Improve Your Sales Productivity: 3 Easy Practices To Push Through Your Plateau

by Kinga Odziemek

The one common characteristic that business leaders of all industries have in common is that they should always aim for increasing productivity and your skills.

However, the tricky part is agreeing on what sales productivity really is and how best to boost it.

We deliver practical tips on improving sales productivity, as well as some simple techniques you can use to make it better.

What is Sales Productivity, actually?

Generally speaking, sales productivity is a measure of how effectively a sales team is selling — or how many leads, inquiries, and sales opportunities a team is able to close. Generally speaking, sales productivity is a measure of how effectively a sales team is selling — or how many leads, inquiries, and sales opportunities a team is able to close. So what makes sales productivity so important? Basically, it’s an all-in-all measurement of how effectively a company is selling. If your sales team is successful at meeting their quota each month, your team’s sales productivity is considered successful. That’s not to say that individual sales reps should be measured on the same metric.

#1 Fix Sales Productivity with Social Media

Did you know that 63% of B2B marketers have a strong presence on social media? It’s estimated that nearly 75% of B2B buyers prefer to make purchases through social media channels. With this in mind, social media may just be one of the best ways to capture leads and convert them into sales. Social media marketing isn’t just for B2B. In fact, it’s become one of the most important tools for sales.

As you may be aware, you don't need to have any strategy at all. You can from time to time publish some social media posts in which you promote a product, or you may post an article from your blog once in a while. You can run your social media activities without any idea or plan. You can do this and not be successful on social media, just like the thousands of companies that do just that.

However, if you care about sales and profits from social media, it is worth developing a strategy that foresees the next stages of action, defines the basic procedures for planning content creation, content creation and its publication - after all, it defines the standards for content and its mutual coherence.

Practice shows that acting in the latter way translates into incomparably better results than in the former case...

However, it should be remembered that standards, procedures, strategy and so on cannot kill the authenticity and "human approach" to content and graphics creation. Both of these aspects must complement each other, otherwise the content will become synthetic and unattractive to the audience, it will merge with what can be found in hundreds of other places, and thus our effectiveness will not be as high as we would like.

#2 Boost Sales Productivity with Referral Marketing

The first step in increasing sales productivity is to figure out the best way to refer potential clients to you. Many business owners spend too much time focusing on lead generation methods, or fixing their slow WordPress site, but they neglect to see the value in referral marketing. For starters, you can generate high volumes of qualified referrals in just a few weeks and your conversion rates will be high. Secondly, you’ll have a steady stream of new business clients that you can nurture and grow for years to come. A recent study found that referral marketing generates about 10 times the revenue of a lead gen marketing campaign. Referral marketing, however, requires you to make it easy for your customers to refer new clients.

If you are going to conduct a referral marketing action, we will tell you what you should pay special attention to. Although the idea itself is very simple, it is worth knowing about some general guidelines related to this form of promotion.

  • Provide customers with the right service and take care of their positive shopping experience - a truism, but it is worth bearing in mind. Make your company really worth recommending.
  • Pay attention to statistics - they will allow you to optimize your referral campaign and modify the forms of gratification that new customers will receive in such a way that they are as attractive as possible for them.
  • Make your customers themselves willing to share positive opinions about your product and their product experience. Make it easy for them to share that opinion.
  • Accurately define the conditions in your referral marketing program - perks for referrals and new customers, conditions for receiving them, etc.
  • Focus on influencers - identify which customers may be particularly attractive to your business when it comes to recommending it. Try to motivate them additionally.
  • Get yourself the right tool for your activities: for example, EarlyParrot.

#3 Increase Sales Productivity with Appointment Scheduling

Sales professionals may be hesitant to schedule appointments because of the myriad of unknown factors involved. But, once you start, you’ll realize that the amount of free time you have is not nearly as constricting as you imagined. Cut out the on-call routine The modern sales team is not only more mobile than ever, but they’re also no longer tied to a desk. In fact, 86 percent of employees work remotely on a regular basis, and this trend has been increasing every year. Today’s businesses and sales reps both have to work with the tools that they have access to, which means that it’s perfectly acceptable to set an appointment when you need to reach your prospect instead of calling them on the phone or cold emailing them.

Harmonizely is here to help you.

Over to you

Are you looking to drive higher levels of sales for your business? Ready to improve the effectiveness of your marketing by finding the answer to an often-misunderstood question? We hope that our insights will come in handy, but also, don't forget about the right software development direction.