Every year, companies grow their sales teams and set higher goals for them, but few of them scale their processes and use best practices and advanced sales tools with such dedication and vigor. As a result, the productivity of sales teams is rapidly declining. Check out these 5 strategies to help your sales team overcome productivity challenges, improve sales efficiency, and increase profits.
1. Embrace customer data sync tools
Since all of the information a company receives from specialized software tools comes from many different sources, databases can easily become fragmented and disorganized. This is how data silos, conflicting, duplicate low-quality or outdated data, lack of visibility to customers’ full history with the organization appears. All this makes it more difficult to build accurate, actionable, and comprehensible reports based on data-driven insights.
Customer data integration tools help sync the data you need about website visitors, leads, customers, or accounts. Using CRM along with additional tools gives excellent results in solving the aforementioned problems.
For example, you can use Salesforce along with one of the popular third-party integrations like Clari, InsightSquared, Aviso, Gong, or XANT Playbooks, or just make the best of Einstein activity capture, a tool that connects to Gmail or Office 365, automatically syncing all of your team’s customer communications to Salesforce.
But, in most cases, to get a flawless experience and the best results, it’s better to use advanced platforms. One of such platform is Revenue Grid, an AI-powered Guided Selling platform that covers the full sales cycle, allows you to analyze and implement your growth strategy, and helps your teams to conduct outreach campaigns based on complete customer data.
Here are the main reasons to choose Revenue Grid over, for example, Einstein Activity Capture:
- You own the data: unlike Einstein Activity Capture, Revenue Grid never stores your sales activity data on third-party databases — it just syncs it and sends it to your Salesforce directly. Custom deployments like on-premise and private cloud, both your and your customer’s data will never leave your org.
- You have full control over the data: unlike Einstein Activity Capture, which indiscriminately captures all types of your activity, Revenue Grid syncs data based on your allowlists, denylists, and custom rules, preventing sensitive personal data from ending up on Salesforce.
- You always stay secure: unlike Einstein, Revenue Grid provides full encryption for all data passed to Salesforce. Microsoft Graph Security API is also supported for companies that need the fullest protection of specific data types.
- You get accurate reporting in SFDC: unlike EAC, Revenue Grid captures and saves data to Salesforce, making it completely reportable in SFDC, and you can easily build reports for the most important metrics.
2. Evaluate and re-evaluate your sales processes
An ineffective sales process costs companies millions of dollars in lost revenue each year. However, companies that continually review and improve their sales processes are 30% more likely to meet their goals.
The beginning of a new quarter is the right time to reevaluate your work processes and find problem areas to correct. To increase the efficiency of the new process, you need to:
- analyze which components of the existing process are working and which are not;
- find out what are the strengths and weaknesses of the existing process;
- understand, if there are some gaps or obstacles in the existing sales process, and if so, where exactly;
- find out where the communication process tends to be interrupted;
- figure out where you might need to reallocate your resources tomorrow.
And even after you’ve established a consistent workflow, you still need to improve it periodically. Each step in the sales process should be directly related to your goals and add value to your actions on the way to achieving the goal.
3. Build a thought-out onboarding process
In addition to the customer onboarding process, you should pay due attention to another, not less important process — the proper onboarding of your salespeople. The sooner you start, the sooner they will start to be beneficial.
Make sure to teach your sales reps to use their time and resources as efficiently as possible. To do this, get your training materials ready, and do not forget to update them periodically. Also, letting your best salespeople mentor new ones will shorten their learning curve and help them get started faster.
The key tasks of an effective adaptation process are the following:
- In-software training means providing your new salespeople with access to modern tools that they will use a long (and don’t forget about video tutorials!). This will help them understand how the software works in advance and get used to it.
- Developing phone skills will help new salespeople learn how to optimally tackle different parts of the selling process. The more experienced colleagues can supervise their activities in the early stages of the training and help them develop the right communication skills, deal with their fears and increase their capacity to overcome customer objections.
- Monitoring their progress: checkpoints and quizzes will encourage new sales team members to improve their skills faster and harder. Tell them more about your product and its features, benefits, and features, organizational culture, rules, documentation, etc.
4. Track and measure your sales activities
To increase your sales productivity, you need to understand what to start from. To do this, you need to clearly know exactly where you are right now. Dashboards help you with this, allowing you to visualize trends to provide information and performance for each member of your sales team.
Train them to log their sales activities: this will allow you to establish a benchmark to measure productivity. Collecting and analyzing the right data can quickly identify opportunities for improvement.
Be sure to pay attention to KPIs such as Conversion Rates, Average Sales (per hour), Actual VS Forecasted, etc.
5. Keep your sales reps motivated
When it’s not only you but each of your employees who is focused on success, you’re guaranteed to reach it. Companies that regularly invest time and resources in employee motivation report a 50% increase in sales and a 38% increase in productivity.
By following a few simple strategies, you can keep your team motivated:
- praise in public (hold regular meetings celebrating both big successes and small accomplishments);
- building trust (the more they trust you, the more and better they work. One of the simplest ways to gain trust is to provide transparency in the workplace
- setting destinations, not paths: this statement means that you should specify the destination (the goal itself) for your subordinates, but give them freedom of action in finding ways to achieve it, which greatly helps build trust;
- blurring the line between the boss and the employee: let your sales managers think about what responsibilities they can delegate to sales reps to motivate them;
- show them the money: although many non-financial drivers are quite important to motivate your employees, timely payment of salary is still the #1 motivating factor for most of them.
