Your sales team is the backbone of your company. They’re the first line of defense when selling your product or service and generating leads. If your sales team isn’t productive, you won’t grow the sales funnel, sales productivity metrics will be down, sales goals won’t be achieved, and the sales pipeline and annual revenue growth will be affected.
In a world where every second counts and employee retention is at an all-time low, you must identify ways to increase sales productivity and help your team successfully convert opportunities into sales.
The key to improving sales productivity is identifying where you can streamline processes and reduce time spent on low-priority tasks to have more time for essential activities like lead generation and sales funnel development.
Take writing cold emails or sales messages for sales prospecting as an example. Sales managers want to ensure that your sales reps engage buyers, contact customers, clients, or prospects, and communicate daily with managers.
And I can guarantee they waste time searching for old messages to reuse in their new communications. They might have to search old emails. Or in a folder for a Word doc, Google Doc, One Note, Evernote, Notepad, or Notebook. Or through notes on their phones. All the time spent by sales executives doing admin work, they could be using more efficiently with the right tools.
To speed up their writing and decrease the number of repetitive tasks, you can provide FlyMSG, our digital writing assistant and text expander, to your sales reps. It automates writing messages and emails and lets you allocate more time to critical assignments like sales engagement.
To see how it works, create your free account today.
Sales productivity isn’t something you can magically increase in one day for the entire team, but you can improve sales productivity in one day by using a productivity app like FlyMSG, the auto text expander. Like any sales process, productivity is a process that requires dedication and attention to detail over time.
To help you speed up the process, in today’s article, we will share 16 tips to help you boost productivity and explain how FlyMSG helps you as an individual, your inside-outside sales reps, or your sales enablement team along the way.
Let’s first explain what sales productivity is.
Find out what #sales #productivity really means and how to increase it with these 16 #tips from @GoVengreso CEO @M_3Jr 💡 #salesproductivity Click To TweetWhat is Sales Productivity?
Regardless of your sales enablement or sales processes, the ultimate goal of any sales team is to generate revenue by selling products or services to customers. Many different sales metrics can tell you something important about how your reps work and how they could work better.
Sales productivity is the measurement of your team’s performance. It helps you see how efficiently and effectively your sales team works. Sales productivity determines how much revenue or transactions your team generates in a given period, such as an hour, day, week, or month.
Sales productivity gives insights into how much time your sales team spends selling and how much time they spend on other activities.
If you need help finding the right metrics and sales productivity tools for your sales team, read on for some valuable productivity hacks.
How Do You Calculate Sales Productivity?
Sales productivity measures the revenue generated for every hour a sales rep spends on sales activities. In other words, how much money an employee makes for their time spent selling. It measures an individual contribution to the team and organization.
While conducting your analysis, you can also evaluate sales efficiency, sales effectiveness, and sales performance metrics and use CRM tools to gather all data in one place.
Each organization has a unique formula that works best for its business model. However, some universal metrics (aka sales KPIs) for sales effectiveness work well in most circumstances. Let’s share a list:
- The number of prospecting calls.
- The number of sales emails sent.
- The number of demos given.
- The number of sales tools utilized.
- The number of follow-ups per lead.
- Lead conversion rate.
- Cost per lead.
- Average deal size.
- Win rate.
- Average sales cycle length.
- First call close rate.
- New customer acquisition rate.
- Customer retention rate.
- Customer lifetime value.
- Gross margin.
By tracking sales productivity metrics, you can identify areas where your sales teams may need more training or support to become more effective. Your team will love that you are focused on helping them, ultimately building a strong sales culture.
Now let’s discuss why sales productivity is crucial for sales teams.
Why is Sales Productivity So Important for Sales Teams?
In today’s market, prospects are flooded with marketing messages, sales emails, and calls, making it harder for sales professionals to break through and stand out.
Sales are the most challenging and competitive department in any organization. For sales managers, managing your sales team becomes even more critical if you have limited sales technology or resources.
