How to Increase Sales Productivity

How to Increase Sales Productivity

I’m obsessed with productivity – especially sales productivity. Sales metrics, and how to measure sales effectiveness and efficiency, can be subjective. If your salespeople are incentivized – paid more for reaching specific sales goals – their goal is to increase their sales productivity so they can make more money.

This is how Salesforce defines sales productivity:

A great way to measure the sales productivity of your team is to add up all costs, including salaries, benefits, commissions, and perks. Next, calculate the revenue brought in by that sales force. Divide the revenue by the sales costs to get a ratio of revenue to cost.

Your business may define sales productivity differently – but it is critical that you do define it so that your salespeople can meet their goals. If your sales team wants to increase their productivity, you can provide them the tools and resources to boost their sales results – and their income.

5 Keys to Increase Sales Productivity

1. Optimize Your Sales Team Onboarding
Your sales team is often the first – and only – contact with a prospect or new customer. When you train new employees right the first time, they will make the company more money, and sooner. Your new employee training and onboarding program should accelerate their productivity and pay for itself in more sales, better retention and fewer costly mistakes.

Tip: Sales training doesn’t end when the onboarding ends. Training should be ongoing – even for your top producers. 

2. Choose the Right Sales Tools
A sales tool should save time, save money and get better results. If a sales tool don’t increase your sales team’s productivity, why do you keep using it? New sales tools are released every year – but newer isn’t always better. Listen to the sales experts, study the tool reviews and ask for references before you invest in the latest and shiniest new sales tool.

3. Set Daily Goals
Goals are planning your future performance. It’s not enough to have a quarterly goal or even a monthly sales goal. The best sales reps have daily sales goals to stay motivated, focused and on track.

4. Know Your Ideal Client Profile 
Who are your best customers – and why? How do they want to be contacted? Sales intelligence tools – CRMs, lead generation tools, can help you track information to create your ideal client profile, then help you find and target those prospects.

5. Ask For Referrals 
Referrals are one of the most powerful channels for generating leads and closing sales. If you’ve sold a client on the superior benefits of your product, they can be your best sales tool. If they know and understand your product, they also know who else could benefit from your product. Training your sales team when and how to ask for referrals so they can close more referral sales, and increase their overall sales productivity.

Sales Productivity Tools

Good sales productivity tools can help you maximize your productivity. Whether you’re a sales professional, a small business owner, an entrepreneur – or in fact, just about anyone who does any kind of sales – it’s important that your sales productivity tools actually work. A sales productivity tool should:

  • help you get more sales
  • help you store and manage information
  • save you time

I saw digital sales and marketing expert Neal Schaffer’s recent blog post on business productivity tools for sales and wondered what other productivity tools are recommended by sales and small business experts. I did a little research for other sales productivity tools recommended by sales experts. Some of them we’re all familiar with and others are new to me – and maybe to you too?

Neal Schaffer’s Top 5 Productivity Tools for Sales and Marketing 

1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator – The Ultimate Sales Productivity Tool for Social Selling

2.  Leadpages – Efficiently Create and Manage Your Landing Pages for Marketing Productivity

3. Agorapulse – The Ultimate Social Media Dashboard for the Ultimate in Social Media Marketing Productivity

4. Boomerang for Gmail – The Ultimate Gmail Business Productivity Tool

5. Loom – Easily Create Videos and Screencasts for Free

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