Ignoring your sales reps’ productivity and performance is going to reflect in a big way on your profit. Tackling this problem is not as straightforward as many people may think; you can’t really waltz in there and order them to become more productive and produce more sales. In an effort to shed some light on the best approaches that are used to increase sales reps’ productivity effectively, we’ve created this brief overview.
Tone Down the Pressure
The sales industry is one of the most stress-filled industries across the globe. The approach of putting your team under constant pressure to get results will always backfire. Even if it showed improvement to the numbers for a few weeks, it’s bound to affect their morale and creative process. Instead of punishing your team for having a couple of bad weeks, try to look deeper for insight on what made their performance lower than their average. The quotas that you place on the sales rep should always be challenging, but they should never be in a tier that’s not realistic to attain. Having your team believe that they are going to achieve a quota no matter how hard they try is the worst motivation you could ever provide to a sales team.
Using Your Tools Right
The right tools can make a big difference in the process of sales. Having your employees familiar with the controls and direction of the sales tool they use will always reflect greatly on numbers. You may even want to reduce the time it takes your sales reps to send and react to emails by integrating an automatic email forwarding process. As mentioned by the help guide from salesforce, a verification of the mentioned email address should be provided. It’s not always the best practice to forward all emails to salesforce, but it can help entire departments by streamlining the process.
Cross-Department Shadowing
Even though every department in a business works towards achieving one goal, there are various routes that are taken by each one. The problem is when little tasks that each department has started getting out of sync. No matter how you try to improve a sales rep technique, they can’t do everything on their own. Communication between departments is necessary to keep every employee in the loop on streamlining the sales process and making it more efficient. A sales team’s shadowing program should positively affect both parties involved. Employees involved in other departments will get to learn some inside knowledge that can help them improve their own departments to facilitate the jobs of sales reps.
Defining Productivity
Before you begin to take any serious measurements with your sales reps’, you might want to put the definition of productivity into perspective first. The most basic and essential definition of sales productivity is the increase in the number of sales while keeping expenditure to a minimum. If your reps have reduced the time it takes them to make a sale and the resources they need, then they have improved their productivity.
Develop Consistent Processes
It’s not uncommon for sales reps to improve on the spot and get deals closed, but this shouldn’t go unchecked without a process. You need to look into the tactics and strategies used to close the most recent deals and share them with your team to provide some structure to the optimum process. You should put the current process into the scope and see the necessary steps you need to take, and gauge how long it takes to get them done. Finding out the exact course of action that led a prospect to become a customer is very important to create a sound and consistent sales process that your reps can easily follow.
Using Daily Goals
While monthly goals are great for putting things into perspective and defining the end target that your team should ensure reaching, daily goals are a quicker motivator because their results can instantly reflect. Daily goals should provide an adequate sense of direction and help your team devise flexible plans that allow them to hit their quotas. The most common daily goal is the number of attempts since it is one of the things that a sales rep can have a lot of control over. You might want to calculate the average number of calls needed to make a sale and use it to set a standard number of attempts that could net you a favorable target.
When it comes to managing accounts, the improvement of a sales reps’ productivity and a team’s productivity and efficiency is one of the hardest challenges that executive account managers are faced with. The nature of sales has been pretty much the same for hundreds of years, but the tools used to communicate with consumers have changed to a great degree, so stay up to date with the latest strategies and tactics used.
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