Are you frustrated by the lack of output from your salespeople? The average sales rep spends only 39% of their time actively selling or engaging with prospects and customers, demonstrating that enhancing sales productivity and performance is a crucial challenge for sales managers to overcome.
When it comes to managing sales teams, it’s no wonder the key concerns are sales productivity and performance. Given that your sales team’s productivity and performance directly influence your bottom line, it’s critical to deal with it appropriately and on time.
Increasing your team’s productivity is key to improving sales and company growth. Using a unique set of tools, including a DISC Sales Profile, will provide meaningful information to manage, strategise and motivate your team to ensure they have the most impact, boost efficiency and increase revenue.
What is Sales Productivity?
Sales team productivity centres on the idea of increasing sales while spending as little as possible. The relationship between your salespeople’s efficiency (inputs) and their effectiveness (outputs) is key to understanding sales productivity. In other words, the more your salespeople sell and produce revenue while using fewer resources (such as time and money), the more productive and valuable they are to your company.
Sales efficiency involves optimising the use of a sales representative’s time. An effective salesperson devotes time to high-impact activities such as call preparation rather than low-impact tasks such as administrative responsibilities.
Sales effectiveness refers to a salesperson’s capacity to generate income. A highly successful sales representative makes the most of available resources to attract potential clients. These resources, such as information, direction, and training, must be readily available to close deals.
A sales team manager may use the pace at which a salesperson increases revenue to calculate sales productivity. Boosting productivity involves figuring out how your sales team can be more productive with their time. Adding automation, structure, and emphasis to their day enables salespeople to stay focused on the final objective.
To assess sales productivity, monitor how effective a particular sales rep is at increasing the company’s bottom line.
How to Improve Your Sales Teams Productivity with DISC
Success in sales is often determined by how well sales professionals interact with their clients and prospects. Top salespeople are confidently self-aware and able to communicate their sales pitch with little stress or pressure.
These successful professionals not only understand their DISC profile but also understand the DISC types of others. Their ability to effectively relate, communicate and influence is crucially important when selling and creating relationships with clients and prospects. They understand how they need to behave and interact to be successful.
The DISC assessment is a type of behavioural assessment that is designed to be used in the workplace to improve productivity and team collaboration. However, sales teams can also use it to strengthen their sales mindset and to gain knowledge of different personalities to increase results. Salespeople who complete a DISC assessment gain an in-depth understanding of their natural selling style and how they can effectively adjust their style to improve the outcomes of their interactions with prospects.
Engaging in DISC based sales training will equip your team with the knowledge they need to build rapport and improve interactions with prospects, leading to an increase in sales team productivity.
How to Measure Sales Team Productivity
While metrics are crucial in all aspects of business, they are especially vital in sales. Sales managers cannot rely on intuition to guide their judgments since they deal with vast amounts of information and risk failure. That is why successful businesses continuously implement and monitor effective sales productivity tracking practices. Implementing a few tried-and-true strategies, such as regularly monitoring sales funnel progress and prioritising activities, will help your team win more deals. Here are the top five ways to measure sales team productivity:
Conversation Rate
The “conversion rate” is a common way to gain information about a sales team’s success. It is an excellent starting point to gain a broad understanding of the effectiveness of the sales process. Conversion rate is only one part of the productivity scale. Still, by measuring the number of opportunities generated by each stage of the sales funnel, you can determine where you can make improvements to your sales team’s performance more readily.
Measure the number and quality of customer interactions
Measuring the amount and quality of customer contacts is an excellent approach to determine whether your sales team members are engaging in enough relevant interactions to result in a sale. Implementing CRM or sales tracking software is a simple and effective approach to measure activities like calls, call duration, call length vs. time of day, and call outcomes. This is vital to know if your sales reps are completing high-quality and effective calls.
Pay Attention to Sales Pipeline Progress
Sales managers may utilise a variety of sales pipeline metrics to better understand how their team is performing. In general, sales managers should closely track the number of qualified leads, and the overall number of open and closed opportunities since each step reflects the projected revenue at the conclusion of the quarter. Tracking the progression of sales stages also reveals areas in which salespeople may need to develop.
