Making Salespeople More Productive — Part One

Salespeople have one of the toughest and most challenging jobs in any company. With daunting targets and demanding bosses on one side and customer expectations, whims, and tantrums on the other side, salespeople have to find a way of balancing the two and delivering results that augment the bottom line. Salespeople’s lives are hardly mundane; rather, their day is spent juggling a wide variety of tasks ranging from prospecting to preparing presentations. They stand testament to the adage ‘time is money,’ and wasting time could result in a significant loss in revenue. Organizations should consciously and continuously take steps to identify the causes that make their salespeople waste time and take measures to eliminate these to make them more productive.

In these posts, we’ll see what causes salespeople to waste their time and what can be done to make them more productive.

No system: As a routine, salespeople perform several tasks. They have to make and give presentations, send mails to leads and opportunities across the sales funnel, and sometimes even prospect themselves. With so many tasks and sub-tasks, it is easy to get lost in this multitude and not discharge their most important duty – selling. If your salespeople don’t have a plan or a system to deal with these tasks and others that come their way and are scrambling from one task to another, a lot of time tends to get wasted. Instead of dropping or stopping one task to do another, they need to divide their time equitably so that everything can be given its proper attention.

Paperwork and reporting: Salespeople are burdened with a lot of paperwork too. Not only do they have to record the details of every contact but they also have to prepare extensive reports of any business expenses that they make. If the company does not provide them with time-saving tools like customer relationship management software and expense management software, these tasks take all the more time to complete.

Time management: A salesperson might have to call on multiple prospects in a single day or prepare a detailed ROI document for an opportunity within a short deadline. If he/she isn’t able to schedule the appointments or determine the optimal routing that would allow him/her to keep all the appointments, the victim will be time again. Or, if he/she settles down to prepare presentations instead of calling prospects in peak business hours, the outcome will be the same. Salespeople should excel at time management.

We’ll continue this in the next post.

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