Improving sales productivity provides many benefits for business, including a better ROI on the resources spent to convert prospects, including per-hour pay and lead-generation costs. After all, your sales reps should be spending as much time as possible on sales — something that no virtual assistant or software can do! These 6 tips will help you boost your sales productivity right away.
1. Utilize advanced productivity sales tools
Cutting-edge technologies help you with organizing, managing, and generating qualified leads, optimize workflows, improve internal communications, keep an eye on KPIs, and follow your goals to improve your sales productivity. Finding a CRM that works best for you and your company can significantly help you stay organized. What comes to your mind first when you hear that? Of course, Salesforce, the “CRM giant”!
While Salesforce offers more features than you could ever need, there are some things it can’t do right out of the box. Fortunately, there are plenty of add-ons, plugins, and systems designed to enhance Salesforce’s functionality: ClickFunnels (lead generation), ActiveCampaign (email marketing), Intercom (live chat), Calendly (scheduling), Zapier (data syncing), Yesware (sales toolkit and email software), Aircall (outbound calling) and many other.
However, it makes no sense to use several different tools when there are all-in-one platforms that offer wider functionality, more advanced features, the ability to minimize your time & operational costs, streamline business security measures, and other benefits.
In this sense, you should try Revenue Grid, the first fully dedicated Guided Selling platform with multiple features that provides sales teams with step-by-step guidance to win key deals. Imagine using one powerful software suite that improves the performance of your company’s managerial level employees, sales representatives, marketing specialists, post-sales customer communication and support specialists и marketing researchers at the same time!
Let’s consider an example to understand how this software increases productivity. Revenue Inbox, one of the platform’s features, is more than just a Salesforce automated emails plugin: it’s a #1 Salesforce and Email & Calendar integration that helps you push your revenue up and to the right by providing:
- smart data auto-capture;
- auto-creation of any Salesforce object;
- Salesforce views support;
- fully customizable Email Sidebar (tailor Revenue Inbox’s layout to your needs and goals in a few clicks;
- easier meeting scheduling;
- seamless sync between Salesforce and Outlook/Gmail calendars;
- deal insights on stalled opportunities, team activity, and engagement right in Salesforce Dashboards.
Moreover, Revenue Inbox offers an ROI calculator that allows you easily calculate your expected benefits when rolling out Revenue Grid. It shows you how much time and money you can actually save around productivity improvements.
2. Understand your ideal customer profile
ICP is a picture of the type of company that is most likely to buy from you and is more likely to remain loyal and recommend you to others. Typically, ICPs include such factors as the size of the company, the business and the activities it does, and why it is likely to be interested in your offer.
This must be done right from the start, because your best customers are the primary way to increase sales, and they are the ones you should focus on. And the more you know about them, the easier it will be for you to make them an interesting offer.
3. Perfect Your Pitch
Once you have identified your market and potential customers’ pain points, you must clearly understand how to present your product as an optimal solution to customers’ problems.
Then, you must create an effective call to action (sign up for a trial, visit a store, website, etc.) and tell potential customers what they need to do to solve their problems using your product.
Once you’ve put together a flawless presentation, you should rehearse your pitch. You must exude confidence and answer any questions without hesitation to present your product in the best possible light. Make sure to keep each pitch personal.
Once you improve your pitch, you will increase your sales productivity and close more deals faster.
4. Qualify prospects more effectively
To avoid following up on uninterested leads and wasting your time, it’s important to define what qualifies a lead (both in terms of sales and marketing).
For this, it is important to find the most effective lead scoring or qualification system. You can pay attention to the following factors:
- the type of industry the contact works in;
- the size of the company;
- Annual Contract Value (ACV);
- has the prospect made a contact request?
- specific pain points that the lead has given you;
- the information that you received directly from the lead or the data enrichment platform;
- lead engagement with specific calls to action;
- order page visits.
Gathering lead information can give you all the data you need so you don’t waste your time on weak leads.
5. Use automated lead scoring
To continue the previous part, we can’t but mention another important tip: save your time and resources by using marketing automation platforms to track messages openings and further interactions.
This will help you answer questions such as:
- Are you following up at the right time?
- What’s the exact moment an MQL (marketing qualified lead) becomes a SQL (sales qualified lead)?
Then get notified when your potential customers reach a certain score threshold so you can connect with those who are more likely to convert! To manage all the things alone is often very difficult, so automation helps a lot to accomplish the target effort needed. For instance, LinkedIn automation tools are very popular among users as it helps to manage the account more efficiently.
6. Track & Measure Sales Activities
To increase your sales productivity, you need to be clear about where you are at the moment. Dashboards are just the perfect tool for this purpose! They help you visualize trends to get valuable insights into the performance of each member of your sales team.
Five main metrics field sales managers need to know will show you exactly where your team spends most of their time:
- Contact Rate;
- Lead Rate;
- Close Rate;
- Average Revenue per Sale;
- Rate of Follow-Up Contact.
Collecting and analyzing the right data can quickly identify opportunities for improvement.
