Business models that prioritize the increase of sales productivity must always look for ways to improve performance and efficiency. These are key metrics essential to the overall success and growth of any business. This means employing sales strategies that make efficient use of time, improving connections with potential leads, and nurturing client relations.
Implementing such strategies comes with certain caveats. The acquisition of tools, both physical and digital, requires significant investment, one that senior management may not approve. Particularly if such investments are costly or have unproven results.
To counteract this, sales teams must look at productivity strategies that provide measurable metrics and are fully actionable. In doing so, sales teams can display an increase in ROIs, which is crucial to a management team loosening their purse strings. This ensures senior management is onboard with the necessary strategic changes in investment guaranteed to improve your sales team’s productivity.
To identify roadblocks and increase productivity, here are five investments to get the most out of your sales team.
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Ongoing development and training
No matter how senior your executives are, ongoing development and training are important for every member of the sales team. As your company continues to grow, team members must always be on hand to master new methodologies and tools.
Ongoing training and development enable members of your team to shore up any weaknesses they demonstrate in particular areas.
Your sales team should receive regular training on a periodical basis. Staff training and development is an investment that ensures all members of the team operate at a high level. Such continuous training resulting in higher productivity and performance can earn individual team members 50% higher net sales. Implementing a sales enablement program can further help the sales team’s performance skyrocket into hyper-growth territory especially when implemented across an enterprise-level sales team.
Strategically structured schedules
When running inefficiently, meetings become a waste of time. Such time can be better spent developing or researching prospective clients and acquiring better leads. While meetings are crucial to help increase sales productivity, those without a clear purpose or a schedule result in a disproportionate amount of time being wasted.
Being able to effectively schedule, coordinate, and run meetings, whether they be one-to-one or group meetings, is key to helping team members stay organized and on task.
In regards to this, there are tools sales teams can invest in to organize their time more effectively. Timer+, GoToMeeting, Speek, and Asana are just some of the tools that enable your team to stay on task while keeping every member accountable for their work.
Such tools are powerful enough to help your team members manage their projects effectively and improve their productivity.
Social selling
The growth of digital tech has emboldened sales teams to utilize new platforms to engage with prospective clients and network with potential customers.
The power of social selling enables team members to employ social media to effectively engage in meaningful conversations with desired target audiences.
By employing social media to gain insights on key metrics such as pain points, industry happenings, and audience preferences, team members can leverage these social tools throughout the sales process to meet their quota, or even exceed it.
Flexibility enabling tools
Ensuring team members are up-to-date with the latest technology eliminates barriers to opportunity. Employing the latest technology enables your team members to increase their productivity. No longer will they be hindered by the tedious aspects of their job.
Arming your sales team with the latest tech, such as mobile communication and collaborative tools will provide them access to timely and critical information such as customer data or sales information.
The ability to perform on a remote platform enables your team to work with real-time data, ensuring better sales and customer experiences. Instead of spending hours at the office acquiring or updating relevant information, team members can accelerate the sales funnel through the efficient utilization of pertinent technology.
Automation technology
Collectively, the sales department could also benefit from the seamless integration of technology that enables flexibility.
Automating sales activities that don’t contribute to team members’ acquiring leads and selling saves the department time and money. Reducing administrative tasks and automating tedious aspects of your sales workflow helps members respond timeously to potential customers, improving the consumer experience and accelerating the sales process.
A defined workflow sees marketing automation take care of tasks such as data entry and triggered events like follow-up emails to nurture customer relationships. Automating buying signals and other key elements that accelerate the sales funnel drives efficiency throughout the whole department, and is perhaps one of the most fruitful investments any company can imbue to improve a sales team’s productivity.
Improving efficiency and driving productivity is more than just eliminating tasks or generating more leads. Consumers today are more sophisticated than ever. As such, companies must invest in tools that drive opportunities for better engagement, not simply more engagement.
Investing in the right tools and platforms can be highly effective in increasing productivity and conversion rates. Aligning your sales team with the right investments will result in a shorter sales process, effectively increasing overall productivity.
