Today, increasing your sales productivity is becoming one of the most relevant and fastest ways to increase your sales. Almost 80% of business leaders claim that the main driving force in achieving their business goals is improving the productivity of their salespeople.

In this regard, we will give you several simple but effective tips on how to increase the productivity of your sales team and achieve your goals much faster.

1. Embrace automation to save your time and money

Sales reps need to perform many repetitive tasks every day: for instance, an average salesperson spends 21% of his time writing emails. The more such tasks he fulfills, the less time he has left to sell.

You can change the situation by automating different sales processes using modern productivity tools. After all, high-performing salespeople use nearly 3x the amount of advanced sales technology than underperforming teams!

For example, no thriving modern company is complete without the use of a CRM system. CRM automation refers to a system’s ability to automate many repetitive, manual tasks to streamline workflow and improve your sales team productivity. An example is a gym booking software which is similar to a CRM but is designed and made for gyms and fitness businesses with features such as membership management, online billing and payment, staff scheduling, and business branding to name a few. Salesforce is the best CRM application for growing businesses because it provides a sheer number of features, third-party integrations, and add-ons. If you want to Generate Dynamic Document on your site use Document generation for Salesforce.

Advanced plug-ins can further expand the functionality of Salesforce and adapt it as much as possible to the specifics of your daily tasks. For example, Revenue Inbox, an advanced Salesforce Gmail plugin, (developed by Revenue Grid, the famous Guided Selling & Revenue Acceleration platform) helps you nurture leads and close sales faster  by:

• automatically capturing all sales activities and customer data (emails, meetings, tasks, etc.) directly from your Gmail Inbox, keeping your CRM data up to date 24/7;
• allowing you to manage your CRM data directly from your Inbox using the Email Sidebar;
• syncing your Salesforce and Google Calendars (once you update any event in one calendar, the changes will apply everywhere);
• allowing you to schedule meetings on the go, eliminating your scheduling routine.

Also, this leading Salesforce Gmail integration provides free onboarding, the highest level of security, enterprise support and training, and many more features for successful integration into your business processes.

2. Choose SMART sales goals to focus on

Goals are the first thing that drives sales teams to success. However, statistics show that only 43% of salespeople reached their sales targets in 2019, and these numbers have even decreased in 2020.

To ensure success, your goals must be correct: make them follow the “SMART” acronym. Namely, your business goals must be:

• Specific;
• Measurable;
• Attainable;
• Realistic;
• Time-bound.

Having set such goals, your sales team, provided that it has the necessary resources and experience, will easily achieve the set sales goals!

3. Build correct follow-up system

Follow-up is a critical step in any organization’s sales process. Pay attention to these numbers:

• 48% of sales reps never follow up with a prospect;
• 25% of them make the first contact and then stop;
• 12% of reps only make three contacts.

These statistics can be continued indefinitely, but we believe you have already understood why many companies do not achieve their goals.

Your salespeople shouldn’t have to guess which prospects to contact and when they should follow them up… Instead, your CRM should send notifications when it is the best time to reach a prospect.

It will help simplify the salespeople’s job and help them make the most of each potential customer.

4. Qualify your prospects correctly

Almost half of the salespeople consider sales prospecting to be the most difficult stage of the entire sales process. This is partly because sending massive amounts of emails is no longer effective today.

To improve closing rates, salespeople should have a targeted prospecting process:

1. Analyze what you have in common with your customers. To do this, talk to your customer support team members and try to find out if customers work in a similar industry if they have some common problems that your product can solve, etc.

Also, make a simple customer survey: find out what they like the most about your product. This will help you understand which product features your customers mostly benefit from, and focus on further improvements.

2. Create a prospect persona. Once you’ve gathered as much information about your perfect prospects as possible, try to create a personality for each customer category. Start with demographic data, define the industry in which they work, their positions, goals, interests, and difficulties they face every day.
3. Be personalized. Knowing clearly who you are working for, create effective sales strategies based on the characteristics of these people; for example, send them the specific type of customized messages that suit their needs best.

5. Monitor and improve sales performance with key metrics

If you do not measure the results of your actions, you will not be able to influence them.

Get into the habit of continually measuring your KPIs: this is the most reliable way to understand how effective the sales department and individual sales reps are.

• Here are some important KPIs to track:
• Lead-to-Sale Conversion Rate;
• Average Revenue per Unit;
• Customer Acquisition Cost;
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV);
• Opportunity-to-Win Ratio;
• Average Sales Cycle Length.

Of course, these are not all sales KPIs that you should monitor. However, you should remember to focus on those that are directly relevant to your sales process.