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Your sales team is crucial in driving revenue. When they are not meeting quota, one might quickly think the team is lazy or not trying hard enough. But if you carefully examine the situation, their poor performance might be because your team was not given the resources to optimize their sales efficiency.
What is Sales Efficiency?
Not to be confused with sales effectiveness, sales efficiency refers to how fast your sales team operates. It measures the speed at which you convert users into leads or sales while generating the maximum return on your investment. Sales efficiency is your team’s generated revenue relative to the cost.
Sales effectiveness, on the other hand, is the capability of the sales team to convert prospects into leads and into paying customers at each stage of the sales funnel. An effective sales process means there will be more wins than losses every step of the way.
Why Should You Boost Sales Efficiency?
Your business would be wasting and losing time, money, and resources if your sales team is inefficient. An inefficient sales process indicates that all the help you are investing in your sales efforts is, at best, not maximized and not contributing to your growth at worst. By optimizing your sales efficiency, you are ensuring that your business is right on track toward success.
20 Sales Tips to Boost Efficiency
If your team struggles with sales efficiency, you must make the right calls and implement the best sales strategy to maximize your team’s performance. Here are some proven sales techniques to give your team a much-needed boost:
Keep track of sales tasks.
Before developing and implementing new strategies, you must assess the old ones. The best way to start is by monitoring sales activity and keeping track of the time each team member spends on various tasks. Ideally, you must watch and measure your sales activity in real time.
Use the right resources.
Monitoring sales tasks lets you assess where you can improve. If you notice that your team spends most of the day doing tasks manually, you need to provide resources that streamline sales processes. For one, having them use a high-quality CRM application facilitates their jobs while keeping track of sales activity, sales pipeline performance, and revenue goals. Nowadays, you can get a lot of reliable Salesforce CRMs for free on the market. However, paid CRM tools often offer more functions and precise sales analysis. Or try outsourcing cold calling. Using the right resources to streamline sales tasks frees up more time for your team to focus on achieving their goals.
Broadcast sales activity in real-time
Compel your staff to constantly do their best by broadcasting their performance all the time and in real time. No one would want their names seen at the bottom of the leaderboards, especially by others. You do not need to broadcast to a large audience; everyone in your workplace would be sufficient. Put your team’s activity data on screens all over the office, including TVs, desktop dashboards, and mobile phones.
Set daily goals
Accountability drives results. Setting goals for your sales team serves as motivation, making it an easy way to increase productivity. Goals give your team a sense of direction and make them carry out a plan of action to hit their targets. Hitting daily targets will also give the team a sense of fulfillment.
Be SMART
When creating a plan of action to reach sales targets, you can follow the SMART guidelines. You do not need to prioritize increasing sales when planning out your goals. Instead, keep in mind that the focus of the daily goals is to improve the efficiency of your sales team.
Review individual activities regularly.
Setting goals and expectations for your team is not enough to improve sales performance. You also need to follow up on their activity. There are many ways to do this, like scheduling weekly one-on-one meetings, team meetings, or leaderboards. When you let them know that you recognize their effort (or lack thereof) regularly, you make your reps more likely to continue achieving. Review everyone on your team’s activity numbers. During your weekly meeting, walk through each individual’s numbers and ask them to share their plans for the week.
Hire the right people.
Hire naturally productive people and set them up for success through a practical training and coaching program. The program has to thoroughly explain your sales process and expectations for their performance, detailing what they need to do to succeed and how it should be done. Hiring telemarketers in a call center in the Philippines might be worth your while.
Invest in employee development.
Keep your team up-to-date with the latest sales trends and cold-calling sales techniques by prioritizing ongoing sales coaching. Everyone has to be trained on new or changing information, especially regarding buyer personas, selling space, and products. This will strengthen your sales force and enable the team to develop professionally.
Run contests or offer incentives.
Run weekly or monthly activity contests or incentivize those who exceed their targets. However, remember that you cannot unquestioningly offer up a prize and expect the team to work for it. While small tips are enough to motivate some salespeople, not everyone would want to work for a standard giveaway. Please tell your team what reward they want and keep it as flexible or versatile as possible.
Teach them best practices.
Telling your team that they need to do more is not enough to improve their performance in the long run. Usually, this tactic is only effective in short bursts. Share best practices for different sales processes. Aside from exposing them to the skills necessary to achieve results, this is also a way to invest in the professional growth of your sales team. They would feel that the company is helping them develop, increasing their motivation to help the company succeed.
