A recent State of Sales Report by leading sales CRM – Salesforce highlighted how in most sales models, sales reps only spend about one-third of their time on actual revenue-generating tasks.
This study itself is cause for alarm because a sales rep’s core job primarily revolves around generating revenue and meeting sales quotas and growth targets. The amount of time spent in non-revenue generating activities like entering manual data into the CRM can eat into the potential ROI that a sales rep can give a company in terms of monetary earnings.
At a time when global economies and brands are largely stressing on the importance of optimizing every part of their business operations and sales-marketing cycles to ensure growth despite slowdowns and recessionary times, this is where sales managers and sales leaders need to dive deeper into their brand’s sales process and lifecycle as well as salestech to ensure the most effective steps are thought of and put in place to: 1) drive revenue 2) ensure consistent growth 3) reduce the time spent on non-revenue generating tasks.
Here are a few starting points that can help:
Using the Right SalesTech/Sales Automation to Prioritize Open Deals
There are just about those many working hours in a typical working day and to expect a sales rep to keep extending their time will lead to burnout – something that sales managers need to prevent to maintain consistent growth and output. Without the right intelligence platforms though, sales reps can end up wasting a lot of time following up and chasing leads that are either not ready to buy into your product/service or aren’t ever going to be in-market due to a variety of reasons.
A proper lead scoring methodology that is used by internal sales and marketing teams that is automatically reflected into a unified platform can enable these teams to access real-time information that allows them to focus more efforts on high priority leads: ones that have interest in your product or are showing signs of leaning towards your brand already.
When sales reps are given the right data and tools to prioritize their efforts and when sales leaders/ sales managers work on optimizing who they should follow up on along with them through constant discussions, it will help tighten the overall product lifecycle while enabling quicker ROI and growth in the near-term.
Enabling Sales Ops to Work Closely with Sales Reps
There’s always been churn in sales, with about 35% sales reps moving out of their current employment within the year. Teams that have unified systems in place that allow all their sales rep data and communication to be stored centrally can easily handover accounts to new sales hires.
But when a team has a process that makes sales reps manually enter lead data and prospect information into systems themselves, it could lead to mistakes as well as lack of input or information not being recorded on time or in real-time.
Sales managers and sales leaders need to pay more attention to how their sales reps work while also accounting for future rep churn. Ensuring that a sales ops member can shadow key reps can also help ensure that information that needs to be updated manually is down regularly, it also ensures that when there is a case of churn, the shadow employee is aware of what the rep was currently working on.
Preventing the need for manual entries by using integrated salestech and CRM platforms through which sales reps can call/email and have their communication automatically logged into central systems will actually save a lot of this time and also ensure that reps have the current state of deals and relevant information handy for sales managers to go through when it comes to discussing ways to optimize next steps and efforts.
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Automating a Large Part of the Last Stages of the Deal Cycle
Sales reps should spend more time prospecting and selling. Activities and tasks that eat into this effort can hinder potential growth of any team/company.
Sales reps who spend large amounts of time creating proposals or quotes for interested prospects might actually benefit more from proposal management software or similar platforms. Automating the end stages of a typical B2B sales cycle (even having a tool help generate the right quote template/quote amount) can allow sales reps to have the right information to send over to the prospect and close the deal faster while also moving forward with other prospecting efforts.
Generating quotes and custom pricing is actually an integral part of the sales cycle. But this part of the sales activity can take up a lot of time in certain cases. For reps who deal in a large number of prospects and sales communications on a daily basis, automation at this stage can help them improve their output and save time on other crucial revenue generating tasks. Ensuring a steady deal pipeline is after all crucial to anyone in sales and so it becomes critical to try to reduce the time spent on each prospect cycle while optimizing the overall process with the right automation, so that new outreach and efforts can continue at a steady pace.
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