You are the one holding your sales team back. I am not saying this. In a recent survey, InsideSales reported that salespeople spend more than 60% of their time on tasks that don’t involve selling.
That’s a shocking stat. If your best salesperson is spending his valuable time on administrative tasks, then how do you expect him/her to bring more sales. How can you achieve your revenue goals?
Good sales talent is difficult to find and it’s unfair to ask them to do non-revenue generating tasks like lead gen, admin tasks, prospecting, billing, etc.
In this blog post, I am gonna show you how to make your sales team work more productive and close more sales using my 3 Step Sales Productivity Booster method.
Without further ado, let’s get started.
Step 1: Finding what your sales team is actually doing
Another shocking stat from Hubspot. Salespeople spend 66% of their time on admin tasks. Is your sales team doing the same?
Closing is a skill only a few people have. Somehow you recruit them, but what’s the point in asking them to do billing, lead gen, etc.
Closers are hunters but they are not gatherers, let them hunt, allow them to hunt. If you ask them to do both hunting and gathering, they may end up messing both.
Action Tip: Ask your sales team to list down the tasks they do every day. Also, ask them to mention the time taken to complete each task. By doing this, you will get a clear picture of what they are doing.
Step 2: Increasing the capacity to sell
When you keep doing something persistently, you will get better at it. Your sales team feels comfortable to do a gathering job. That’s not good news for you. Your closer should be in the field talking with prospects and persuading them.
When your salesperson is distracted, he/she might lose focus on closing. Your sales team needs more time to research prospective clients. Let’s say you give him a whole day and ask him to take only 2-3 sales calls.
He will start researching the client’s business and prepare the perfect pitch. The chances of closing one client a day look pretty much possible. In B2B, that’s an amazing achievement.
Action Tip: Speak with your best salesperson and ask him to do only closing for one whole day. Make sure he doesn’t spend any time on lead gen, admin tasks, etc. Try this and you will see the difference.
Step 3: Leave it to the experts
List down all the tasks your sales team has like lead gen, prospecting, cold calls, lead qualifying, billing, etc. Now ask your team what they are comfortable doing. This will shock you.
Now hire a specialized person for each role. You will see your sales skyrocketing. That’s because your closers are spending their entire time on closing.
When you’re hiring, be clear about what you want them to do. Don’t be generic with the job description, be as specific as possible. This will in turn help the candidate to take the right decision.
Action Tip: Have a weekly meeting with your sales team and get to know what they are doing. Analyzing this will help you find gaps. You can fill the gaps by hiring suitable candidates. This is how you can increase sales productivity.
Bottom Line
Increasing sales productivity is not an overnight thing. Make sure that your team is focusing on what they’re good at. Once you know what they’re best at, you can assign the tasks accordingly.
Also, build a team in which others can take care of admin tasks, lead gen, and prospecting. Everything will fall in place once you do this. You can see your sales increasing and your sales team need not come up with an excuse for weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings.
B2B Growth Summit
In order to help you and your sales team, we are hosting an exclusive event where top business owners come together and reveal their growth secrets.
Date : 1 Sept 2020 - 3 Sept 2020
Time : 10:30 am IST
As a B2B business owner, this summit will help you understand what exactly you need to do to grow your business. How to tackle competition, how to scale your business, how to get sales, increasing sales productivity, and much more.
This will be a value-packed summit and you don’t wanna miss this. Also, your sales team can attend this summit and know what’s happening in the business world. Register Now.