Evaluate whether you’re meeting your sales forecast
Sales forecasting does more than simply estimate final figures; it also provides a baseline for salespeople to assess if they’re on track to accomplish targets and if they need to improve their skills. Working backwards from your sales forecasts enables you to establish if your salespeople are on track to reach their quota.
Analyse the Average Length of a Sale
The average time between gaining a lead and converting them is your average “sales length.” This measure is an essential indicator of client behaviour. You can successfully create campaigns and manage expectations when nurturing leads by determining the length of time required to close sales. The longer a sales cycle lasts, the more resource-intensive and inefficient it gets.
The Importance of Productivity in Sales Teams
Sales productivity provides a more accurate view of a sales representative’s capabilities and the difficulties they experience when making a sale. Looking at performance only provides you with a partial picture. However, looking at productivity offers you a holistic view.
For example, take two salespeople, Dave and Lisa, who make daily cold calls. They both work the same hours, have a KPI of 10 qualified leads per week and a sales target of $9000. Let’s compare their metrics:
| Dave: | Lisa: |
| Calls Made: 150 | Calls Made: 200 |
| Average sale per call: $60 | Average sale per call: $45 |
Here’s what you’ll discover about them if you follow their particular metrics. Dave only made 150 calls in the allocated 40 hours to meet his goal. On the other hand, Lisa made 200 phone calls at the same time. As a result, Lisa is a more efficient worker. However, Dave earned $60 for each call, whereas Judy earned $45. As a result, Dave is a more successful employee in terms of effectiveness.
Dave’s sales productivity = 150 X 60 = 9,000 (efficiency = 150 calls, effectiveness = $65)
Lisa’s sales productivity = 200 X 45 = 9,000 (efficiency = 200 calls, effectiveness = $45
So, who is the more successful employee? Looking at the sales rep’s success in terms of revenue is an excellent place to start. However, you must have the entire picture to determine their genuine worth. Dave is probably better from a short—term viewpoint since his calls provide more results. Using the above sales productivity metric, we can conclude that both workers are equally productive and hence equally valued – an insight you would have missed otherwise! This is why keeping track of sales productivity is critical.
What Factors Affect Sales Team Productivity
According to research, 42% of businesses say that only half of their salespeople achieve or surpass their quotas. This is a challenge for many companies attempting to boost their sales and revenue.
Regularly dealing with failures in your sales team can be difficult. It’s even worse when you’ve done all you can think of to boost the effectiveness of your salespeople. As a result, it is critical for any organisation experiencing sales difficulties to identify and fix any factors impacting sales promptly.
Other factors may be at work that you have not considered. Understanding how such things affect your sales is the first step towards boosting your team’s performance. Different factors can be detrimental to your sales team’s productivity, and some of them are:
- Pressure to achieve unrealistic sales targets
- Reluctance to adapt and learn the latest technologies
- Lack of consistent sales strategies and formal processes
- No alignment between marketing, sales, and operations.
- Failing to set sales priorities
- Product or service is not meeting customer’s needs
- The economic impact of supply and demand in your market
How to Improve Sales Team Productivity
Almost every business struggles with sales productivity and the increasing pressure to reach or surpass growing revenue goals only adds to the problem. Businesses are increasing the size of their sales teams and setting more ambitious sales targets. Still, they are not scaling their procedures, best practices, and sales tools at the same rate, leading to issues in efficiency and effectiveness. Luckily, businesses and sales managers can implement several methods to improve sales team productivity. These include:
Prioritise Sales Coaching and Training
Increasing sales is the primary objective of many Australian businesses. Sales training and coaching are two of the most potent tactics for growing sales success at every level of the sales cycle, whether your company is small or large. According to Sales Alliance, salespeople typically forget 80-90% of what they learn in training within a month. Sales training and coaching is an excellent way to enhance your sales team. It helps identify actionable solutions and methods to create revenue, assists your reps in prioritising and successfully allocating their time and resources, and lets your team grow professionally.
