How to increase the sales productivity of a company?
This article will deal with all the obstacles that sales personnel face in the course of increasing sales productivity and the effective ways of overcoming those negative aspects.
Sales productivity is undoubtedly the key to the growth and profitability of any business. No matter you are selling any product or service, increasing sales will always be the top priority. From this point of view, all the existing businesses and even start-ups are desperately fighting to keep themselves ahead of their competitors.
Now, one thing that must come to your mind is what shall we do to increase the sales productivity of a business? Let us dwell more on the topic.
What exactly is sales productivity?
The most basic answer to this question is that sales productivity can be termed as maximizing your sales using the least of your resources.
The second question can be, What are the resources?
A straight answer is that resources mean not only the budget of the company but also the time consumed by the team members of your company. You definitely need to calculate the revenue generated by your sales team in return for the resources invested by your company.
What is the root cause of unsatisfactory sales productivity?
Several challenging factors are responsible for the dissatisfactory performance of the sales team of any company.
- Strategies that do not align with the sales processes.
- Lack of availability of structured data.
- Not understanding the target market.
- Inadequate training or knowledge of the sales personnel.
- Lack of data-driven strategies.
Well, the problems are varied, but can you identify the root cause?
Take a close look and you will realize that the problem is most of the sales representatives spend a whole lot of time arranging the administrative tasks, traveling to different places and end of the day reporting to the office. One thing is evident the decrease in sales productivity is not due to a lack of dedication but a lack of time available to the sales department.
Let us discuss why time and data are the main variables for increasing sales productivity
Strategies and sales performance
The success of your sales team depends on how well they form their strategies for sales processes. To create a solid blueprint, the sales representatives require dedicated effort and sufficient time. This is because for planning an effective strategy, the research work on the targeted market has to be very strong.
Lack of available structured data
The sales productivity of your company can be maximized only when you use the stored information as well as generate new information in the form of data and optimize the sales strategies. Here dwelling on past data and generating new data requires a systematic and automatic approach that will save the time and energy of any sales team.
Lack of knowledge or training of the sales representatives
A salesperson can only sell the product or service of a company when he or she acquires adequate knowledge regarding the item to be sold. Insufficient knowledge will result in failure to close the deal or divert the interest of the targeted customers.
Not understanding the targeted market
On the part of a sales representative, understanding the targeted market is very essential. If you fail to judge the targeted audiences or fail to understand the intent of customers, then you will probably end up losing the deal due to a lack of efficient handling of the situation. You need to track the historical data and nurture the recently collected information as well. Your sales personnel need a lot of time focussing on the existing market.
Lack of data-driven strategies
If you move on to preparing strategies without collecting sufficient data then you might end up creating a wrong line of strategy for selling your products or services. Again, here data and time play an important role.
Why should we increase sales productivity?
The one-word answer to this particular question is to increase the revenue of the company. But apart from this basic purpose, there are some other benefits too that can be acquired if we can increase the sales productivity of our company.
• Chances of higher sales with fewer utilization of resources
For generating higher sales or closing more deals there may be two alternative ways available to us. The first is hiring more sales persons and the second option is helping the existing sales team to be more productive. But the question is how? Suppose you have already tried out all the motivating tricks or even announced handsome perks for your sales department. But things are not working the way you expected. From this juncture, another term pops up in the form of automation. We will discuss this further in detail.
• Customer satisfaction and retention and generation of new customer base
Increasing customer satisfaction and retaining them is the new mantra of the present-day business units. The more time the sales representatives of your company spend on your customers the more will they get the opportunity to serve them efficiently and increase their satisfaction level. Not only will they retain the existing clients but the bunch of happy customers will repeat their business as well as attract more similar clients. This at the end of the day helps in increasing your sales pipeline.
• Competitive Advantage and stronger market positioning
In the current market scenario, any company with higher sales productivity enjoys the ability to respond faster to the needs of the customers. Formation of strategies makes it easier to outperform the competitors.
Does automation really help companies to increase sales productivity?
Yes, they really do. The very fact is that technology can improve the quality of human lives if implemented in a systematic way. Robots are simply helping us to reduce our burden and get done the work faster. Any technology that helps in reducing manual labour and that also within a short span of time in the context of sales processes is termed sales automation.
Your sales team remains packed up with a whole lot of scheduled work on a daily basis and the bitter part is that these works have nothing to do with selling the products or services. All you need to do is automate the repetitive and scheduled tasks of your sales department and allow more and more time for your sales personnel so that they can effectively prepare the marketing strategies to increase sales performance.
How does marketing automation help to improve the sales performance of a company?
The productivity of the sales team of a company gets a boost by implementing marketing automation. Due to a number of factors, the sales performance of a company jumps up after introducing sales automation tools.
• Manual works is eliminated
Eliminating or reducing the manual tasks of the sales department, like tracking the customers and maintaining a cordial relationship with the customers with the help of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, data entry, and follow-up activities, can be regulated by introducing marketing automation.
• Track and analyze the sales activities
Analysing the conversation rates, measuring the sales length cycle, and observing the team performance allows clear visualization of the trends of the market. The valuable insights are immensely helpful for the sales representatives to set their next course of activities.
• Data management and strategy creation
The data tracked remained stored in the system and can be further used for future references and nurtured from the sales pipeline. The sales automation tools help in optimizing sales strategies, thereby improving forecasting.
• Enhances the communication process
The automated emailing process with inbuilt templates and chatbots ensures quick and smooth communication with the prospects. The timely response received increases the satisfaction level of the leads.
• Cost-effective
Handling leads in bulk is only possible due to automation, as it eases the whole process without involving a large number of sales representatives. A company can grow very fast without deploying a long list of personnel to conduct repetitive daily tasks.
• Speeding up the decision-making process
The coordination within various departments becomes very fast as the whole process of marketing automation can be conducted while maintaining a hierarchy. The managerial personnel can control the total system as per their wish by granting the desired level of access to the junior team members accordingly.
To wrap things up
As per the current market condition in the context of any kind of business, automation is likely to act as a game-changer to increase and stabilize sales productivity. Marketing automation tools provide a deep insight into every aspect of the sales process so that companies can boost their revenue by utilizing their available resources. Enterprise Automation, as a company with a vast range of expertise in the field of sales automation, has helped a whole lot of small as well as medium-scale businesses to introduce sales automation as their marketing activities and establish their business from the grassroots level.
For more details, contact https://enterpriseautomation.in/
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