Find out what motivates each team member.
Each person in your team has strengths, weaknesses, experiences, aspirations, and circumstances. Take the time to get to know each person and walk through their motivations together. Find the goal that is so important to them that they would be ashamed if they do not achieve it. Help your team align their personal sales and life goals and set daily targets to help them achieve them.
Help team members overcome their hang-ups.
Many salespeople who cannot prospect or close sales think they cannot or are uncomfortable doing it. They might be afraid of failure or rejection, as well. To have them push through, you will need to coach them. Effective sales coaching takes some effort to develop. You need to identify what type of sales rep they are to find out how you can help them. Someone who focuses on building relationships, for example, may have to be reminded that prospects need what they are selling, and closing helps enrich their prospect’s life. You are coaching your staff to help fix their problems, not just their deals.
Assess your current workflow.
Never assume that the workflow you started with is still optimal today. As you immerse with your team and go through improvements in your sales processes together, you will likely notice things that take up too much time, processes that can be simplified, or cumbersome steps that can be eliminated. Evaluate your sales workflow periodically and eliminate specific steps if necessary. You may also need to update your qualifications or definitions. This process not only saves time but also increases employee satisfaction.
Align the sales team with your marketing team.
Poor communication between sales and marketing can create a disconnect between these teams, which the company’s revenue will inevitably reflect. By encouraging your sales and marketing staff to work together, you can boost the productivity and Efficiency of both teams. The sales team knows the qualities that make leads valuable, and effectively communicating this with marketing will enable the latter to create strategies that attract these types of information. When your marketing team attracts better leads, your sales team will be able to close more deals.
Ask your leads good qualifying questions.
Improve the Efficiency of your sales team’s prospect-vetting process by asking good qualifying questions. Your priority should be to disqualify unlikely prospects ASAP. Ask provocative questions. They should have your leads think through challenges and gather the information that helps you determine whether or not they would be a good fit. Of course, your questions should be appropriate for your relationship with the prospect. Based on your ‘scientific information, you need to diagnose their problem or challenge and ultimately decide if you can have a mutually beneficial relationship.
Speed up your team’s response time.
Timeliness gives salespeople a significant competitive advantage. Encourage your sales team to address customer product inquiries immediately. Studies suggest that immediate action will drastically increase the chances of closing a deal by up to 50%.
Connect with existing customers.
While cold selling to new prospects is necessary, it isn’t easy compared to selling to customers who already know and enjoy your products. After all, your existing clients are more likely to close deals than new customers. Have your sales team take the time to reach out to existing clients and talk to them about what they need — not what your sales team is trying to sell. Occasionally check in with current customers to see how they are doing and whether they would like to hear updates on your other products and services. They are more likely to close, and existing clients are cheaper to retain and upsell.
Request referrals from your current customers
Teach your team to be more vocal when asking for referrals from your existing customers. Salespeople tend to think that referral requests jeopardize existing customer relationships. However, asking for referrals can help your clients feel that they are trusted, respected partners instead of customers you only talk to when you need to sell something. Have your sales team ask for referrals during their follow-up calls, and ensure that post-sale surveys include referral requests.
Make referral requests even from failed deals.
Even if a deal falls, your team should avoid requesting referrals. A prospect who did not work out may know someone who needs your products or services. Remember that the sales space is always crowded, and introducing your business with a familiar name goes a long way.
Strengthen your culture
A lack of motivation among your team negatively affects their output. If your staff has low morale, they will not bring their A-game to the sales field. So, it would be best to encourage them by fostering a culture that effectively makes employees feel valued and encourages them to work hard. Assess the overall company culture and how your team conveys it. Make them feel closer to the company values by organizing get-togethers, such as lunches, parties, and team-building events.
Celebrate victories and milestones with your team. You can also offer incentives to show that you respect them, such as recognition for a job well done. Investing in a blog also helps uphold and develop a healthy culture. Post helpful articles that support the sales team in facing different challenges and finding work-life balance. If you cannot write articles, you can hire a content writer.
Keep in mind that the members of your sales team strive to be better, not only for financial gains but also for the fulfillment they feel from getting positive results from their efforts. Make an effort to understand their needs and provide adequate support so that you can boost their efficiency and productivity.
The sales team is what keeps your company afloat. Investing in their improvement ensures your company thrives and expands to reach your goals.
