How To Improve The Productivity Of Your Sales And Sell More : In order to explain what is the key to the proper functioning of any business in terms of sales, the answers may vary, but most would undoubtedly agree that the productivity of the sales team will decide the degree of success of a business. This is because the income of any company depends on the customers generated by the sales team.
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What Is Sales Productivity?
In simple words, sales team productivity means increasing profits and reducing costs. The concept is simple: sales of the product or service are increased while minimizing the use of resources, and therefore profits are increased.
How To Increase Sales Productivity?
Sales productivity can be easily optimized from an analytical point of view of the sales process, trying to eliminate unnecessary tasks and streamline the workflow. Although in most cases optimizing the productivity of the sales team seems simple and could be increased by making small changes in workflows, it is often necessary to go much further to fully optimize the sales process.
Sales management has different definitions depending on who asks it and also who answers:
- If you ask for a human resources profile, you will find the answer in continuous training processes and professional development plans for the commercial department.
- If it were up to the marketing team, they would say that it is the content produced by their department and that this is what helps to close subsequent business deals.
- If the same question is asked to the development department, they will answer technology, etc.
Why Do Companies Need To Improve Sales Team Productivity?
In this sense, they are the people in charge of increasing the income and benefits of a company. 80% of sales representatives do not achieve their annual sales goals, and this is due to a series of factors:
- There is a lack of training and qualification in this area.
- Sales trends are unknown and are continually changing.
Improving these three main problems means that any business would be able to practically double its income by improving the productivity of its sales team through the elaboration of a good sales management strategy focused on the elimination or automation of redundant tasks, training, Qualification, and continuous improvement of the sales staff in an effective way.
Keys to improving the productivity of your sales team.
The following key points would help companies improve the productivity of the sales team and therefore the ROI (return on investment):
1. Continuous training of sales staff
Almost every company has some sort of training program for their sales team, but very few have an effective training program that equips sales managers with the right skills to thrive in closing deals. The number of companies that have continuing education programs for sales representatives is even fewer.
2. Automation of sales tools
Automation is an important part of improving the productivity of a sales team.
A large number of sales reps fail to reach their sales goals because they are busy with non-business activities throughout the year.
These tasks can be easily automated so that salespeople spend more time on activities that generate returns instead of wasting time on non-productive and repetitive tasks such as sending emails, cold calls, etc.
Automating these tasks so that sales representatives can return to their main activity, which is none other than selling, is undoubtedly key when it comes to improving their productivity.
3. Alignment of marketing and sales teams
Waging war for someone else by the marketing and sales departments is a mistake commonly repeated by many companies. The lack of communication and shared objectives sometimes causes the commercial and marketing strategies to differ.
This causes discrepancies between both teams and is undoubtedly detrimental to the overall business results. Promoting marketing strategies, establishing meetings between those involved, sharing common, achievable, and measurable objectives, or reporting improvements or detected failures will be synonymous with success for any company.
4. Integration of business systems
One of the biggest drawbacks when it comes to streamlining the business work process is the use of different tools.
This problem is easily solved with the integration of a CRM system such as HubSpot’s, vital for the efficiency of the sales team’s work and that brings together all the data that is collected from a business opportunity or client.
As its main advantage, the CRM system allows integration with other types of tools such as customer service, communications (Outlook, Gmail, etc.), productivity, or marketing.
The implementation of this type of system in the field of commercial work has a great impact on daily work in terms of saving time. A simple example is that with just one click, the salesperson can link all the information collected through email with the CRM database.
In short, improving the productivity of the sales team depends on a series of factors to take into account if your business objective is continuous growth and the achievement of results.
The cost of inaction in this regard is very high. The opportunity to improve sales ratios, automate processes and establish a common strategy between all the departments that make up a company with the challenge of achieving more profits and income is the order of the day.
