Over the last two years, the way we all work has changed tremendously.
According to Pew Research, 20% of Americans worked from home prior to the Coronavirus epidemic. According to current estimates, 71 percent of people now work full-time from home. According to another data, 54 percent of respondents want to continue working from home if things get back to normal.
Moreover, if you want your remote sales team to do their best work, you need to create a fluid workflow and a business culture that supports productive behaviour. Over and above, Without making an effort to enhance how and why your team communicates, you can’t expect to raise sales productivity.
Furthermore, with sales teams being forced to work remotely, optimizing your team’s process and increasing remote worker efficiency is more vital than ever.
If you want to boost your sales productivity while reducing your outlay of resources like money, time, and effort, there are a few things you can do.
In this blog, we’ve listed down 10 proven Strategies to Increase Sales Productivity, but before we get into it, let’s outline why optimizing remote sales productivity is crucial for sustaining growth and competitiveness, identify key challenges that can impede progress, and highlight essential tools designed to enhance the performance of remote sales teams.
Why Is Remote Sales Productivity Important?
Remote sales productivity is critical as it directly impacts a company’s revenue and growth. Effective remote sales strategies enable teams to reach more customers, adapt to market changes quickly, and maintain competitive advantage, all while managing resources efficiently.
What kills remote sales productivity:
- Challenge 1: Lack of clear communication can lead to misunderstandings and missed opportunities.
- Challenge 2: Inadequate access to sales tools and customer information hampers the ability to close deals effectively.
Tools to Improve Remote Team Sales Productivity:
- CRM Software: Centralizes customer information and sales activities, improving team collaboration and customer engagement.
- Video Conferencing Tools: Facilitate face-to-face interactions with clients, enhancing relationship building.
- Project Management Platforms: Streamline task assignment and progress tracking to keep sales initiatives on schedule.
13 proven Strategies to Increase Sales Productivity
To increase sales productivity in today’s competitive business environment, it’s essential to implement proven strategies that drive efficiency and results. Let’s dive in!
1. Set Explicit Goals And Objectives, As Well As Precise Metrics
It’s your role as a sales manager to provide clear expectations for new and experienced team members. People don’t talk face to face as regularly as they would in an office, which is one of the disadvantages of remote work or remote culture.
This means that when it comes to creating goals and rules for your employees, you must be succinct. Employees may struggle to keep on track if you fail to communicate specific goals swiftly and effectively. It’s critical that your salesmen understand their key performance indicators (KPIs).
KPIs are the targets that each team member is required to achieve. Depending on the function, you may want your team to keep track of things like total weekly sales or whether they can minimize churn and increase average customer retention. In pursuit of these uber objectives, you may track how a lead progresses through the sales cycle at a meeting level. For example, measuring how many follow up calls are scheduled with the customer can be a good indicator of the probability of conversion.
Giving your staff samples of successful sales calls is a terrific approach to keep them up to date on benchmark KPIs to beat. For example, successful sales calls involve a high level of interactivity where actively listening to the customer becomes critical. Hence, an idea about metrics such as talk to listen ratio and longest monologue can indicate when a sales rep is alienating his customer by talking too much.
These many aspects are crucial to the overall performance of your company and sales team. Give your staff goals with deadlines, objectives, and methods to grow if you want them to stay productive. And the best way to do it is to develop crystal clear sales metrics and set expectations as early as feasible.
2. Examine Your Sales Procedures
It’s time to audit your processes now that you know what your priorities are. When you do this, you’ll probably find that there are a lot of methods to improve how your team works. You can identify out-of-date processes and communication gaps, then devise a strategy to close them.
Here are three things to consider, and I’ll go over each one in more detail:
- Experience in selling
- Tasks to be completed after the call
- Collaboration between teams
3. Experience in selling
Examine your team’s interactions with prospects first. Identify frequent queries that arise and ensure that your team is prepared to respond. You can discover in your audit that there are pain issues that haven’t come up before as your goods evolve. Then, to bring your reps up to speed even faster, organize a training session. Mix it up a bit by combining the best of the worlds of asynchronous and synchronous training. In the early induction phase, make reps go through “game tapes” i.e. the winning moments in sales video meetings and learn from them. Later, to make them more hands-on, ask them to jump in and take customer calls. As a coach, you can always have their back to handle objections they can’t at that stage.
4. Tasks to be completed after the call
Then, for both favorable and negative results, look at the duties that your agents must complete after a sales call.
Is there anything you can get rid of that is unneeded or menial, such as taking notes after a call or manually entering data?
