Meeting targets, improving productivity, reducing costs - these are all basic goals any organization strives to achieve. Indeed, sales productivity often poses a challenge for many organizations, particularly when your sales team is no longer in a state of growth. But the first step to progress is determining the particular hurdle. Identifying the bottlenecks and roadblocks are necessary in ensuring that it is addressed with the most proper and effective solution.

Definition and Factors of Sales Productivity 

Sales productivity measures how an organization uses its resources for optimal results. Resources include anything from tools, processes, people, time, and costs. Essentially, we want to meet revenue goals while also reducing expenditures. The faster the sales quota is met, the more productive a sales team is. 

Studies show that efficiency and effectiveness go hand-in-hand to ensure good productivity. 

Efficiency denotes how much time a seller spends on preparing and practicing sales as opposed to administrative tasks or crafting reports that, while necessary, may not always drive sales results higher. Research has also shown that sales reps often spend more time updating sales records than actually selling out in the field. 

On the other hand, effectiveness points towards a seller’s ability to ensure future revenue. For instance, enticing customers to return and buy more simply based on the language used by the seller. 

By identifying the above factors, organizations can improve and work on where their sales team falls short. Again, this encourages a continued state of growth for an organization’s sales team towards improving productivity. 

Strategies to Improve First, training and coaching should always be continuous throughout the lifetime of an organization.  For sales reps, an orientation during onboarding is not enough. Instead, schedule regular training sessions on topics such as getting to know buyers, understanding target markets, and such. Expound also on your organization’s culture to make them understand what drives you/ your company. Encourage your team also to speak up so that they themselves can identify strategies on how to improve. 

In this day and age, online sessions are novel ways to conduct sales coaching. Most sales reps can also lose focus after hour-long sessions, which is not effective for memory retention if they cannot remember the discussions once the session ends. Instead, opt for quick interactive sessions that can be more stimulating. 

Second, ensure your marketing and sales team are collaborating together towards a common goal. This shared goal should also revolve around the need to better serve customers. Open communication works to properly close deals as well as understand which resources work, and what content is sellable versus what is not. After all, these teams are basic foundations for good sales productivity.

Third, welcome technology and implement automated systems that record sales updates. It is often said that sellers spend more time on administrative tasks such as reports and recording that take away from time spent actually selling. 

It is therefore recommended that organizations embrace automated programs that do the research work needed so sales reps can focus more on what they are hired for. Of course, the data gathered through these software needs to be verified - double checked and triple checked! But as do all things with growing pains, in the long run, these may benefit your organization more.

Remember that improvements do not happen overnight. These need to be tailored and fine-tuned in order to fit the needs of your organization. However, with the help of these simple strategies as a jump off point, together with continued monitoring of key performance indicators within your sales team, there is growth planted within the cornerstones of the organization. 

Which to prioritize - training, coaching, automation, team expansion? Let BT Partners help you build good foundations and set a sales pipeline to ensure optimal growth. Get in touch with us today at marketing@btpartners-asia.com.