What separates the top performers on your sales teams from the average performers?
Is every sales team member working as efficiently and effectively as possible?
In sales, time is quite literally money, which means that sales reps need to make the most of their time. Efficiency and effectiveness together are what determine sales performance—and sales performance directly affects your company’s revenues.
The terms “Inefficient” and “ineffective” sales process are sometimes used interchangeably. However, they are not the same efficiency measures the overall output and effectiveness is the team’s ability to complete the right tasks, at the right time and close the deal. They are both interlinked and streamlining your sales process means tackling efficiency and effectiveness.
We have outlined some key areas to help streamline your sales process and make more sales in less time.
Set Business Goals And KPIs
Go back to basics, regularly set goals and KPI’s and review them and make educated adjustments. We recommend using the SMART goals method to set realistic goals that are actionable by your sales team.
Profile your customers
A whopping 50% of time is wasted on unproductive prospecting. Creating a comprehensive customer profile that is backed up by data, you can generate quality leads. Regularly reviewing these and enhancing the profiels will make communcating and delivering value to the prosecptive customers easier. Remember the WHO, WHERE AND WHAT, focus on their pain points and needs.
Sell the solution
The research invested in your customer personas will tell you the problems and pain points. Customers don’t want a product or service, they want a solution to their issues and make their business or job role easier and more effective. While competitors are shallowly focusing on their newest features, you can be speaking directly to their pain points and demonstrating the tangible benefits for them.
Understanding these needs and pain points and having the right content to help articulate this is the best and surest way to close a deal.
Create a repeatable sales process
It’s easy to create efficiency if all members of the team know what process to follow. It is easy for individuals to go off track or be unprepared and having a go-to guide eliminates any guess work.
The 7 sales steps are:
- Prospect and Research
- Connect and qualify leads.
- Research the company.
- Give an effective pitch.
- Handle objections.
- Close the deal.
- Nurture and continue to sell.
Each one of these should have readily available content to assist the sales representative in reaching the next stage. It is worth noting here that HubSpot found that sales reps spend an average of 440 hours each year trying to find the right content to share with their prospects and customers which is a huge drain on efficiency.
Additionally, instead of wasting time searching for relevant content, reps might give up and send irrelevant or impersonal content to prospects, resulting in an ineffective sales process.
When 62% of B2B companies finalize decisions based solely on the content they receive, irrelevant content is unlikely to lead to closed deals.
Align marketing and sales
A misaligned sales and marketing team can cause inefficiency and friction. The idea that marketing generates the leads and sales converts them is not enough without clear communication.
Only a 3rd of marketing and sales team collaborate regularly and without clear communication from the marketing team, a sales rep may be pitching a product that was never marketed to them. Without sales communicating to marketing may mean marketing are not providing the content that sales require to close a lead.
By aligning both teams, you improve communication and collaboration, increasing your rate of conversions and reducing drop-offs in your sales funnel.
Setting up automated sales processes.
Automation is the key for improving efficiencies in the sales process, it is estimated that sales reps can lose over 70% of their selling time on other, less essential tasks, like scheduling sales appointments, sending follow-up emails, and updating the CRM. There is technology for that now!
Automation tools, like HubSpot integrate and streamline the various systems and processes used by your sales team. This will free up a sizeable portion of your sales reps’ time to make more calls and close more deals.
Using cloud-based CRM and sales software programs.
In addition to automation, cloud-based tools also help save time and facilitate easier information sharing between team members and departments. The access to information means a collaborative approach is easier to achieve.
Another major bonus of cloud based technology is there are no location limits, there are the options for virtual call centres and setting up sales teams in different areas while still sharing and viewing information in real time.
Manage And Nurture Leads Effectively
“You wouldn’t jump into bed with someone on a first date”, was always something that was at the forefront of our minds when planning customer journeys. It is easier to sell to a “warm lead” in fact, nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads.
The best system for doing this is a centralized CRM like HubSpot that allows your sales team to see where prospects are at in the sales cycle and using their go-to guide can follow up with them in the right way at the right time, increasing their effectiveness and efficiency.
Using Data to Improve Sales Efficiency
We no longer need to rely on “gut instinct” for sales, there is so much data available it is important to businesses to use it effectively. The cost of aquiring customers will keep rising.
Technology plays a major role in increasing sales productivity. To be competitive, sales organizations need to get better insights into consumer behaviours. A great example of this is the use of Big Data. Big data, fuelled by things like IoT are huge sets of data that can’t be traditionally analysed but analysed correctly can reveal trends, patterns, and associations as it relates to your customers. Analytics tools can help you identify and focus on the most profitable sales activities, given the observable trends in your customer and sales data. This information can lead the way to adapting and continuous improving the sales process. There are a range of sales tools available to help this process, but be sure you choose one that covers all your requirements.
Stop the leaks in your sales process – book a call.
Turn prospective leads into buyers with a sales support programme that delivers.
Plug the leaks in your sales process and streamline your conversions. Through years of experience, we have helped many organisations operate efficiently and productively through tried and tested techniques and the latest technology. Increase revenue and profit through sales operations efficiencies and enable your sales team to work more autonomously. Each business is unique, so we audit current processes and make recommendations for improvement. We work with you to make those improvements showing you the return on investment.