You can get a call transcript as well as a post-call report with action items and critical tidbits. This allows you to easily identify something the prospect mentioned in case the rest of the team needs to know about it.
5. Collaboration between teams
Examine who your sales team is talking to (and who they aren’t talking to) within your company. Collaborating with other teams is a terrific approach to make life easier for each other. For instance, if your conversion rate or sales funnel suddenly changes, did you notify the marketing team to see if anything was changed?
6. Divide Your Chat Channels Into Categories
Let’s move on to how you communicate with your coworkers. Instant messaging, such as Slack, is the easiest way to get your entire team together and increase your sales productivity.
You’ll want to make it as simple as possible for everyone on your team to discuss ideas, roadblocks, and project progress. We used to send emails back and forth in the “old days,” and we’d often have to wait an entire day for a response to a seemingly basic question.
Those days have long passed.
You no longer have to wait hours for an answer to your question. Teams can rapidly resolve difficulties and get back to work, increasing sales productivity with Slack.
However, if you want to get the most out of your messaging software, divide your sales team into smaller groups and channels as needed. This seemingly insignificant procedure guarantees that teams are not sidetracked by anything unrelated to their project.
People may focus on projects, share insights, and fulfil goals that are relevant to their roles by segmenting these channels.
7. Take Use Of Video Calls
There’s no denying that instant messaging may help your company interact more efficiently. Employees who only communicate through a messaging app, on the other hand, may feel isolated from their coworkers and the company as a whole.
When utilized appropriately, video conferencing is a wonderful way to bridge this distance and bring everyone closer together, and it has been shown to enhance sales productivity. You may utilise video conversations to cooperate, celebrate together, and make your firm a better place to work in a variety of ways.
Depending on the size of your team, you may want to hold many meetings per month to ensure that everyone is on the same page. For example, similar to a standup meeting, do weekly team meetings where everyone gets together, goes over their KPIs from the previous week and describes their sales targets for the next week.
It discovers that doing so helps prioritize tasks as a team, making it easier to achieve long-term objectives. These meetings benefit staff because they know exactly where they stand, which means less self-doubt and confusion, both of which are recognised productivity killers.
Also, urge team leaders to hold biweekly one-on-one sessions with their subordinates. People, in our experience, feel more at ease discussing difficulties in this context. You can utilize this time to ask questions, follow up on projects, and brainstorm new ways to assist your colleagues in succeeding.
8. Automate As Much As Possible
The concept of automation will be discussed next. Sales management may acquire a better understanding of the sales cycle and assist sales people complete deals faster thanks to advancements in automation, sales, and AI.
This similar principle may be applied to your remote staff to save time, money, and effort. What’s the end result? People (including yourself) now have more time to complete daily duties.
According to Hubspot’s 2021 Sales Enablement report, 45 percent of underperforming sales teams integrated critical technologies such as a solid customer relationship management (CRM) platform but did not include automation aspects. As a result, these companies didn’t see the same level of growth and productivity as teams that used automated technology.
Fortunately, there are a number of methods to incorporate automation into your company’s daily operations.
If your sales team conducts video calls with prospects, emails with video messages saves them time and effort. Instead of recording a bespoke message each time, you can pre-record a message and just “drop” it into the prospect’s inbox if they aren’t able to make time for a meeting. .
Depending on your sales and communication tools, you may be able to integrate them, which is a simple approach to decrease manual labor. Examine the integrations for each tool to see what can be automated.
Instead of checking a dashboard every hour to see if there’s anything new, set up alerts that are delivered to Slack or an email inbox when anything happens, such as a high intent lead who fills out a form.
9. Make Sure Your Productivity Tools And Resources Are In Sync
Let’s speak about the necessity of synchronizing your company’s software and resources across all teams while we’re on the subject of CRMs and sales tools. One issue that many salesmen face is that their entire team uses a different technology to complete the same activity.
As a result, productivity may suffer, and team communication may become more difficult. Imagine trying to teach someone how to use Facebook for marketing when you’ve only ever used LinkedIn as a social media site.
Both systems have similar features, layouts, and functionality, but they have dramatically distinct features, layouts, and functionality. It’s easy to understand how this could cause confusion.
This principle also applies to your productivity tools. For example, if you want access to various sorts of analytics, such as speech and predictive, to help your sales force perform more efficiently, investing in a single platform, which will provide you with the information you require. Otherwise, you’d have to run through a slew of different tools just to ensure that your team’s productivity indicators are all in order.