It means you need to look at every aspect of your sales department and check where there is scope for improvement.
To improve the productivity of your sales team, you need to understand the current situation and take steps accordingly. Additionally, it’s essential to collect effective pulse surveys to gather feedback and insights directly from your sales team and improve their performance.
Sales productivity measures how efficiently and effectively sales reps sell, market products, and meet sales targets. It involves using data to decide how best to utilize your sales team’s time.
Let’s look into how low sales productivity negatively impacts your overall results.
How Low Sales Productivity Affects Sales Reps’ Results
Let’s face it: Sales reps have a lot on their plates. In an environment where technology is rapidly evolving and customers expect personalized experiences, your reps must balance multiple tasks simultaneously.
In many cases, the responsibilities of today’s modern sales rep are much more complex than those of just a few years ago.
Sales reps spend just a part of their time on actual selling. Their time is spent in meetings, emailing, and other administrative tasks. These administrative tasks take up a massive chunk of the average sales rep’s day, making them highly unproductive.
Moreover, the non-selling activities aren’t just a neutral part of the job—they can negatively impact sales reps’ performance.
It is why sales leaders must arm their individual sales reps with the essential tools they need to optimize productivity.
What’s the Result?
Low sales productivity leads to low revenue and lost opportunities for the sales organization. Additionally, low sales productivity also harms rep turnover rates. Reps with low productivity are less likely to stay with the company if they feel they aren’t getting anywhere fast.
To back up these claims, let’s evaluate some stats about sales productivity.
5 Valuable Stats About Sales Productivity
If you’re interested in the current state of the sales industry and want to learn what sales reps struggle with the most, continue reading these five valuable stats.
- Sales reps spend only 39% of their time selling. (Spotio)
- Salespeople spend just one-third of their day talking to prospects. They spend 21% of their day writing emails, 17% entering data, 17% prospecting and researching leads, 12% going to internal meetings, and 12% scheduling calls. (Brainshark)
- Salespeople estimated they could drive 38% more revenue per quarter if they spent no time on non-revenue generating activities. And they’d be highly incentivized to do so as they believe extra work would boost their paychecks by 66%. (Dooly)
- Top-performing reps only pitch 7% of the time. (Fit Small Business)
- 20% of sales teams don’t have the resources to reinforce their workflows. (Email Analytics)
A decrease in sales productivity can have a domino effect on other areas of the business, resulting in selling fewer products, which would impact inventory levels and customer satisfaction.
To help you overcome these challenges, we prepared helpful tips you can always return to when you need ideas for increasing sales productivity.
16 Tips From the Pros to Help You Boost Sales Productivity
These strategies are simple enough for even the busiest sales leader to implement immediately. Read on to discover how to amp up your team’s performance and put them on the fast track to success.
1. Evaluate Your Sales Process
It’s essential to evaluate your sales process continuously. Are you making mistakes? How effective is the sales process in achieving desired outcomes? How efficient is the sales process regarding time, resources, and cost?
Set up automated processes to track key metrics like sales cycle times and revenue growth. These will help you identify areas for improvement to make the most of your efforts.
2. Create an Action Plan, Prioritize Tasks, and Set Deadlines
A crucial aspect of sales productivity is creating a plan that outlines how you will reach your goals.
Picking a time frame for your sales goals, from short-term objectives like increasing your daily sales to long-term goals such as boosting annual sales or revenue, is an excellent way to keep your team on track.
Set deadlines for each process step, and ensure your team stays on schedule.
3. Set and Track Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Sales Targets
There are several ways to set and track sales targets daily, weekly, or monthly. One way is to establish a target number you want to reach and then track your progress toward that goal.
If you need help figuring out where to start, set a minimum target, such as $1000 in daily sales.
It is also essential to be flexible with your targets. If you consistently miss your targets, it might be time to reassess and readjust them. On the other hand, if you are consistently hitting or exceeding your targets, consider raising them.
