5 Steps to Creating a More Productive Sales Team
The productivity of your sales team has a rather significant impact on the performance of your business. The salesforce are the people who are generating and driving new consumers to your business while maintaining the existing clients as well. Since a sales team effects a business’s profit so directly, maximizing their efficiency should be at the top of any business owner’s or manager’s list.
Invest in Your Team
You can’t expect to launch someone into a sales team and for them to immediately start getting great results, everyone needs a little bit of training. Still, don’t assume that you have to spend loads of money on external training courses or using up hours and hours of one of your manager’s time. Does lots of training provide someone with more knowledge and better equip them for their role? Not particularly, and it is very wasteful. In reality, around 87% of training is forgotten after a few weeks, so spending a lot of time providing training is not very cost effective. When developing an effective training program, the program should allow a new sales person to receive a high level of training in a shorter amount of time. All of that extra time and money that would have spent on a lengthy training process can be better spent producing more sales and revenue.
Task Batching
Important but very disruptive to your workflow, the breaks created by intervals of admin work add up and equate to more wasted time. Create a standard process for everyone to follow where you batch tasks together. For example, make 10 calls to prospects and write down any important information that you will need later in a notepad. Then, following making that batch of calls, spend a small amount of time recording any information and data into your CRM and completing any other related admin work.
Tools of the Trade
This doesn’t mean that you should buy all of the latest gadgets and every sales tool under the sun; more tools and better gadgets doesn’t instantly improve your sales team. If a program is unnecessary then don’t buy it, because you would just be spending money without getting any benefits in return. If you come across a great tool that will boost the productivity of your team, then it is ultimately worth the investment in the long run. Purchasing the tool is only half the battle though. Getting your sales people to adopt it into their routine is the next step. Many may seem reluctant, because they don’t want what seems like a hassle of adding something new to their process, but most of the time this can be overcome with a demonstration and some training.
Establish a Prospect Research Process
If you don’t have a standard process for researching any prospects before you make contact with them, then it’s time to get one. Leaving your team to their own devices to do whatever research they like could be resulting in more wasted time. Devise an easy to follow, streamlined process for each of your sales people to follow; the process should set out what information they need to gather and where to look for it. All of these minutes saved from each time a prospect is being researched adds up and could even end up equating to around an hour a day.
Keep Them on the Road
Consider hiring an outbound marketing agency and take advantage of their appointment setting service. They will be able to set appointments for your sales team so they don’t have to. Appointment setting cuts out some admin work that can be taken on by someone else, which then gives sales people more time to be meeting with prospects and making sales. The appointment setters are able to contact prospective clients from a qualified list and then make appointments between the sales person and any prospects. Since an appointment setter also has access to the sales person’s diary, they will be able to make the appointments at suitable times. Not only do they just make the appointments, but they gather and supply all of the necessary information, too, along with any other notes from the calls that they have made.
