Workplace productivity is a never-ending topic for most businesses simply because the challenges are just as constant. Distractions, employee commute, and other roadblocks are a reality for many businesses. And when you’re faced with the fact that workers are really only productive three hours a day, you want to make sure that you get the most of your employees’ time.
Certain productivity hacks are effective, and a good work environment also certainly helps. But what can you do to enhance the productivity of an entire team?
We’ve identified four workplace strategies that can really improve sales productivity within a team.
1. Technology Mastery
Technology has become synonymous with productivity these days. There’s a new piece of technology for almost every process, and each one promises to make things more efficient for the worker and the workplace.
How has technology helped sales productivity? Technology has made it easier to:
- Monitor time and performance of employees
- Perform tasks through automation
- Stay mobile and do work anytime and anywhere
- Collaborate through easier communications, file sharing, and task building
- Personalize the customer experience with easier collection and analysis of data
- Track the buyer’s journey—and for sales teams to respond accordingly
- Respond in real-time to any customer concern
- Make decisions based on intelligent analytics
- Do sales projections / forecasts
These are enough reasons for you to not only invest in the right technology but also make sure that employees are masters at using them.
In sales, a mobile CRM is one of the most indispensable tools a team can have. Does your team have one? And is everyone maximizing its use?
An intelligent CRM can enable pipeline management and analysis, connectivity, automation, mobile capabilities, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Lucrativ, for one, has Lucy, a powerful sales assistant that can help schedule calls, set meetings, respond to clients, and close deals. Can you imagine how this can impact every rep’s productivity and, in the long term, the whole team’s?
A CRM like Lucrativ has features applicable to performing the tasks/benefits of technology outlined above, but every sales rep must be capitalizing on its strengths.
Set up an in-depth training session with every member of your team to explain the use and benefits of the technology you have in the workplace. Allow some time for learning curve, and have specialists ready to answer questions and help troubleshoot.
In time, every sales rep will be highly adept at using every piece of technology in the office, reaping the great benefits of each one, and contributing to the team’s productivity.
Sales enablement is a system that provides sales teams with strategies, processes, tools, technology, and other resources to help them sell more effectively.
How does sales enablement boost sales productivity?
- Sales enablement helps gather, organize, and activate data for the sales team to use.
- Sales representatives can focus on what they should really be dong: selling.
- Sales teams have immediate access to relevant data, tools, and knowledge.
- Sales teams will sell better, faster, and have increased win rates.
Aligning your Sales and Marketing teams is important in sales enablement. These two teams working together can improve sales productivity in these areas:
- Lead generation
- Lead scoring / qualification (see next)
- Creation of sales tools
- Personalization of the customer experience
Marketing is essential to sales, and if there’s a perfect and strategic alliance between the two, both departments will end up being more productive.
If you have a bigger team with bigger needs. you will benefit from a full sales enablement team. Here’s an infographic on how you can build one (you may download the PDF here):
How many times have sales reps wasted time and energy working on leads that led them nowhere? For many teams, the answer is gut-wrenching.
But that can easily be solved with better lead scoring.
Lead scoring involves a scoring system wherein leads or prospects are assigned values (essentially points or scores). The values or scores, from a scale of 0 to 100, are based on a lead scoring model determined by the organization or business. The lead scoring model usually has these two basic components (or criteria):
- Demographics
- Engagement / Activity
By scoring leads, you identify the ones who will most likely convert to actual customers. These are your high-scoring ones.
If properly set up and successfully implemented, a lead scoring system can:
- Help sales reps make smarter and more efficient use of their time. They won’t be chasing low-scoring leads!
- Make sales enablement more efficient. Marketing (MQL) and Sales (SQL) will follow the same lead scoring model/system. That makes the whole lead qualifying process more cohesive and efficient.
- Be profitable. It helps reduce customer acquisition cost (CAC), and this directly impacts the bottom line.
If you haven’t yet, it’s time to build a functional lead scoring system for your team.
A team can’t be productive if team members can’t perform on their own and will need the constant monitoring of sales managers. The managers also risk their own productivity if they’re constantly hovering around their sales reps. It’s a loss for the whole team.
It’s critical for sales reps to receive proper training in these areas:
- Product knowledge
- Finding and creating opportunities
- Soft skills
- Presentation
- Closing deals
- Customer service (pre- and post-sale)
- Time management
Train them in these seven areas and you can be sure that the training they receive is holistic and on target.
Learning the technical specifications, features, and benefits of the product or service you’re selling is the easiest of the seven. The rest are trickier. For one, soft skills, essential for building relationships with clients, are intangible and hardest to teach. Some people are born with them, while others need constant training and practice for them to develop soft skills.
Mentors will need to have real expertise on these seven areas. And they need patience: training is not a one-time thing. Managers and heads should make time for team training and individual coaching. And even spot training.
It all begins with onboarding training, but sales reps should still receive coaching for the first few months on the job. Monitoring their performance will show managers which areas they need to improve on—and receive coaching. Have the right sales metrics in place so you can generate the proper reports that will serve as basis for your training and development plans.
These four strategies help improve the performance of every sale rep—every member of a team. They are sure to improve sales productivity within any team, and it would be wise for companies to invest in their successful implementation.
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