Anyone who claims that selling is easy has never done it. There are obstacles throughout the sales cycle that can slow down or stop progress. Salespeople can get discouraged and lose motivation and focus. These can bog down sales productivity and eventually erode the organization's growth and stability. Don't let that happen!
Here are seven of the smartest ways you can improve sales development team productivity, maximize your return on investment (ROI), and keep your company flush and thriving.
The wrong salespeople set you up for maddening issues from the beginning. This doesn't just mean you need to hire the most experienced veterans. Make sure your team possesses can-do attitudes, ownership thinking, and their own set of core values.
Use in-depth interviewing and assessment testing to decide whom you want to add to your sales development team. Product knowledge and processes can be taught, but personal morals and an internal belief system cannot.
Freeing up just a few minutes of your sales team's time every day gives them opportunities to communicate with more prospects and close more deals. Over time, this extra productivity can add up to big bucks.
Eliminate manual, paper-based processes wherever you can, and add a CRM system for sales to keep easily-accessed records of their clients and prospects. Finding automated solutions that save sales time and ways for them to reach more prospects faster creates a more efficient and productive environment.
Goal setting is vital for every position, but especially for sales folks. Striving for specific goals helps good salespeople plan their time accordingly and know what they should prioritize. Communicating with them before setting the goals is key to acquiring their buy-in.
Create SMART goals, meaning they must be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Concise goals guide sales' activities, increasing the time they spend on high-value tasks and cutting down on the time they waste on low-value ones.
“I don't care about the money," said no salesperson, ever. Most people making their living selling would say the compensation opportunities are one of the biggest draws of the profession.
Pay your performers well, or another company will. It helps sales managers to understand how their salespeople are motivated beyond their incomes.
Do they want to pay for their kids' college, travel, drive nice cars, or retire early? Offering lucrative commission structures and bonuses for high performance is great, but the smartest managers will quantify these with what the salespeople want to use it for.
If salespeople are responsible for finding their own leads, a good chunk of their time will be spent doing just that. Unfortunately, they'll go down paths that lead nowhere.
Smart leaders are increasingly investing in sales outsourcing. Appointment setting can be handled by your outsourced vendor, freeing up your sales team's time to focus on warm leads that may turn into closed sales.
Sales outsourcing gives many productive hours back to your sales team they would otherwise have burned through trying to find viable prospects on their own.
Sales managers play a huge role in the team's success or failure, so it makes sense to give them a wide arena to operate in. Let them get to know their people, communicate with them, and invest in the tools that make them more productive.
By giving the managers more power, the sales development team can function as a cohesive unit. Communication, coaching, feedback, recognition, and rewards should all fall under a sales manager's job description.
We'd be remiss if we didn't mention how essential it is to examine certain sales metrics and evaluate the performance. It's hard to increase productivity if you don't understand your team's weak points.
Look at the calls per day, demos, closed sales, and average sales to determine who may need coaching and what each individual, and the team overall, is doing well. Only by digesting the numbers can you get these answers.
Productivity is crucial for every job, but salespeople need to be on top of it every day. By identifying drains on productivity, investing in automation tools, outsourcing to reduce the strain on sales, and setting goals and compensating sales for reaching them, organizations can maintain and increase their sales team's productivity.
These efforts reap great long-term rewards with more prospects becoming customers, bigger sales, and happier, more motivated salespeople who focus on the right tasks.
For faster results, consider partnering with our experienced team at Purple Sales. We offer a sales outsourcing model that has been a huge boon for our SaaS clients. Contact us today to learn more!