How to Improve Revenue and Productivity
Boosting sales productivity is essential to increasing the overall success of your sales team. It also helps increase revenue and ensures that your team’s efforts are not wasted.
According to Forbes, the average salesperson spends less than 34% of their time actually selling. Most of the remainder is spent managing administrative responsibilities and non-selling tasks.
1. Develop a strong pipeline
The sales pipeline is the foundation of any revenue-generating business. It organizes and manages leads through the entire sales cycle, providing visibility into the team’s performance. A strong pipeline can improve the efficiency of your sales and marketing teams, boosting ROI on all of their efforts.
A strong pipeline begins with qualifying leads before adding them to the funnel. This means asking important questions like if the prospect is a decision-maker, do they need to persuade others, or does their organization truly need your product?
Pipeline analysis also helps to identify bottlenecks that create loopholes where deals fall through. For example, if the majority of your pipeline is stuck in one stage for too long, you may need to change your approach or invest in additional resources.
2. Offer continuous training
If you want to ensure your sales team stays on the cutting edge, then continuous training is a must. It helps them stay up to date on new product releases, market trends and enables them to connect with customers in a more relevant way.
The training should also be tailored to the different generations within your workforce as they have differing values, goals and learning styles. Providing training in this manner can help your salespeople retain knowledge, improve performance and generate revenue.
This type of training often consists of weekly micro trainings that are led by the sales manager and focuses on specific issues faced by the sales team. This is then followed by a tracking and measurement of the data and this is then delivered to the sales management team and other departments like human resources.
3. Give your team plenty of product options
Having enough inventory to meet the demand of customers is essential for growth. This is especially important for small business with limited resources, as it allows them to focus on more sales-related activities and strategies that will ultimately improve revenue.
Sales productivity is one of the biggest challenges for many companies. According to a survey conducted by Pace Productivity, salespeople spend less than 30% of their time selling, the rest going to administrative tasks and non-selling responsibilities.
Increasing the amount of time your team members are able to devote to selling can be done by providing them with the right tools and training. For example, a CRM can help them track their sales pipeline and customer information, allowing them to sell more effectively. Moreover, providing them with incentives such as sales contests and commission structures can boost morale.
4. Give them the right tools
When your team has the right tools, they can focus on what really matters – making sales. Whether your team is looking for ways to improve their own sales performance or the overall sales strategy of the company, there are certain things you need to keep in mind.
For starters, make sure your sales reps aren’t wasting time on repetitive tasks that aren’t generating revenue. Use a customer relationship management (CRM) system to automate some of the recurring duties like updating records or sending emails.
Another thing you can do is encourage collaboration between marketing and sales teams. This will help both teams learn what tools and strategies are working and which ones aren’t. This will ultimately allow them to increase sales productivity and improve revenue.
5. Invest in a CRM
Using customer relationship management CRM technology helps companies maximize revenue by streamlining sales processes. It provides a single platform for tracking customer information and data, giving teams a comprehensive vision of customers.
CRMs collect and compile data from multiple channels, including website forms, emails and meetings, and then provide visibility to sales representatives. This allows the team to identify which products are most popular with customers, which geo regions have potential for expansion and what customers need at each stage of the sales cycle.
This information also makes it easier for reps to find upsell and cross-sell opportunities with existing customers. Moreover, sales reps can prioritize their efforts with lead scoring tools and automatic task prioritization features. This enables them to meet quotas without having to hire more people.