In addition to making administrative duties easier to manage, aligning your software will encourage your staff to communicate with one another.
10. Promote Adaptability
Flexibility is one of the benefits of working remotely. Many of the strategies we discussed today were on keeping your team on the same page and communicating with them. But here’s the thing: some people are simply more productive at certain times of the day than others.
Your sales personnel should be able to work when they are most effective, rather than being forced to attend mandatory meetings and events. Some people like to work later in the day, while others prefer to work first thing in the morning. We are all unique individuals who prefer working when our minds are fully engaged. People may manage their days for efficiency while preserving sales if they check their KPIs and develop weekly standards.
Of course, some professions are more challenging than others, such as a sales representative who does a lot of outreach and sales calls. Team members tasked with improving lead generation efforts or establishing a unified sales plan, on the other hand, can concentrate on their jobs whenever they feel most productive.
Another advantage of having this kind of freedom is that it’s easier to hire people from all over the world, which is one of the reasons why remote teams are so effective. If you’re not open to the idea of people working in their own time zone, you can miss out on a lot of bright people.
11. Request Feedback On A Regular Basis
Your sales personnel are well-versed in what works and what doesn’t. Start asking for comments if you want to see your team’s productivity skyrocket. Start asking your employees for feedback so you can figure out how to make your organization a more fun place to work.
Many of the sales activities and procedures utilized today come from existing team members, believe it or not. The idea is to find common data points, which you may do by distributing internal feedback questionnaires.
For instance, if 100 employees provide input, and the bulk of them are concerned about one component of your business, you will concentrate your efforts there. This method, in my opinion, is a wonderful way to improve your business over time.
Each quarter, you can also conduct an email survey to your salespeople. Targeted questions about their role and the process they employ to execute day-to-day tasks are frequently included in the survey. You may use this method to analyze your procedures and uncover ways to improve new recruit sales training while making life easier for current employees.
12. Enlighten About Your Productivity Tips
Finally, you may provide your team a competitive advantage by teaching them sales productivity tricks you’ve picked up over the years. Depending on your experience and sector, you’ll employ this advice in a different way.
Let’s imagine one of your team members is having trouble locating and turning quality leads into clients. During your one-on-one discussion, you might discuss their job and thought processes. You’ll almost certainly come across possibilities to give them a new tip or trick that will aid their success.
Knowing how to be busy in general, not only in terms of sales, is an important element of being successful. We spend a lot of time with our employees, giving them different shortcuts and hacks that they may utilize to save time during the day.
Perhaps you’ve discovered that using time blocking to arrange daily duties has helped you be more productive. Make a point of telling all of your new employees about this advice, and perhaps design a time block template for your staff to follow.
13. Squad Goals
Finally, invest in innovative and fun-filled activities to create friendly competition and camaraderie among your remote teams. You can do this in a variety of ways, including asking weekly icebreaker questions in a newsletter or group and starting every virtual meeting with an icebreaker as well.
Also, team-wide adventures, such as an online storytelling workshop for remote teams, are a sure-fire approach to grow your sales team in all aspects. Your team will discover new tactics and tips for telling captivating stories that appeal to your target audience as a result of these methods.
Gamified sales leaderboards are one of the most effective methods for aligning and motivating your sales staff. They promote healthy competition and increase participation.
There are a variety of software apps and platforms on the market that provide a customized gamification dashboard that gives you a customized view of your sales funnel, allowing you to streamline your dashboard and track only the most important indicators for your business.
Use GoodMeetings
As you can see, there are numerous effective strategies for keeping your remote sales crew productive and satisfied. Furthermore, these tactics are necessary because an increasing number of companies are hiring freelancers for certain projects.
Hence, These suggestions provided here should assist you and your sales leaders in becoming the finest sales team possible.
It’s worth noting that when your company expands, you’ll need to adapt your plan. You can’t just make a few tweaks and expect your salespeople to keep working for years. Employee feedback, sales targets, and the growth of their industry all influence how successful organizations alter their approach.
This is where GoodMeetings comes in.
By leveraging the power of AI, GoodMeetings provides critical customer meeting insights, streamlines operations, and enhances deal closure. Its capabilities in collecting valuable insights and automating tasks ensure an optimized revenue cycle.
For teams aiming to focus on their core strength – selling effectively – GoodMeetings integrates seamlessly into workflows, saving time and increasing deal closures. Dive into the world of elevated sales productivity with GoodMeetings, where AI-driven efficiency meets sales expertise.
