Today for most of the B2B companies, sales productivity is the key challenge they are facing on a daily basis. And that could be a quite challenging and serious concern because sales productivity means maximizing the business’s sales and minimizing the spent expenses on the resources including cost, time and effort, which in turn, gives a direct impact on the revenue.
So the question is how it could be addressed? – Most of the companies think that poor sales reps are the key reason behind it. But, that’s not true for all the time. As not only your sales agent could pull the weight of your company’s sales alone. You should also be pro-active you’re your sales processes and methodologies. Your sales team’s other tasks that they are doing on the daily basis also come in the core selling activities. By properly reviewing and streamlining their workflows and eliminating the needless tasks, you could turn the things around your favor.
The key hurdles that Stops sales productivity
Many of us think that for helping the business grow, we need to hire more sales agents. But that’s not the best step to take? By just hiring more sales bodies, you can’t increase the sales; you need to work on your sales tools and processes, too. Let’s take a look at the 7 reasons on why companies are struggling with sales productivity and how to meet those challenges:
- Improper Training
It takes a lot of time to hire and train a proficient sales agent. But with time most of them either forget their training lessons or use those old conventional sales tricks. This challenge could be resolved with ongoing sales training of the new and updated technologies and tools.
- Automating the System
Only 1/3rd of the sales representatives’ time is spent in selling the products. And rest is taken up in the monotonous and less productive admin tasks. By automating the sales processes and tools, you could reduce admin and data entry tasks. In turn, this will increase the sales productivity and improve your customer service, too.
- Aligning Sales and Marketing Departments Together
By bringing both the departments together, you could increase the productivity and could work on the same shared goals and targets. This in turn will boost your sales productivity and will add value to your customers.
- Making a Central Repository for content
Sales agents waste a lot of their time in finding the relevant content or crafting it. By making a central repository, which has all the required content available will ensure your sales team’s success and flawless work flows.
- Training on social selling
Social selling knowledge gap could be the reason of your sales failure. And that could be prevented by having ongoing training in social media channels. This in turn, will arm your sales representatives and agents with key the skills they need to boost your company’s sales.
- Setting right metrics to measure sales
Mostly sales is judged by the number of E-mails sent and number of calls done, but that could never give a right picture of the efficiency of your sales team. By properly identifying and often tracking of the right metrics, your sales productivity could be boosted.
- The right ground-breaking tools for the right job
Too many brands and companies recruit and train sales agents and allow them to use their own devices and tools. But that could not only cause security concerns but could also impact your sales productivity. So allocate company’s devices and tools for company’s tasks.
Hope the above mentioned points will help you in figuring out the reason behind your business’s low sales productivity. If you really want to boost up your sales, then you must ensure your teams have the right training, tools and easy accessibility to the information they need to properly identify for driving the sales.