Five Ways To Increase Sales Team Productivity

Meeting increasing sales goals and revenue targets is not an easy job, and almost every company can struggle.

As a company grows, it will try to chase more aggressive sales goals. However, without the right sales team, they will not even get close to the desired targets. Even if you have a well-performing sales team, it does not mean they will always be at the top of their performance. Your sales team will face immense pressure. That is when you need to ensure the productivity does not fall into a downward trajectory.

You need to apply the best practices, scale the process, and use sales tools to maximize your sales team’s productivity.

What Exactly Is Sales Productivity?

The textbook definition of sales productivity would be to maximize sales while minimizing expended resources. Resources include time, money, effort, and machinery.

Sales productivity can also be stated as the ratio we get from effectiveness or output and efficiency or input. However, it is basically the rate of increased revenue a salesperson can offer to the company. The more efficient the workers are, the higher the productivity. In short, to increase productivity, you need to increase the efficiency of your sales team.

This is easier said than done since there are myriads of factors that affect the efficiency and overall productivity of the sales team.

Motivation and incentives just do not cut it these days. You need to provide a superior structure for the team to follow and provide access to CRM platforms, and sales tools.

One intuitive company named CloudEnv provides tools to keep your IP and audit logs restricted and manages your environmental variables to ensure efficiency at work. They have amazing and affordable monthly plans and you can definitely use their software for added protection against your company secrets.

What Affects Sales Productivity?

Before jumping into how you can increase productivity, let us first look at the factors that play major roles in affecting your company’s sales productivity.

• Immense pressure from the higher department for a prolonged period
• Unreachable sale targets and lack of setting sales priorities
• Inconsistent sales plans, procedures, and strategies
• Disorganized and mismanaged daily routines
• Lack of proper training sessions & programs
• Reluctance to use new and innovative sales tools and technologies
• Constant changes of plan in the middle of a routine
• Lack of transparent communication among the members of the sales team
• Static sales tunnel
• Negative work environment and ethics
• Continuous disturbance and distraction in the workplace

Now that we have got all the factors figured out, let us examine how you can eliminate these factors and increase your sales team’s productivity.

Ways To Increase Sales Team Productivity

1. Automate Repeated Administrative Tasks

According to an article in Forbes, sales reps only spend about 35% of their time selling and spend about 65% doing administrative tasks.

It is important to recognize that we can not expect them to devote 100% of their time selling, but 35% is still very low. This means that there are a lot of scopes for improvement.

One easy way to allocate them more time for selling would be to automate administrative tasks like record creation, report generation, prioritization, and lead generation. Tools and software can also be used to schedule meetings and phone calls so that your team can prioritize more on what they do best – selling!

To make sure your sales team actively follows the schedule and meet clients on time, use the CloudApper SalesQ app. The platform tracks daily tasks, visit details, and sales orders to improve sales team engagement and accountability levels. The geo-fencing system will let you see their check-in information in real-time, preventing any chance of discrepancy. Deploy this tool to optimize sales activity and secure client meetings.

Speaking of meetings, always keep it short. The point of meetings is to brief everyone about a particular topic. If you have a topic in mind, determine whether it is important for everyone to hear; if not, then do not call it at all.

2. Do Not Let The Team Juggle Tasks

Multitasking is one thing, but when you try to forcefully juggle all your tasks simultaneously, it will only be exhausting for you.

Make sure to bundle tasks to maximize effectiveness. For instance, advise your sales team to get all the calls when they are selling. These two things go hand in hand and make sure they do not take any administrative task in between them. Once they have completed the task at hand, let them take a break.

They can then respond to their mail, finish generating reports, or some other tasks. If your team has to store data on the computer, then allocate a set time to do that particular task. Bundle tasks to increase efficiency and make work less exhausting.

3. Combine Marketing and Sales

A lot of companies completely separate their sales and marketing team. Yes, their tasks are completely different, but both the teams share the same organizational goal. They have to rely on each other.

The sales team must know what the marketing team plans to promote, and the marketing team must know how sales operate and how much of the budget they can use.

You do not necessarily have to combine these two parts of the company, but you should allow them to work together. That way, both teams will have a better idea about lead and revenue generation.

4. Provide Your Sales Team With The Right Tools

Your sales team has to make calls, respond online and maintain in-person interaction. Despite living in the age of social media and video conferencing, people, especially, business people feel more invested in face-to-face contact.

This creates credibility and trust. This means your sales team needs to be free to manage time to make these business visits. To make their time flexible, you have to offer them the right tools.

Give them the right device like a tablet or compact laptop. Provide them access to sales tools and management systems to boost productivity.

As for in-person meetings, coffee shops are great places, but sometimes you need more peace and quiet. So provide them memberships to flexible offices for formal meetings.

5. Give Credit Where Credit Is Due

Just like any other team, you need to motivate your sales team. Motivation is basically the essence of increasing efficiency. Your sales team needs the most motivation because they have to go out of their comfort zone and all-out every day to make sales.

Motivation can also be an incentive. Provide special bonuses, an employee of the month awards, occasional raises, and respect to your employees.

Engage with each member of the team and maintain work ethics. Have a conversation, ask about their opinions about the sales stats, and make them involved in the process. This way, your entire team will grow, and productivity will surely increase.

Final Thoughts

A well functioning sales team is important for any company. So, implement the things we mentioned above to create a better work environment, motivate your employees and increase productivity.