6 ways to boost your Sales team productivity

Thought of the Month

“Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.” -Og Mandino

Last week, I had the opportunity to reflect on the last year’s Sales cycle and draw comparison with this year. Even though, this year has been challenging due to Covid-19 and other restrictions, there is more time to focus on Sales strategies, clean and manage customer data and plans to increase productivity to the sales teams.

Improving sales productivity requires a comprehensive approach that tackles inefficiencies in both salespeople’s actions and your overall sales strategies. By taking a two-pronged approach, you give your team the best chance of resolving the issues, preventing them from achieving your revenue goals.

When it comes to enabling your sales team to sell better, here are six solutions to consider.

1. Automate repetitive tasks

It’s estimated that salespeople spend only a third of their time selling and half their time on administrative and other tasks.

While it would be virtually impossible for a salesperson to spend 100% of their time selling, the 33% figure is rather dismal. There is room for improvement, however, and the easiest way to give some time back to your sales team is to automate their basic administrative tasks. For example, automate lead distribution and prioritization, report generation and record creation. You can even use tools that make it easy to schedule phone calls and meetings without all of the back-and-forth confusion about availability.

2. Give Sales the tools they need to be flexible

Your sales team needs to be able to meet customers all the time. Staying in the office all day doesn’t cut it anymore. Despite the everlasting popularity of social media, people do enjoy face-to-face interactions. Enable your sales team to sell anywhere, but make sure they have the right tools first.

A great contact management app can help Sales rep finding, updating and entering new contacts. such as, ScanBuddy.ai.

In regards to accessing CRM, sometimes it’s not convenient to login to CRM, wade through a sea of options to find what is needed and update just one or two small details on assigned tasks. A lightweight, intelligent and mobile app can save tons of time for your sales team by enabling CRM access from any device, app, location and network. FLashCX.ai is one such cool CRM apps that works hand in hand with leading CRMs in the market and brings the utmost efficiency in accessing and managing CRM data.

3) Keep Your CRM Updated

Surveys show that 79% of the data salespeople collect never makes it into their CRM. That number is staggering, but I believe it. Sales reps don’t have time to keep their CRM up to date. Even if they did, they should be focusing on higher value-added tasks.

That said, ensuring data is captured regularly and in a standardized fashion is crucial to growing your business. Your CRM is only as good as your data, and your data is critical to help ensure you have accurate sales tracking, sales reporting, and transparency.

When used correctly, CRMs can boost your sales productivity by:

• Highlighting the opportunities that are most likely to close
• Helping you keep track of the next steps for each prospect
• Keeping your pipeline organized, so you don’t waste time looking for information

If you don’t have time to keep your CRM updated, use a productivity app such as FlashCX.ai to do it for you. It’ll log all of your call notes, move prospects through your pipeline, and help with many of the other productivity strategies in this article.

4. Get personal with your top leads — and early.

Ensure your sales team is in touch with their best prospects early on. Sending end-of-cycle emails (“Where did the year/quarter go?”) is typical and a little boring, but a riff on that idea may do the trick.

One excellent way to break through the professional muck is by getting a little personal. Ask for updates on their year or next 6 months, inquire about their specific job burdens and see if there’s some way you can help. This is also a good time to update your client Rolodex, and update your clients on changes within your company. This tends to be a good time to finalize any outstanding transactions, so there’s incentive on both sides to clean things up before the new year.

It also helps to get clients’ mobile numbers early on, so if you’re on a tight deadline, you can call them. Just make sure that your CRM has the most updated contact information of your customers all the time.

5. Proactively Seek Out Referrals

Referrals are 4x more likely to close than web leads. Thus, seeking out referrals is one of the most effective ways to boost your sales productivity.

The easiest way to increase your referral pipeline is to remain in close contact with your customer success team. They have a strong pulse on who the happiest, most engaged clients are, and can give you recommendations on who to ask for referrals from.

Additionally, if you have a list of clients who you tend to request referrals from, check in with your customer success team first. They can let you know if there are any changes in your clients’ experiences that would make it inappropriate for you to request a referral.

6. Recognize a job well done

Motivation is one of the keys to efficiency. People who are motivated to do a good job or simply earn their manager’s praise, are more likely to get things done. Never underestimate the power of praise. Respect your sales team, get to know them, work with them individually, nurture their talents, give them room to grow and develop, and they will certainly repay you with their productivity. Very few people are comfortable “letting down” someone they respect, and will work hard to earn their admiration.

Finally, don’t forget to develop a way to measure productivity and success. Without a benchmark, it’s impossible to know whether you have truly made any progress. For a sales team, the number of leads engaged and the number of finalized sales are good metrics to consider.

Awesome Duo: FlashCX.ai and ScanBuddy.ai

FlashCX.ai , a really cool way to access your CRM and manage data without going to CRM at all. Flash saves tons of time for your sales team and leadership and bring more efficiency. FlashCX, CRM at your fingertips!

ScanBuddy.ai is an Artificial Intelligence-based focused mobile/web solution for busy and successful Sales Professionals. It solves key challenges of contact management by Sales users and enables them to manage contacts from anywhere, any device and any tool (app, slack, teams, bots). All this happens with AI and Machine learning in the cloud with secure and 100% data accuracy.