It’s pretty much a given that the goal of any sales leader is to have a highly productive, high performing sales team. But when it comes to growing effectiveness and output, all too often roadblocks and non-selling activities clog up a rep’s day meaning less time selling and lower productivity.
Happily, there are a few strategies you can implement to streamline processes and workflow that will enable your team to succeed. Here are our top ways to grow your sales team’s effectiveness and output.
1) Reorganize Workflow and Reduce Admin Time
All reps have admin tasks they need to complete - it’s just part of the job. But when the admin side becomes too much, it either means your reps don’t get to spend enough time out there selling or, equally problematically, they cut admin corners resulting in missteps down the line.
We’ve written before about why it’s important to invest in support staff - the sweet spot seeming to be 50%-60% of your team in support roles. Sales ops staff can free up an enormous amount of time for your reps helping them by managing data, reporting, organizing sales collateral, managing technical tools, handling lead generation and booking appointments. Leaving your reps far more time to go out there and sell more.
However, aside from reorganizing your sales team’s structure, your reps can also reorganise their workflow to be more efficient. Get your reps in the habit of batching admin work - it’s a productivity hack to be more efficient. Instead of reps making a call then entering in the info into CRM then sending a follow-up email, get them into the habit of batching similar tasks together. If reps batch together their call time, their email time and their data entry time it speeds everything up since it reduces the start-up and slow-down time it takes to switch between tasks and improves focus.
2) Give Reps a Prospect/Research Process
Prospecting and research are an integral part of the sales process. But how efficient and effective are your reps at this across the board? I’ll bet the answer is that it varies substantially from person to person. Implementing a standardized process that they can implement quickly and efficiently will not only save them time but it will give them the tools to prospect successfully while improving consistency. Implement something like a three-minute process all reps should conduct before a call including checking LinkedIn and google; plus give them a list of potential exploratory questions and icebreaker they can refer to during the call. Find the right process for your team and your increase effectiveness and output substantially.
3) Invest in Giving Your Team the Right Tools
There are so many amazing tools on the market right now that can help increase your team’s effectiveness. For example, how much time are your reps wasting trying to find the right piece of content to share at a specific moment in the sales process? Tools like KnowledgeTree and Bigtincan use AI to automatically provide your reps with the right content at the right moment. Check out more content management and organization tools that can help grow your team’s effectiveness and output here (add URL for CPSA article Ten Powerful Tools for Content Sharing and Distribution once published). New digital tools are emerging all the time so stay up to date and invest in the right tools for your team.