7 Effective Ways to Increase Sales Team Productivity
Executives and sales managers worldwide are constantly on the hunt for ways to make their sales team more effective. While you can’t force people to buy your products or services, you can better equip your sales team so that they have a better chance of closing deals.
In technical terms, this is called sales enablement, which boils down to giving your sales team the knowledge, support, and tools they need to be successful. Sales enablement is crucial to your team’s success. It creates a productive and cohesive workforce and actively searches for and removes barriers to closing deals. In short, it makes your team more productive.
How to Increase Sales Productivity for your Organization:
1. Systems Beat Willpower Every Time
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
James Clear, in his book Atomic Habits
It’s true for eating right and exercising, but it carries over to your professional life too. Your sales team needs structure, so they think less about the process and more about bringing value to potential customers.
Creating systems begins with onboarding. You’ll find that teaching newer reps a fresh system is much easier than teaching seasoned sales reps, since they don’t know any other way of doing business.
During onboarding, provide them with a rough schedule of what they should be doing each hour of the day. Provide them with the software systems they need to be successful and set up the right triggers to enable the right behaviors.
2. Get 1% Better Each Day
The learning process doesn’t stop when onboarding is complete. Far from it, in fact. The best sales reps know that an ongoing comprehensive sales training program is the key to long-term success.
For many companies, it makes financial sense to create their own internal training program based on the years of experience of their seasoned sales leaders. That’s what Salesforce did with Aaron Ross at the helm, who implemented their Predictable Revenue model.
For others, it may make more sense to reach out to consulting companies that can bring fresh perspectives to the sales team.
3. Give Your Lead Scoring a Facelift
Lead scoring is essentially assigning values, or points, to each lead you generate for your business. The lead score is often based on multiple factors such as engagement, responsiveness, and deal size.
Many companies’ lead scoring systems are out of date and could use a revival. If you’ve been in business a while, then it would make sense to turn to your own analytics to start.
Compare your closed deals to lead sources to determine exactly where your best leads are coming from so you can double down on those efforts. This will also tell you where you might be wasting time chasing bad leads.
4. Make Content Accessibility a High Priority
While you’re at it, create targeted content for each phase of the buyer’s journey to make this process easier. That way, when strong leads do come through, you have the right message to send at the right time.
Your marketing and training team is (hopefully) churning out top-quality content every day. All of the ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, blog posts, checklists, and industry insights should be at the fingertips of your sales team.
The right content makes it easier to manage common sales objections or see how you stack up against competitors. It also levels up the confidence of junior sales reps who are new to the company or new to the industry.
5. Develop a Mentorship Program
The right leader can take your sales team far, but they can’t be everywhere at once. That’s where mentoring comes into play. Pairing up junior and senior sales reps sharpens both soft and technical skills.
Senior reps can share their go-to cold calling scripts, email templates, and objection handling talk tracks. They can answer product questions and relate on a level managers often can’t. More importantly, pairing reps together adds a motivation factor.
Reps relate more closely with each other than they do with their manager, and they will often help each other when they’re having a rough week or prop each other up when things are going well.
6. Provide the Right Incentives
Some people respond well to consequences and constructive criticism. Others respond well to praise and incentives. Ideally, you’d have a mix of both in your sales organization.
On the consequences side, you can host meetings for underperforming reps to work on coaching. It’ll help those underperforming and incentivize them to get their numbers up so they can show up a little later or leave earlier when they’re hitting their goal.
On the incentives side, try holding sales contests to get people fired up about some of the more monotonous tasks. Awards for most outgoing calls longer than one minute or the most “no’s” to overcome the fear of rejection are a good starting point.
7. Strengthen Your Tech Stack
Your SaaS stack can be hugely impactful on your sales productivity. A CRM makes sales reps’ and managers’ jobs easier. You get in-depth reporting, reminders, and more, which keeps everyone connected and on the same page.
Email marketing software puts cold email outreach on autopilot, so your reps can scale the volume of their campaigns and still keep their personal touch. For further increasing the conversion rates from cold outreach campaigns, build targeted lists and verify the email addresses of the prospects with an email verification tool. These systems help build the right habits, so your team always knows what to do when a customer engages with your content.
Finally, project tracking software helps measuring your team’s productivity to figure out when they’re most effective. If calls in the morning aren’t closing deals or are not getting answered, then perhaps team meetings and training sessions are best suited for the AM, while cold calling is better suited for the afternoon.
Wrapping up on Sales Team Productivity
Boosting productivity in your sales organization comes down to the little things. When you build the proper habits and have the right systems in place, great things happen. Your sales operations flourish, and so does your bottom line. What tips and tricks worked for boosting your sales team’s productivity?
About the author:
Sujan Patel is a partner at Ramp Ventures & co-founder of Mailshake. He has over 15 years of marketing experience and has led the digital marketing strategy for companies like Salesforce, Mint, Intuit and many other Fortune 500 caliber companies.
How to Increase Sales Productivity for your Organization:
- Systems Beat Willpower Every Time
Your sales team needs structure, so they think less about the process and more about bringing value to potential customers.
- Get 1% Better Each Day
The best sales reps know that an ongoing comprehensive sales training program is the key to long-term success.
- Give Your Lead Scoring a Facelift
Compare your closed deals to lead sources to determine exactly where your best leads are coming from so you can double down on those efforts.
- Make Content Accessibility a High Priority
The right content makes it easier to manage common sales objections or see how you stack up against competitors.
- Develop a Mentorship Program
The right leader can take your sales team far, but they can’t be everywhere at once.
- Provide the Right Incentives
Try holding sales contests to get people fired up about some of the more monotonous tasks.
- Strengthen Your Tech Stack
Your SaaS stack can be hugely impactful on your sales productivity.