4. Measure What Matters Instead of Measuring Everything
In today’s data-driven world, it’s tempting to measure everything. But more data isn’t always better. When making decisions, it’s essential to focus on the right metrics.
Once you have a goal in mind, you can identify the key metrics that will help you measure progress toward that goal.
Remember to revisit your metrics periodically. They will change as your company grows and transforms. By regularly evaluating and adjusting your metrics, you can ensure you’re always on the right track.
5. Automate or Outsource Your Most Tedious Tasks
Tasks that are time-consuming but don’t require much skill can be automated using sales productivity tools such as FlyMSG.
Automating repetitive and manual tasks can free up your team’s time to focus on selling and generating revenue.
Similarly, outsourcing can be a great way to improve your bottom line. It can help you save money and time while improving your company’s overall performance.
If you’re considering outsourcing, be sure to do your research and choose a reputable provider.
6. Stay Organized With a CRM System
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system allows you to record and track customer interactions in one centralized location, such as orders and payments. Similar to payroll software, it can automate a lot of processes with payments, automating the labor that’s too manual and repetitive.
By collecting and organizing data and making it accessible across all departments, CRM systems can be valuable for any business looking to improve customer engagement and retention rates.
They also allow you to keep tabs on your sales pipeline, marketing efforts, and other critical business metrics.
7. Optimize Your Onboarding Process
When you hire a new sales professional, they’ll need to learn everything about your product and find ways to sell it. Creating an effective onboarding process will help them succeed in their first few months on the job.
It can take a lot of time and effort to get it right, but an optimized onboarding process will help you increase sales reps’ productivity in a shorter time frame.
8. Identify Skill Gaps and Invest in Sales Training
Sales professionals need many different skills to thrive in their careers. Knowing what skills are most critical for the sales team is essential. In addition, it can be helpful to identify gaps and focus on training in those areas.
If you are a sales manager, you can check out our OnDemand training program: FlyMSG Sales Pro for Individuals, a sales training that helps sales reps prospect better and sell more.
It’s an excellent choice for sales professionals who want to learn how to book more meetings, grow their sales pipeline and close more deals.
Or, if you have a 10+ sales team, then FlyMSG Sales Pro for Teams is the right fit for you.
9. Create a Resource Library in the Cloud
The most crucial reason is that it allows salespeople to access the latest and most up-to-date information or files from anywhere in the world. It is vital for sales teams working across different geographical locations.
It also improves your team’s productivity. Having all of the sales resources in one central place makes it easy for salespeople to find the information they need when they need it. It can save much time and increase efficiency.
Another benefit of a sales resource library in the cloud is that you can share it with other sales team members easily and quickly. It is essential for collaboration and knowledge sharing.
Maximizing #sales #productivity is key to #success in any #business. 👏 This blog post from @M_3Jr has 16 tips you need to get started 💪 #sales Click To Tweet
10. Create Sales Email and Proposal Templates
Sales email and proposal templates are a must for any sales rep.
- They save you time because you don’t have to spend precious minutes crafting each one from scratch.
- They make it easy to create and spread a consistent message across all your sales materials.
If you are searching for a solution that provides email templates, you can create a free account and evaluate FlyMSG. Our rich library includes more than 203 ready-to-use templates created by sales industry professionals.
11. Block Out Your Calendar in Advance
Blocking out the calendar allows your team to better plan their time and focus on the most critical tasks.
It gives them more time to prepare for sales calls and meetings and to research potential customers and prospects.
They can easily track their progress and ensure they meet the company’s goals. It helps them avoid last-minute scrambling and the associated stress, leading to poor decision-making and decreased productivity.
12. Hold Weekly Meetings to Stay on Track
Holding weekly meetings is a crucial way to stay on track. The more regular your sessions, the more likely you are to stick to your goals.
Keep the meetings short so that the sales reps attending can get their point across in a timely fashion. If your meetings are too long, they may lose effectiveness.
