According to a report by pace productivity, the number of companies facing sales team inefficiency is 5% more than five years ago. That’s why this problem now leads to challenges facing most organizations. Here are five ways to make your sales team more efficient.
According to recent research, increasing the efficiency of your sales team is the most prominent task in most companies. As of 2012, the number of parties facing this problem was 44%. After five years, the number increased by 5% and is still growing with time. If not careful, it may paralyze most sales activities.
The perfect solution will be reducing administrative tasks. Let us jump right into five ways to make your sales team more efficient.
What is Sales Team Efficiency?
Roughly, the sales team efficiency in a company is as simple as how productive the salespeople are in their tasks. To calculate this, you will need to know the manager's expectations and the actual results from the sales. Cross-checking them will give you a brief idea of how efficient they are and if further action is necessary.
Note that most companies have a common goal: maximizing profits using minimal resources, also by using business phone services.
What Brings About Sales Inefficiency
Many salespeople involuntarily encounter distractions that lower their productivity levels. This section focuses on the challenges the concerned individuals have to go through every day, affecting their efficiency negatively.
Getting to know the root of the problem is always the first step in finding its solution.
Performance Pressure
The targets you set as a manager need to be practical. In case you set hard-to-reach targets, your team's chances of feeling pressured by your expectations may negatively affect the activity. Before deciding what you expect from them, consult, and find out what is comfortable with them. According to human behavior, someone will work better if they participated in decision making.
Internal pressure is also present within the teammates as they compete to exceed the set results.
Inconsistent Sales Strategy
Consistency is a crucial attribute in marketing and has a massive impact on the success of your actions. In the sales industry, you need to accept that results are not immediately seen. You have to wait for the public to adapt to your products before witnessing your strategies' success.
Allow more than enough time for your strategies to pick up the pace before deciding on a new approach.
Incorrect Sales Activity Priorities
Prioritization techniques are essential to sales activities. It is your responsibility to analyze the current statistics and make the necessary adjustments according to your analysis. Incorrect sales activity prioritization will act as a hindrance to the success of your project. Skills on how to prioritize activities will prove useful when it comes to this stage.
We will expound more on prioritization techniques and how to approach them later in the article.
Poor Route Planning
From the understanding of sales, most activities require physical human interaction. That’s why that plan is the best route possible. When deciding which roads to use, focus more on high traffic routes since they provide a larger target. If your selection is wrong, the salespeople will have few parties to pitch your products to, making them inefficient.
5 Ways to Make Your Sales Team More Efficient
Reducing Administrative Tasks
One of the most effective ways to make your sales team more efficient is by reducing administrative tasks. By this, we mean do not give one individual all the power. You will also need to keep the number of supervisors minimal.
Although you are the one to make all the essential administrative issues, it would not hurt to involve your team once in a while. It will not only improve your employer-employee relationship but also boost their confidence while on the field. In the long run, you will get to improve your team's productivity. One example is to automate order forms and paperwork, so that sales reps can spend more time closing deals and less on admin.
Embracing Sales Tools
The number of administrative responsibilities required is too vast for one to handle on their own. It is the reason that we find some activities simplified with the aid of practical sales tools or ecommerce reviews apps. As the manager, embracing such advancements will do you more good than harm. A company that truly embraces these tools most of the time runs on "autopilot."
According to a SITE survey back in 2011, most sales executives rely on 11 sales tools, on average. The CRM platform is the most popular. The tool is famous for reducing the time taken to handle time-consuming and redundant tasks. Doing away with them will give you more time to focus on how to make your sales team more efficient.
Ringblaze and Harmonizely
In your sales career, you may have come across these two tools, Ringblaze and Harmonizely. They are two tools that serve two different tasks in the sales field. So what do they do?
Harmonizely specializes in automatically scheduling meetings. With this tool, you have your appointments organized correctly, saving you time and human-error. It also boosts your engagement with the audience, increasing your productivity.
Ringblaze, on the other hand, being one of Ooma alternatives, focuses more on the business phone system. Its services include managing your call activities by adding notes and assigning calls to respective parties. You have the option of a free trial to get a taste of its efficiency.
Visme and SendX
Creating a sales pitch deck doesn’t have to be difficult or overwhelming. Visme is a tool that offers a variety of professionally designed pitch deck templates and design elements as well as a seamless presenting feature, you’ll quickly and easily be able to create one of the best pitch decks around.
SendX can be considered as another valuable tool for your sales team. No more need to send cold emails and keep the whole follow up strategy in mind. With the email deliverability service - you can create outstanding automated marketing campaigns and get conversions even in a non-work time. Also, make sure to take the time to consider your customers' needs and to choose the right email marketing agency in order to produce the best possible results for your use case.
With these tools, you will have adequate time to focus on how to make your sales team more efficient.
Be Keen on Sales Activities
As an administrative party, it falls under your obligation to track and analyze all sales activities. It is at this juncture that statistics prove useful. How do you collect sales statistics? Are they reliable and up to date? Are the records accessible for future reference? Knowledge of the answers to these questions is an excellent way to monitor sales activity.
If you correctly analyze the data from your sales, you will identify areas that require attention. By doing this, you will also have a rough idea of prioritization techniques to use. Now, do you see how it will improve efficiency in your sales team?
Create a Schedule Routine
Another way on how to make your sales team more efficient is by creating a schedule routine. From experience, the practice needs to focus on two categories; when it is busy and not. Ideally, sales reps need to put in more effort when the region is booming with activity and attract as many prospects as possible.
Work does not stop when the number of potentials decreases. With the help of a scheduled routine, your team knows what next when such a scenario occurs. Remember to sync your schedule with the profile of your team. Avoid replicating the ideas used by competitors; what works for them may not work for you.
Create Daily Goals
Another effective way to make your sales team more efficient is by creating daily goals for your team. After creating them, make sure every individual is familiar with what is expected of them. These goals will not only act as a principal to their conduct but also serve as motivation.
Implementing this idea means that your team will always have a sense of direction in what they do. We would recommend setting rewards for exemplary performance to boost their morale. Even without testing the idea out, you can already see how it aids to make your sales team more efficient.
LinkedIn Message Automation
LinkedIn message automation is also a tool that is proving useful every day. If your organization has a LinkedIn profile, it would be best to make the necessary adjustments.
How Does it Work?
LinkedIn message automation is one of the most innovative features on the platform. For you to correctly grasp what it is all about, let us take an example.
You may view our LinkedIn profile and decide to interact with us. Your interaction may be in the form of a message or an invitation. When using an automated LinkedIn profile, such actions will be triggered automatically and correctly. It helps get rid of most manual interactions with your profile. In simple terms, that is how LinkedIn message automation works.
Minimum Viable Product
A minimum viable product is the technique used when introducing a new product to the market. This product is not entirely complete; the features it possesses are just enough for an adequate response from the consumer.
What does the minimum viable product have to do with our topic? It will provide a basis for analysis regarding the customer's feedback. Its manufacturers will then make modifications as per the feedback and improve its appeal. Eventually, you will find your sales team more efficient.
Conclusion
In the current world we live in, ways to make your sales team more efficient are inexhaustible. However, by correctly implementing the mentioned approaches, you will get pleasing results in a matter of time.
About the author
Dennis Vu is the CEO and Co-founder of Ringblaze, a virtual business phone system company that helps teams to better serve their customers, anywhere.