What is Sales Productivity?

Sales productivity is a relationship between a salesperson’s efficiency (inputs) and effectiveness (outputs). Gains in productivity are achieved by optimizing rep efficiency and effectiveness — in simple terms, you are looking to maximize output by reducing inputs such as time, cost, and effort.

Sales efficiency is all about optimizing a rep’s use of time. An efficient salesperson spends time on high-impact activities like call preparation instead of low-impact activities like administrative tasks.

Sales effectiveness relates to a rep’s ability to increase revenue. A highly effective agents uses available resources to win customers. Critically, these resources — content, guidance, and training — must be close at hand to close deals.

In basic form, sales productivity is the output that can be quantitatively measured individually (per sales rep) or by the entire team.

Sales productivity is measured across your entire company. High-performers in your organization can help you identify and scale best practices to optimize productivity.

So if a rep fits in some extra sales calls during their allocated time, they’re improving efficiency. If they convert those calls into customers, they’re improving effectiveness. Efficiency creates as many opportunities as possible, while effectiveness is how well a team capitalizes on those opportunities.

How to improve sales productivity?

Identify hidden opportunities

A great sales enablement platform can do more than just manage your sales assets — it should also provide you with crucial data rep into rep workflows and potential areas for improvement. For instance, if you have recently uploaded a critical sales play but the view count is low, it’s safe to assume that reps aren’t utilizing this resource to its full capacity.

Dedicate time for optimization

Dedicate time maintaining critical aspects of your sales strategy, whether that’s finally upgrading a core platform to a better offering, refreshing your training courses, or rolling out a new sales process. As long as you communicate upcoming changes effectively, the only thing your reps will notice is how much more productive they are post-maintenance.

Accelerate pipeline with value

In many cases, modern selling requires that you position your product not based on what you’re selling, but on why you’re selling it. Selling value instead of features or capabilities allows you to drive urgency because it attaches the purchase of your product to your customers’ key initiatives.

Make it simple to be productive

Make achieving peak productivity dead simple. All elements of your sales organization should drive efficiency and effectiveness, from your tools to your sales strategy to your sales processes.

Your salespeople are busier than ever. But meetings and administrative tasks will never go away, and there are several things you can do to help your representatives save time and increase productivity. Give your sales reps the foundation and content to engage their buyers successfully. With the right sales productivity instruments and strategy, your sales team can go to market more efficiently and monitor performance to get better over time. 

When your sales productivity audit is complete, it’s time to take action. Using the productivity matrix featured earlier, you can map each activity based on its impact and urgency to see which of the remedial measures below should be taken. Remember: the goal is to focus reps on activities that close deals.

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