If you're a startup founder, one of your responsibilities is to ensure that your team can handle the workload so that you can focus on the more important aspects of running the business. Since sales is one of the biggest components in driving profitability, your sales team must be performing at its absolute best. While there are many ways to increase sales productivity and increase revenues, find out in this blog post some more-specific tips for improving your startup's profits.
But to begin with, what is sales productivity/ sales effectiveness, and why would it matter this much to you?
In simple terms, Sales productivity refers to increasing sales while reducing resources used, such as cost, effort, and time. The higher the Sales: Resources ratio is, the more you will grow. Organizations expand their sales teams and pursue more aggressive sales targets to increase sales and productivity. Still, they aren't scaling their mechanisms, best practices, or sales tools simultaneously. This is where they are lacking!
If you are a startup owner looking to pace up your teams' sales productivity, use these seven strategies to help your sales team conquer productivity issues, improve sales effectiveness, and increase revenue acquisition:
1. Establish Lead Qualification / Scoring Framework
A lead is a very first step in every sales process. You need quality leads almost every day to reach the target market. Thus, you should focus on establishing lead qualification to increase productivity. This is critical because you don't want your salespeople working with low-quality leads.
Sales and marketing teams can use a “scoring framework” to assign a value to leads premised on their behavior regarding their involvement in products or services. To acquire quality leads, lead scraping services are the best!
One more important thing to be considered here is that reps must add more value to the sales conversation by providing relevant insights to move prospects through the sales cycle. They require messaging and sales securities that address concerns, demonstrate the potential to fix a problem and demonstrate how to realize a return on investment.
2. Develop and Follow a strict sales process
A sales process that is inefficient and ineffective can cost a company millions of dollars each year. Thus, it is crucial to follow a consistent sales process from the beginning. First, you need to test what works for your company and what not to increase sales productivity. After determining the key points, you can move on to consistency, sales effectiveness, and efficiency. But make sure you do not get stuck with a single process, which may turn redundant due to new trends and market needs.
A solution to this challenge is to keep checking over the process constantly. With every quarter or year ending, you can check the business reports to pinpoint your weaknesses, strengths, opportunities, and threats. A strong strategy is to compare your productivity with the sales goals and then determine the loopholes.
3. Embrace automation
Numerous unproductive repetitive tasks (such as data entry into the CRM, creating templates, scripts, data, and content). Streamlining workflow and eliminating redundant tasks are the keys to increased sales productivity. To automate these tasks, there are numerous automated tools available such as CRM, social media sharing apps, email automation, and many other tools that can help you sell more effectively with so much reduced human cost and time.
To improve sales implementation and reduce the resources used, the sales stack tools can even update sales reps with information such as who to call, when to call, and what content to provide. One of the most important examples of such tools is AI Customer services that respond to queries using prebuilt data.
4. Invest in Accurate contact data
Today's sales process, particularly in B2B, is dominated by data. Without knowing your customer base properly, your sales will stand at zero. Initially, customers may get interested, but eventually, you will face losses. With that in context, one of the most critical aspects of the sales pipeline that is often ignored is using the correct details of your customers. Contact information changes now and then. You won't be able to start the sales process if you are contacting the wrong person with the wrong details.
Jobs, preferences, affordability, contact information, emails, and more change with time. Your sales team needs to be updated with all these to successfully take your leads to the sales funnel or remarket them. Thus, ensure your sales campaigns succeed with the latest contact information. Datahut recently helped a company improve sales by 3X, and the reason for success was the accurate contact data. You can read about it here.
5. Align sales and marketing efforts
Lack of communication between the sales and marketing departments may lead to huge losses of resources: cost, time, and efforts. Guessing games won't work here! Your marketing and sales teams should collaborate rather than work in silos and speculate what the other requires. Ensure effective communication between the teams to make better decisions and increase sales productivity. Ensure continuous feedback from both sides for what works and what does not!
6. Leverage sales technology
Technology can become your greatest advantage if you know how to leverage it and a bane if you don't! Thus, make sure you utilize it to the most of your advantage. For example, AI-based chatbots, auto-dialing software, voicemail drop, integrated emails, and much more can complete the most time-consuming tasks within minutes.
Chatbots can attract potential customers when they arrive at your website and cater to customer support needs. With in-built details, a conversation can be built using these bots, and when the chat becomes too detailed, the chatbot can transfer the chat to a customer care personal.
Auto dialing software can save a lot of time and effort for the sales reps by connecting them directly to the next best possible leads in the queue as defined by the management.
Voicemail drop allows reps to leave pre-recorded voice messages with a single click, saving valuable seconds. Rather than using worded scripts or templates which may appear boring to the customers, voice mails are more personal and increase curiosity among customers.
Integrated Emails can help sales representatives quickly communicate with prospects and customers using prebuilt email templates, automated email drips, and email campaigns that can be personalized accordingly.
7. Track and Measure sales activities
Being blindly consistent in sales activities can be a massive drawback for any company. However, with time and market trends changing the business era, you need to keep track of productivity gains and results at frequent intervals. Dashboards are fantastic for this, as they allow you to visualize trends and gain valuable insight into every other salesperson's activity-based metrics. Next, determine which performance indicators, such as call rate, sales cycle length, upstream conversion rate, etc., are vital for you. Some of the best KPIs to consider are:
Conversion Rate is the percentage of your prospective consumers completing a specific action. This action varies and may include viewing a website, fixing a demo, leaving a review, or purchasing.
Average Sales Per Hour is the average percentage of sales a rep pursues within an hour. It is an essential individual performance indicator that can be used to compare different reps' productivity and eliminate the differences.
Actual VS Forecasted is one of the most important KPIs each successful company uses to measure what was expected from a rep and what he has served. It is also known as Mean Percentage Error (MPE) It helps you identify deviations from sales goals and take actions accordingly.
Summing Up
The new era is all about data. Analytics are crucial for enhancing business strategy and making informed decisions. Relevant and speedy data trends are the source of the competitive edge you ought to survive in your industry. Companies that use sales actionable intelligence achieve team quotas 4x faster than those that don't. It is never too late to start.
And knowing the importance of the strategies mentioned above, you need an adequately customized data scraping service to help increase your organization's sales effectiveness. Contact Datahut to learn more.
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