Making Salespeople More Productive – Part Two

In the last post, we saw the different issues that caused salespeople to waste their time and kept them from doing what they were actually hired for – selling. In this post, we’ll look at some remedies for these issues to make our salespeople more productive.

Lead generation — This is something that unfortunately happens often. The Marketing team at Company XYZ fails to generate quality leads and the sales reps had to undertake lead generation tasks themselves. This is a surefire way to waste sales reps’ time. Not that their participation in the program and the benefit of their insights is bad. But this works only as long as it is kept at that level. If they have to take the entire lead generation responsibility upon themselves, they will be kept from their work. It is essential that organizations take steps to improve lead volume and lead quality to keep their sales reps busy.

Bundling tasks together — As mentioned in the previous post, a salesperson has to handle several different tasks in the course of a day. If the salesperson constantly keeps interrupting one task to do another, he’ll never get anything done. Sales reps have to develop a system of bundling these tasks together to improve their efficiency. For instance, it’s easier to record details of ten phone calls in the CRM once compared to doing it ten times, once after every call.

Automation – Relationships with prospects and opportunities matter. Follow-ups matter. Sales cycles can be long and prospects have to be slowly walked through the stages of the cycle. If the organization does not use productivity software like customer relationship software to automate several steps in the process, their salespeople will be forever stuck on managing old accounts without following up on new ones. They might even miss something. Same is the case with expense reporting which can be automated with travel and expense management software.