Closing Deals July 20, 2016 Kristie

8 Ways To Increase Sales Productivity

The productivity of your sales team directly relates to the results they achieve. The more productive they are with their time, the more their sales will increase.

Here are a 8 tips to help increase your sales team’s productivity and skyrocket your sales.

increase sales productivity

Create email templates

Encourage your sales team to create email templates for the various types of emails they send – from initial contact, to follow up, and routine touch points. By leveraging email templates your sales team can perfect their emails, save time by not having to re-write an email each time, and they still have room for personalizing where necessary.

An email template provides the base and they can add additional details to personalize without having to create an email from scratch each time.

You can share email templates across your team or have people create their own so they still feel that each email is in their own voice. If your’e using Daylite to manage contacts and sales opportunities, you can use letter templates – here’s how.

Group tasks together

Help your sales team increase productivity by teaching them time management skills– one of these being task grouping. Studies show that multi tasking lowers your productivity. Instead of wasting time jumping from one thing to another, teach your sales team to focus on one type of task at a time.

Bucket like-tasks together by breaking down your schedule into chunks. One chunk of time for checking email – which may be in the morning, afternoon, and before the end of the work day. One chunk for processing orders. One chunk for performing follow-up calls.

While your sales team may need to answer calls at any give time that comes in, they can still be proactive about scheduling calls with clients during specific windows.

Use a shared system

Avoid wasted time digging for information and asking each other questions by investing in a shared system. With a shared system your team has access to the client contact information, emails, call notes, and internal documents that they need to get their work done.

Full disclosure, we develop Daylite, so of course we’ll suggest using it if your team is on Macs, iPhone, and iPads. There are many other great systems available that allow your team to share and access information to increase their sales productivity. Find the one that works for your team so you can share information and save time.

Rank leads

Anyone in sales knows there’s a lot of tire-kickers that can waste time. Help eliminate wasted time by ranking leads based on probability so your team can focus their efforts on those that are likely to convert.

Without capturing which leads are high probability, it can be difficult for your team to focus their attention on the right leads. Encourage your sales team to take an extra few seconds to capture the probability of each lead converting in whichever contact management or sales tracking system you use. You’ll save hours in the long run because their priority will be on converting leads likely to become customers.

Create automated sales funnels

Rating leads doesn’t mean that you have to avoid giving any attention to your low-ranking leads. Low-ranking leads can still be converted into customers. But you can lower the risk of wasted time by creating automated sales funnels.

When a lead is somewhat interested in your service or product(s) you can add them to a sales funnel by leveraging automated email campaigns that periodically remind them that you’re here when they need. MailChimp is a common tool used for this.

This can be done through bi-weekly or monthly newsletters or specific automated email campaigns that  send your leads helpful information about things of interest that also gently nudge them in your direction.

Set realistic goals & celebrate successes

Goals give your sales team something to focus on and get motivated about. Realistic is the key term here, though. Review past sales data to establish a baseline of what is expected of your sales team on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis.

Set targets for each of these time frames so your team has specific metrics to reach. Celebrate their success when they reach and exceed these goals so they’re motivated to keep going. Celebrations don’t have to be financial rewards. They can also be things like social events to celebrate when they reach goals as a team.

Schedule regular check-ins

Keep your team motivated by checking in with them periodically to see how they’re doing and how they can improve. How close are they to achieving their targets? What can they do to achieve their goals? What can you do as a sales manager or business owner to help them reach their goals? Keep it a two-way street for communicating ways of improving the business overall. Help them to see their place in the company and how their role makes a difference.

Listen to your team

As Verne Harnish states in Mastering The Rockefeller Habits that 40% of employee time is wasted on recurring problems and hassles. While your sales team is focused on easing pain points for your customers, remember that your sales team has pain points as well.

To increase productivity for your sales team, work on figuring out what those pain points are and make changes so your team can reach their full potential. It’s helpful to present current processes to your team and ask how they think improvements can be made. Another way of getting feedback is through anonymous surveys to ask your team what the company is doing well, and where the company can improve.

Listen to the feedback of your team. Make changes where you can accommodate. Explain and educate where and why you’re unable to in other areas.

By building up your team and encouraging them to have a voice, you’ll empower your team to work harder to achieve the goals of the company.

Need help tracking sales? Try Daylite for managing clients, tasks, opportunities and more – in one beautiful app.

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