Studies show that only 43% of the sales professionals achieved their sales goals in 2019 and 2020. If you’re serious about achieving your sales goals in the year 2021, then the ideal way is to improve sales team productivity.
Here are some interesting hacks to boost sales productivity and get those sales figures soaring. Ready? Let’s get started:
1. Focus on The Goals That Matter
One of the first mistakes that sales teams make is to create goals way beyond their reach.
- The ideal way for a sales executive is to act on the current prospective customer. Success depends on how well you focus your energies on closing a deal.
- Organize retrospective sessions so that sales team members can share their experiences and learn from each other.
- Motivate salespeople by celebrating small achievements and organizing employee recognition programs.
- Help the team to recharge by taking breaks between task milestones.
2. Use Automation to Save Time
Studies show that sales representatives end up spending 21% of their time writing emails. Spending time writing emails reduces the energy a sales executive uses in the actual selling process.
- You can automate the email process by sending mass emails from Gmail. It’s an easy and cost-effective way to put sales outreach on auto-pilot and connect with prospects from all over the world.
- Make use of triggered email campaigns to get site visitors into your sales pipeline. Prospects receive such emails when they take action, like filling up an online form. Examples of such emails include welcome emails, thank you emails, and follow-up emails.
- Automated chatbots can help save time that sales representatives spend on the initial interaction with a prospective customer.
3. Invest in Training
An essential aspect of sales productivity is for the salespeople to have deep product knowledge. An understanding of the product helps a sales representative to answer prospect queries quickly and effectively.
- Every sales representative should learn about common audience challenges, and the product benefits helpful in solving those challenges.
- At the same time, a sales team should be aware of the features and benefits of competing products.
A trained sales professional is likely to impress a potential customer better and achieve sales goals more effectively.
4. Optimize Sales Prospecting
More than 40% of salespeople say that prospecting is the most challenging part of the sales process.
- The first and foremost part of effective sales prospecting is to get an in-depth understanding of an ideal customer.
It’s critical to understand what your customers have in common. Also, learn about why some customers chose your products and services over those of the competitors. - Conduct a short survey to understand what customers found helpful in your products and services.
- Create a persona of an ideal prospective customer and understand their interests and preferences.
Productive prospecting is about learning who is most likely to convert into a customer and who isn’t.
5. Spare Time to Plan for The Next Day
One of the best tips for improving sales productivity is to devote some time to planning. It’s ideal for a sales representative to sit back for some time and appraise the day’s achievements.
- Keep aside thirty minutes every day to make a list of stuff you’ll do the next day.
- Planning helps you kick off the next day with a fresh dose of enthusiasm. It puts behind the past day’s successes and failures and helps you work on a new action plan.
6. Be Ready With The Relevant Collateral
It would be best if you remembered that a potential customer is as time-starved as you. And that’s why you need to use the most efficient ways to communicate with prospects.
- For better sales productivity, it’s vital to align sales and marketing goals. Studies show that sales and marketing alignment can lead to a 32% increase in year-over-year (YoY) revenue growth.
- Connect with the marketing team to collaborate on developing content relevant to different stages of the buyer’s journey. Every sales professional must have access to the appropriate collateral, including educational content, case studies, product brochures, flyers, and sales proposals.
The right way to be an efficient sales professional is to be prepared in advance and be proactive in your approach.
7.Templatize as Much as Possible
A sales professional needs to communicate with prospects every day. They can’t write new emails and sales pitches every time.
- A better way is to create two-three email templates for different types of prospective customers. To save time consumed in each sales call, you can create a unique sales call script template.
- Organize each template and either store them in separate folders or a note-taking application.
- If need be, you can modify a template and make it suitable for each new prospect.
Sales templates can do wonders to sales productivity and improve business outcomes many times over.
Final Thoughts
Improving sales productivity is a continuous process. You can learn every day, every week, and every month. Every sales representative is different, and you can observe the techniques that work best for you. It would help if you worked on improving how you manage time and tasks continuously. Keep reviewing the relevant metrics and stay motivated to do better, and you’ll come out with flying colors.
