What Can You Do to Improve Your Sales Productivity?

Being productive can help you to accomplish the goals set for the day. This could give your company a competitive edge to generating more revenue by accomplishing multiple weekly goals.

In addition, a culture focus on productivity can help sales representatives feel more confident without feeling overwhelmed and stressed. Most importantly, your sales teams are able to spend time on optimal activities efficiently, such as generating new leads, sending and following up on emails, having meaningful conversations with customers, and much more. All of which are essential for business growth.

As we mentioned before, your sales team can develop bad habits from poor time management to lack of prioritization that can hinder productivity.  

Why is Productivity So Important?

The answer is quite simple: producing and achieving the greatest amount of results or goals for the organization.

As technology and the evolving sales process develops, sales representatives need to be more focused and efficient in generating new leads. Before we can solve your sales productivity problem, we first, need to explain what is sales productivity.

What is Sales Productivity?

According to Salesforce, sales productivity is the product of sales efficiency and sales effectiveness. Basically, it is how your resources are allocated (sales efficiency) and how you put those resources to use to accomplish your goals (sales effectiveness).

There are various metrics to measure sales productivity, but the most common metric businesses use is “revenue per rep”. Or, more simply, how much is each sales agent bringing in?

Now that we have a clear explanation of what sales productivity is, we can go through three strategies to boost sales efficiency and effectiveness, which will ultimately increase your sales productivity.

A Continuous Sales Coaching Strategy

During the onboarding process, there is a significant amount of time spent on training new employees. New employees will have to learn about your product features, the qualifying lead process, phone etiquette with consumers, and so much more. Moreover, the sales process is evolving with the latest development in sales tools and changing consumer behaviors, creating a demand for an updated sales strategy.

Sales coaching can contribute to boosting productivity in sales by 88%. However, sales managers are not allocating that time needed to coaching as only 73% of sales supervisors spend less than 5% of their time coaching.

Utilize sales coaching as part of your strategy by allocating time to meet with your team. Schedule weekly sales training to analyze their individual performance and provide them with advice and support for success. Share practices from the top performing sales rep to the rest of the team to help less productive employees. Utilize these frameworks as a training reference for new employees.

The data collected from sales analytics can reveal insights to your sales reps efficiency and effectiveness. Use these metrics for learning and improvement opportunities. Implementing these consistent sales coaching strategies with your team can help accomplish more goals and increase sales productivity.

Need support implementing hands-on sales coaching? Our professional services team provides customized sales coaching. If you're interested, a member of our team will be happy to share more information.

We recently published a free, in-depth eBook full of tips about how to implement and enhance your sales coaching. You can get it here.

Multitask or Single Tasking?

If I multitasked, will I be more productive or not?

There are positive and negative opinions on multitasking. The pros and cons on this topic were introduced by a Forbes article called, “Want to Be More Productive? Stop Multi-Tasking“. However, a recent research journal states otherwise. According to a Psychological Science Journal, titled ‘The Illusion of Multitasking and Its Positive Effect on Performance’, revealed that the perception of multitasking over single tasking enhances participants’ performance.

The participants acknowledging a task as multitasking performed well over other participants that acknowledged it as single-tasking. The study exhibited that if you deem (think) you are multitasking over single-tasking, you are likely to be more productive.

It can be difficult and stressful for sales reps to balance tasks like qualifying leads, engaging with consumers over various communication channels, and ensuring accurate information is put into the CRM.

Multitasking is inevitable in sales. Moreover, the same study also revealed that daunting, challenging tasks increases participants’ attention and engagement which ultimately leads to a better performance. Use these findings to help your sales team create strategies for productivity.

Reinforce to your sales team that you understand it can be a tough game! Understanding your sales team on how challenging this position is can help advocate more engagement and productivity from your employees.

Leaning on Sales Tools to Help

Sales tools can automate and streamline the sale process so employees can spend their time more efficiently. For example, Customer Relationship Management software (CRM) is a vital tool for keeping and organizing consumers information and data. CRMs are great tools but they may require some non-optimal time allocation for administrative purposes.

To better optimize your sales team you could use tools that will provide real-time data and visibility into your business so you can make more productive-based decisions. In a world asking you to do more with less, you may need to invest in a software that will efficiently and effortlessly provide you with the sales analytics to help you increase your sales.

Productivity is a crucial part to making your business thrive. Implementing just a few of these tactics can help spur growth and motivation throughout your organization.

If this feels overwhelming, know that software solutions like Calldrip exist to improve sales team productivity.  At Calldrip, we're here for you every step of the way - Book a free 30 minute demo today.