time writing the same e-mail or proposal repeatedly? You can create templates they can use every day to make prospecting faster and more productive.
It’s important to remember you shouldn’t treat a template as a ready-made message. It’s just a form that makes things easier – sales reps will still need to customize and personalize it, so the clients know you treat them seriously and with respect.
10. Using a CRM platform to manage sales leads
You can use a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) to automate many processes and give your employees easy access to critical information in one place. It makes contacting customers, and managing sales leads substantially more accessible and efficient.
A CRM platform also provides an overview of your sales deals, making it easier to gather information and analyze KPIs. Customer data can help you focus your sales efforts on the right leads and make the most of your existing customers.
11. Investing in automation to reduce repetitive tasks
You can use sales and marketing automation tools to significantly reduce the repetitive, menial tasks your employees have to perform each day. You can simplify lead acquisition, sales pipelines, and follow-up procedures, leaving your people with more time for actual sales, direct contact with the client, assessing lost deals, etc.
If you want to boost your sales productivity, automation is priceless. It means your employees can make better use of their skills and time.
Check this fantastic article with 30 sales automation tools to find out more.
12. Using video interviews for more efficient prospecting
Using modern technology to increase sales productivity is a viable option. Video conferencing software is one such solution.
It lets you communicate remotely with clients and see their reactions almost as if you were in the same room. It is crucial, as words are only one part of the conversation. The manifestation of feelings through facial expressions and body language is equally significant.
Your sales team can use video interviews for prospecting. It helps them find new clients without the need to travel to meet every person. It boosts productivity, as they can use their time for other critical tasks. It also results in lower costs for the company – plane tickets aren’t cheap.
13. Leveraging email automation with drip campaigns
If you decide to use marketing and sales automation software, you should also look for additional ways to capitalize on that investment. Drip campaigns are one such possibility – it’s a great way to reengage your clientele and turn visitors into buyers.
The basic idea is to send automated e-mails to people who performed a specified action. You can set various triggers up, like taking part in an event (online or in the real world). A simple, automated message – sent at the right time – can convince someone to overcome their doubts and engage with your company.
Drip campaigns offer many possibilities and can be an effective tool for boosting sales productivity.
14. Focusing on the activities with the biggest return
As you expand your sales pipeline, you’ll quickly see which activities are most worthwhile and which you should drop in favor of others. Focus on products and customers that generate the greatest return.
Of course, profitability isn’t everything. You might have another reason to engage in some of these less productive activities – charity or employer branding are two possible examples. However, make sure they don’t overshadow your business – making money is the primary goal of your company.
Sales productivity: Wrap up
As you can see, there’s no shortage of ways to boost sales productivity. Some of them require an investment in the right kind of software. Others have more to do with sales reps – increasing their competencies and quickly and effectively finding gaps in their skill sets to help them grow, sell, and earn more.
Good quality training is crucial for many of these advancements, which shouldn’t surprise you. After all, talent is the essential resource for a business, and if you want to make full use of it, you have to cultivate it. The most effective method to accomplish this is to develop a company culture where sales reps see improving their skills and competencies as beneficial – a path towards success.
If you want to optimize your training plans and achieve more in less time, an excellent sales training platform – like our Wonderway – is a must. You can use it to help your people grow their skills faster and review their performance data to understand your revenue potential. The results? Better conversion rates, more closed deals, and achieved sales targets. Sign up today and see how Wonderway improves your sales results.
Sales productivity: FAQ
How do you calculate sales productivity?
You can calculate sales productivity by dividing the total revenue by the number of sales agents who generated it.
Why is sales productivity important?
By analyzing sales productivity data, you can get an insight into possible problems your sales team encounters and ways to fix them. You can also better evaluate the performance of your employees, as information about their productivity provides essential context.
What are sales productivity metrics?
There are many different ones. You can evaluate how much time your employees spend on selling vs. other activities, the number of tools they use, the average number of sales, etc.