In a B2B company, sales is what makes the machine keep going. The more deals the sales team closes and the more efficient they are, the better off the company will be. But, there are usually productivity mistakes that sales team commit. Or even parts of the process that can be improved. So, in this post, I will show you how to increase sales productivity and the benefits of doing so.
Before I start breaking down each topic, here is the list of them for reference:
The benefits of increasing sales productivity
How to increase productivity
- Generate higher quality leads
- Automate your sales process
- Invest in adequate tools
- Measure and analyse metrics
- Institute a lead scoring system
Note: keep in mind that this blog post is about the sales process in general, and not about individual salespeople’s productivity. That will be covered in an upcoming blog post.
The benefits of increasing sales productivity
Here are the benefits that occur when you increase your sales productivity:
1. Spend less on salary
You hire fewer salespeople because you do need as many. That is because you have more steps automated and/or more productive people.
2. Scale faster
When you have a more efficient automated sales process, you are able to train and scale your sales team with more productive staff.
3. Get better ROI
If on average, each of your salespeople is more productive, then they will make you more money per hour for your company.
4. Get happier employees
Employees that used to struggle to hit their sales goals can turn into sales machines consistently reaching them. That will make them happier.
Now that I talked about the benefits of increasing your sales team’s productivity, let’s discuss the methods to do so.
1. Generate higher quality leads
Generate higher quality leads by segmenting your market, creating an ideal customer profile, and curating quality data on contacts.
Why you should do it
With higher quality leads, the efficiency of your salespeople will skyrocket. The open and reply rates will increase, and so will the demo scheduling and demo to close ratios.
How to do it
Segment your market and create an ideal customer profile.
- Create a company level profile (e.g.: company size, industry) and decision-maker level profile (e.g.: seniority, gender, department) of your ideal customer
- Separate prospects into different campaigns and personalise the outreach messages
Curate quality data on contacts
- Partner up with a reliable and GDPR adherent data provider in the B2B space
- Gather on-demand data with 15+ variables on prospects
2. Automate your sales process
Certain parts of the sales process can be automated to save time and allocate it elsewhere. Those include prospecting, outreach, and parts of objection handling.
Why you should do it
The time saved on repetitive automatable tasks can be used in human-related tasks instead.
How to do it
Prospecting and list building may change between different customer profiles. But will remain repetitive within customer profiles. So, both of those steps should be automated or outsourced whenever possible.
Reaching out to prospects can be automated after the creation of the message. Through automation technology, you are able to send numerous campaigns. And each message can be personalized with dynamic placeholders using the data from prospecting.
Objection handling cannot be fully automated since it requires contextual knowledge of the prospect’s reply. However, after understanding the context, it can be made efficient through the use of pre-written responses.
3. Invest in adequate tools
Adopt new technologies that can improve the efficiency of the steps in the sales funnel. Those can range from demo scheduling to phone dialling, to contract creation tools.
Why you should do it
The tools will not only save time for your salespeople and account managers, but they will also make their jobs more enjoyable.
How to do it
Analyse every step of your sales funnel and discover where a tool could fit in to help your sales team’s efficiency. It could be in the prospecting, outreach or closing steps.
Here is a blog post to help you find the best tools for every step of your funnel.
4. Measure and analyse metrics
Measure your most important metrics such as open, reply, positive reply, and bounce rates.
Why you should do it
Amongst all the possible reasons, here are a three:
- you can prove the effectiveness of your cold outreach
- you can analyse what works and adjust accordingly
- you can predict the path to the periodical goals
All of those reasons increase the productivity of your sales team.
How to do it
Find a tool that tracks and deliver the data in an easily consumable way. That way you can prove to yourself and your team the efficacy of cold outreach and improve it over time.
5. Create a lead scoring system
Establish a scoring framework for sales teams to determine the value of leads based on their interest in your product.
Why you should do it
You keep your leads organised and deliver the right message at the right time to prospects. Also, you are able to prioritise the leads that are most ready to be sold to.
How to do it
The first step is to include a CRM in your arsenal of tools. That will help you organise your leads and insert them into a sales funnel.
Next, decide on the possible stages of the sales funnel, from the point of established conversation, up until a deal is done. Those can include, SQL, MQL, opportunity generated, etc. Classify each lead with those tags to prioritise leads.
Conclusion
Increasing the productivity of your salespeople is paramount to have a scalable and happy sales team. Hopefully, with this blog post, you will be able to increase your sales efforts while minimizing the effort that you put in. Here are the main takeaways from this blog post:
The benefits of increasing sales productivity
- you spend less on salary
- you scale faster
- you get better ROI
- you get happier employees that hit their goals
How to increase productivity
- generate higher quality leads
- automate your sales process
- invest in adequate tools
- measure and analyse metrics
- institute a lead scoring system
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