Introduce Sales Team Shadowing or Peer-to-Peer Coaching
As a sales manager, it is your responsibility to be your sales team’s primary source of guidance and professional insight. However, this is not always viable with limited time and energy at your disposal.
Consider pairing reps with diverse levels of expertise together to promote team-wide responsibility and to foster a culture of peer-to-peer coaching and effective mentorship. The next stage is to develop a rotation plan in which your employees may monitor your sales reps’ operations once or twice a month and sit through cold calls, demos, and follow-up conversations.
This way, they’ll have a greater grasp of the entire process, as well as your target audience and products or services, and may subsequently apply that knowledge to their work. This method gives your less experienced salespeople unique viewpoints that will mould their skill sets and improve their overall efforts.
Implement a Consistent Sales Process
An inefficient and unproductive sales process may cost businesses millions in lost revenue. However, companies that follow a standardised sales process are 33% more likely to be top performers. To make a new process effective, you must first establish what works and what does not work about your current process. Analyse your previously closed deals to determine the length of the entire process and the amount of time that transpired between each phase of the process. It’s also critical to identify what actions drove the prospect to advance to the next stage. When reviewing your sales process, aim to understand what methods helped your sales professionals move prospects through the sales cycle from start to finish.
Automate Specific Sales Tasks
Your sales team may be wasting a lot of time on administrative or repetitive tasks, hindering their productivity. You can drastically enhance their performance by implementing sales automation solutions, which will take up the slack and allow your sales professionals to focus on the selling side of their work. The more time your sales team spend on non-productive duties, the less time they have to sell. You may automate most components of your sales processes to increase sales.
Utilise Sales Tools
Achieving a sales KPI is essential in evaluating a sales team’s effectiveness. However, many other crucial factors play a role in meeting sales objectives, such as your salespeople having the necessary scope of behaviours and capabilities to perform successfully in the role. Utilising sales tools is a great way to understand your team’s current behaviours and abilities.
A competency assessment evaluates salespeople, specifically the abilities necessary to succeed in a sales role. A sales competency assessment enables sales managers to take a comprehensive view of their team, benchmark top performers, and identify individuals who may require additional development within 18 areas critical to sales success.
A sales competency assessment enables sales managers to take a comprehensive view of their team, benchmark top performers, and identify individuals who may require additional development within 18 areas critical to sales success.
How successfully salespeople communicate with others is an important factor in their sales performance. Their ability to successfully relate to, engage with, persuade, and encourage prospects is a critical talent in converting prospects and developing long-term customer relationships. Extended DISC® assessments can help boost sales performance and identify areas for improvement in your team.
Best Tools for Tracking Sales Productivity
Any software solution that allows sales teams to track their sales activity quickly and accurately is called sales tracking software. Sales tracking software assists managers in better understanding their target customers and identifying possible pipeline difficulties before they become major ones. Sales productivity tracking tools also assist sales managers in improving individual sales rep performance with precise analytics that swiftly pinpoint what works and what doesn’t.
The best tools for tracking sales productivity include features that enable you to monitor new leads, forecast sales, produce activity reports and understand how many prospects are in each stage of the sales process. Below, in no particular order, are some tools that help you track sales productivity:
- Nutshell: Nutshell enables sales managers to view their leads quickly and their current place in your pipeline, assess important metrics and analyse their sales team’s activities.
- Salesflare: Salesflare is a sales CRM built to keep track of your sales leads and customers automatically by gathering all the data about them from your emails, calendar, phone, social media, company databases, email, and web tracking.
- Hubspot: Hubspot is one of the most widely used CRM tools. It covers all aspects, whether marketing, sales productivity tracking, services, operations, or CMS. It helps reduce manual work and leads to an increase in sales productivity.
- Pipedrive: Pipedrive gives users access to lead management, communications tracking, pipeline automation, and detailed reporting features.
- Zoho: Zoho software comes with a wide variety of sales tracking tools, including customisable dashboards, contact management, funnel charts, sales forecasting, and detailed analytics.
