Sales is the heart of business. It’s the machinery that makes your business move. And inefficient sales means inefficient business; which means inefficient accounts, operations, human resources and IT. Inefficiency in sales is an issue that many businesses continue to face, and very few seem to take notice until much later.
So how do you empower your sales team to execute their tasks effectively and improve sales performance? Here are three ideas that you can begin applying in your business right away.
Set Business Goals and Determine KPIs
Improving your sales performance in your business can be quite a rabbit hole. To save yourself loads of time and a hundred other confusions, it is best advised that you set concrete, measurable goals for your business. Clarifying your goals and deciding upon how you will measure your performance should be the first step in laying out your sales efficiency plan. Pick up an efficient set of key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to be a good measure of your progress. Some of the most widely used KPIs in sales are:
- Sales Growth: Indicates if your business is growing steadily.
- Sales Target: Indicates if you are on track regarding your sales targets.
- Customer Acquisition Cost: Reveals the cost of a new customer.
- Average Revenue per Unit: A measure of average revenue one user generates for you.
- Customer Lifetime Value: An expectation of the earnings per customer.
- Customer Churn Rate: Indicates how many customers you lose in a given time period.
Effective Sales Rep Training
In his book “How to Hire & Develop Your Next Top Performer”, Caliper’s Chairman Herb Greenberg claims that more than half of people working in sales lack sufficient empathy or ego-drive to ever succeed. Sources also suggest that 82 percent of B2B decision-makers think salespersons are unprepared.
While the solutions to this problem are controversial, it can be collectively agreed upon that new hires should go through in-depth training that introduces them to effective prospecting and selling methods. It should address common questions that sales reps typically have during onboarding. This prevents your sales reps from wasting time and resources on approaches that don’t work like pitching to customers before they are ready, or drawing out the sales process longer than it needs to be.
Find Areas to Improve Productivity
Sales reps are hard at work each day, trying to make that new sale come to fruition. Why then is it that only 37 percent of a sales rep’s time is spent selling? This must mean that there is a pretty high inefficiency when it comes to their productivity at work. A majority of their time is mostly spent on non-selling tasks like traveling, attending meetings, checking e-mails, etc.
In order for you to maximize salespersons’ productivity, determining areas where you are inefficient and developing over them is crucial. The right CRM system can assist you with relevant data to pinpoint these areas of weakness and turn them into opportunities for maximizing your sales performance. You also need to know the challenges of CRM to avoid any adverse impact on your sales campaign.
Take Control of Sales Strategy
You are in control of how efficient your business’ sales strategy is; however, seeing what your business needs from you can be difficult when there is an overwhelming amount of metrics to pay attention to. CRMs are instrumental in determining where your business is lagging behind and working on these areas to improve.
