Story:
Best Ways to Increase Sales Productivity

Clearly you can see and understand how important it is to be productive. To get a better picture of this productivity you need to track the amount of time you spend in face-to-face contact with your customers, emailing them, and planning future meetings with them. As a sales manager, you should keep track of your team's metrics in these areas as well. Doing so will help you understand how you can help them become more productive.

Simply put, sales are your company’s bottom line. Your goal is always to sell as much as possible as fast as possible so you can maximize your revenue. For this to happen, you’ll need to find some ways to help your reps and managers increase their sales productivity and rapidly reach their goals. With this in mind, here are a few things you can do.

Optimize Your Onboarding 

Badger Mapping says having effective sales training is the best way to set your team up for success. This starts with properly onboarding a new employee so they spend less time in training and more time doing their job. For this to happen, your sales training content needs to be thorough and encompass lots of valuable details that’s reinforced by repeated practice by them. You should also create a mentoring program.

Utilize Sales Tools

Having good sales tools to use will maximize your employees’ productivity. The tools you need the most are the ones that keep track of your reps’ data, organize it, and show them ways to make more sales – including CRMs, communication apps, and route planning apps. As a manager, such tools are vital because they let you measure your reps’ performance better. You’ll want to track how your reps are progressing with your clients and leads, how much time they’ve spent selling, and what deals they’ve closed. This data will help you understand where your reps are focusing most of their time so you can recommend ways they can increase their sales productivity.

Check in with Your Team

Scheduling weekly or monthly meetings with your employees helps increase sales productivity. Having some one on one time with them lets you see how they’re feeling and performing – something that’s especially helpful when you have new employees. You can use this time to motivate them, see where they need help improving, and get feedback from your team about how you can help them be more productive. This is great because your employees will feel like they have a say and you can get some great ideas and feedback from them.

Align the Marketing Team with the Sales Team

When your marketing and sales teams are aligned your sales productivity will business will significantly increase. The opposite is also true in that when these teams don’t communicate, there will be a disconnect between the two that shows up in your company’s revenue. As a manager, it’s up to you to  encourage these teams to work together and help each other become more productive. 
Your sales team’s job is to determine which leads are valuable (quality over quantity). It’s then up to your marketing team to make sure they attract these types of leads. Together this will close more deals.

Keep Your People Motivated

As a manager you must understand the importance of motivation. This is how you help your employees be more productive and make more sales. For this to happen, you must understand what a sales rep does each day and the issues that impact their productivity. You can’t do this in a negative way. You must remain positive and offer support so your reps are at ease and prepared to continue selling.  The best way to do this is by offering rewards to the most productive reps so they’re motivated to sell more. 
 
Know How to Help Your Sales Reps

Finding ways to help your sales rep will make your job easier. While you have your hands full, you want to make sure they know what they’re doing. With this in mind, some of the things you should do here include:

•    Help them perfect their pitch.
•    Create goals for them to strive to reach. Don’t stop there though. As a sales manager you should also check in with them to see how they’re doing at achieving these goals and if there’s any way you can help them here.
•    Make sure you work with your marketing team so you can help them understand and attract better leads. This will make it easier for your sales team to do its job.

Prioritize Your Schedule 

As a sales manager your schedule is packed full. It’s important to stay on top of everything and always be well-organized. This begins by prioritizing everything since you can’t accomplish everything at once – you’re only human after all. As you work to create your priorities, you need to identify who your most important people, companies, and tasks are.

When you set up meetings it’s important for you to always be on time so you can maintain strong relationships. Here is another area in which you need to set priorities. Your significant, long-term clients should be placed at the top of your list so they always receive the best service. From there you should prioritize leads always making sure that you spend the most time nurturing your existing relationships for long-term growth.

These tips will help you with you with the selling process. By aligning your sales with these tips you’ll make more sales in less time, which will increase your sales productivity.