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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Samir Majumdar
Samir is the CEO and Co-founder of Veloxy. After spending 20+ years creating corporate systems, boosting revenue, and eliminating inefficiencies, Samir started Veloxy to help sales professionals shorten sales cycles, accelerate pipelines, and close more deals.
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As a sales leader, your efforts directly impact the company’s stability and growth. However, with increasing competition combined with a limited budget and sales personnel, reaching your quotas can be challenging.
However, it’s not due to a lack of effort by the sales team. While you may want your sales team to focus on selling, they also spend much time on administrative tasks. Moreover, sales personnel face several challenges that affect their efficiency.
Therefore, you must work smarter to improve sales productivity to help your organization increase revenues. In doing so, you can give your reps more time to sell while helping them reach more qualified leads.
So, if your team has been wondering ‘how can we improve sales force productivity’, you’re in the right place. In this article, you’ll learn how to measure sales productivity and find insightful tips for enhancing it.
Grab a warm coffee ☕️ or tea 🍵 and let’s get started!
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Field Sales Reps & Managers — flip to Chapter 3 to discover the top strategies for successfully improving your sales productivity in 2024!
Get Your Free EbookWhat Is Sales Productivity?
Sales productivity measures how your sales teams and reps convert inputs (effort, time, and resources) into valuable outputs such as revenue. Essentially, sales productivity showcases your ability to generate value from your resources.
Therefore, with higher sales productivity, your organization will be more profitable than rivals with similar resources but lower sales productivity.
How to Measure Sales Productivity
There are different ways to measure your company’s sales productivity. Of course, the method that suits you best will depend on the nature of your business, including factors such as products, pricing models, and revenue cycles.
With these in mind, you can measure sales productivity by tracking one or more of the following sales productivity metrics:
Factors Affecting Sales Productivity
Before going into the strategies on how to increase sales productivity, you must understand the limiting factors. Having such insight sets the proper foundation for enhancing productivity.
Some of the factors that could be affecting your field or outside sales team’s performance include:
How to Boost Field Sales Productivity
Now that you have a rough idea of what’s limiting your sales productivity, it’s time to focus on the strategies you can implement to improve it. These range from strategic alterations to investments you can make that will have a transformational impact.
1. Improve Lead Prospecting
At the heart of successful field sales efforts is lead generation. Rather than spend your resources on a large audience, you should focus your efforts on those who are likely to convert. But with more businesses competing for a limited client pool, lead generation is becoming harder.
This is why 61% of marketers suggest that lead generation is their primary challenge. As such, improving your lead prospecting is a great way to enhance sales productivity. Doing so allows you to identify and qualify potential leads for your services before initiating sales efforts.
Some of the steps you should take when prospecting for leads include:
During outreach, it’s essential to understand that you’ll hear no four times from 60% of customers before getting a yes. So, you should encourage your sales reps to remain persistent and get easily discouraged.
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Use the Calculator2. Invest in the Right Technology
As mentioned, inefficient processes and manual tasks take up too much of your sales reps’ time. You can easily address this by embracing sales technology to streamline sales processes. These sales productivity tools can assist with a wide range of activities, including:
Beyond empowering your reps, field sales software will give you a competitive advantage as it offers the following benefits:
Without a doubt, technology is an essential part of agile and efficient sales. However, you should be careful not to rely on it too much as doing so may erode the essence of field sales, forging strong personal relationships with clients.
3. Invest in Quality Sales Training and Coaching
A crucial part of selling is reaching the right people with a great offer. However, that’s not enough for your sales reps to close deals consistently. Your sales team should understand the art of building and sustaining relationships to outsell competitors.
This is why you should invest in sales training. With the right people promoting your brand, you won’t have to focus on discounts to close prospects. They’ll have the insight, know-how, and charisma to present your products and services as the only logical option to prospects.
Sales training offers the following benefits:
4. Set and Track Sales Objectives
Setting goals is essential for your company to consistently achieve growth targets in sales. However, this is a balancing act you can’t afford to get wrong.
If you set very high targets, you risk demotivating your team or burnout as they chase the impossible. On the other hand, if your targets are too conservative, your team may perform below their potential.
Depending on the nature of your business, the goals you set may vary. Nonetheless, with the right goals, you’ll notice a significant improvement in sales.
Here are some of the reasons to set goals:
For your goal-setting efforts to yield desired results, you need to assess your current business performance and competitors’ performance.
5. Define Your Sales Process
While there are naturally gifted salespeople, you can’t rely on individual attributes or hard work to achieve goals. If you don’t have a roadmap outlining how to approach sales, you can’t expect consistent results.
This is where a sales process comes into play. The sales process will have a series of repeatable steps that your sales reps should follow to convert a prospect into a client. Along with shortening the sales cycle and increasing the conversion rate, it provides structure and accountability.
But beyond boosting your bottom line, a sales process will aid your efforts in the following ways:
When developing your sales process, identify your ideal customer and focus your field sales strategies on appealing to them. From there, create a lead generation strategy and build a sales pipeline.
6. Assign Sales Territories Strategically
The last thing you’ll want your sales teams and reps to do is compete to close the same clients. Aside from cultivating harmful competition, it will waste company time and resources. To avoid such scenarios and establish strategic sales efforts, establish sales territories.
These are geographical areas assigned to particular sales teams of personnel. The objective of allocating such territories is to improve the company’s effectiveness, efficiency, and sales productivity.
For each territory, the assigned party is responsible for identifying sales prospects, building customer relationships, marketing, and achieving set sales quotas.
With effective territory management, you can expect the following benefits:
If you face stiff competition in your sector or target area, setting up territories is a great mover. It will help you consolidate the markets and ward off rivals.
7. Eliminate Unnecessary Meetings
According to data, big companies lose up to $100 million annually due to unnecessary meetings. Therefore, as you seek to improve sales outcomes, take proactive measures to ensure that meetings are only held when necessary and for the appropriate duration.
Beyond affording your team more time to sell, eliminating unnecessary meetings will increase employee engagement and productivity.
8. Celebrate Small Wins
Working in the sales department comes with a lot of pressure. From the entire organization counting on you to make their efforts worthwhile to facing constant rejection, sales reps have a lot to deal with. Moreover, they often have to work extended hours and travel a lot, which can cause fatigue.
Therefore, you need to keep your sales teams engaged and motivated. One of the easiest ways of doing this is by celebrating small wins. Whenever a team or sales rep achieves a target or closes a huge client, acknowledge their efforts.
By doing so, you’ll keep everyone motivated to achieve and surpass their targets. Some of the strategies you can use to celebrate success and keep teams eager to perform include:
As you can see, rewarding your sales team does not have to be expensive. The objective is to show them you acknowledge and appreciate their efforts.
Considering that frequent recognition improves the productivity of close to 80% of employees, the benefits will justify the investment.
Benefits of Enhancing Sales Productivity
With rising competition, enhancing sales productivity may be the best way to remain competitive. It will add value to your organization in the following ways:
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When it comes to sales success in the modern business landscape, you’re better off being strategic than overworking. With a streamlined sales process, a well-trained team, and the right technology partner, you can set yourself apart from rivals.
In this regard, Veloxy is the ideal partner for your growth. We accelerate sales cycles by simplifying the process, allowing you to sell and grow faster. With our AI solutions, you’ll help your team build and maintain stronger relationships with customers, translating to more revenues.
So, schedule a free trial today to enhance field sales productivity and accelerate business growth.