13. Don’t Respond to Every Call and Email Right Away
If you’re overwhelmed by the rising volume of emails and calls, try responding to fewer. It will allow you to process the ones that matter the most and give you time to regain your composure before tackling the rest.
If you become flustered and distracted by a particularly difficult or emotional call or email, take a break until you’re ready to return to it.
Even five minutes of solitude can go a long way toward improving your focus, concentration, and productivity.
Finally, don’t respond to every call and email right away. Doing so will only cause more stress and leave you behind even further. Instead, set aside 10-15 minutes each morning to catch up on your messages, including those from people trying to reach you outside regular business hours.
Similarly, if you need to do outbound calls, consider using an auto dialer to help you deal with them efficiently.
14. Don’t Multitask – Focus on One Thing at a Time
People consider multitasking a sign of efficiency, but it’s detrimental to productivity.
People who try to do multiple tasks at once are more likely to make mistakes, have a more challenging time staying focused, and get distracted easily.
Rather than multitasking, it’s better to focus on one task at a time and devote all your attention and energy to it. It will help you stay productive and avoid wasting time.
15. Take Short Breaks to Stay Focused
Short breaks are essential to keep you on track with your tasks. They allow you to get back into the workflow and maintain focus.
The best thing to do is take a short break for every hour worked. A short break may be as simple as getting up from your desk and going for a walk around the office or a full-blown lunch break.
It will give you enough time to get out of your routine and recharge your batteries.
16. Leverage Technology to Save Your Time and Effort
Technology can help you save time and effort in several ways. You can automate tasks that would otherwise take a long time to do manually, find information more quickly and communicate more effectively with others.
One perfect example is our FlyMSG which helps you overcome writing challenges your sales team handles daily.
Since salespeople send an average of 36.2 emails daily and eight out of 10 prospects want to talk to sales reps via email over any other medium, you will soon understand how our speed writing tool comes in handy.
Let’s explain FlyMSG in detail.
How to Use FlyMSG to Boost Your Productivity
FlyMSG is an award-winning speed writing tool that helps you manage, save, find, copy, paste, and reuse pre-written content.
Whether a part of the sales and marketing team, it allows you to spend less time typing, leaving more time for critical tasks and improving your productivity and efficiency.
Use FlyMSG as a Text Expander & Writing Assistant and Automate the Written Word
According to Selling Signals, 2% of salespeople use email as their only form of communication, whereas the other 98% use a mix of email, phone, LinkedIn, and other social networks. Did you know that FlyMSG covers most of these communication channels?
To be an effective sales manager, you must provide your team with sales prospecting tools and resources to increase productivity and efficiency. FlyMSG helps you create engaging and compelling emails and messages faster and use them anywhere online.
Powered by automation, it expands your text with just a few shortcuts, or FlyCuts. Let’s discuss how:
Eliminate the Time Drain With Just a Few Keystrokes
FlyMSG includes shortcuts or FlyCuts. You can save frequently used words, phrases, or text strings under specific shortcut in the cloud and eliminate writing content from scratch.
The shortcut, or FlyCut, will automatically expand into the complete phrase when you type it in your email, Slack, Google Docs, or social media, allowing you to do more and type less.
You will never have to think about what to write to your clients, partners, or employees! Let FlyMSG do it for you.
Use Sales Templates Created by Industry Experts
Many of the 200+ templates or FlyPlates we provide are related to sales. Our premium content templates are available for any purpose, so you can adjust them to your needs and personalize them for each client.
FlyPlates can be extremely useful when trying to maintain consistent branding across all of your email communications. You can easily modify the look and feel of your emails without starting from scratch each time.
Additionally, FlyPlates help ensure that your emails are well-organized and free of typographical or grammatical errors thanks to a built-in grammar checker.
Let’s share some of the FlyPlates to help you understand our text expander.
Connection Requests:
“Hey PROSPECTSFIRSTNAME! I noticed that we have mutual connections & you recently engaged with one of my industry peers THEIRNAME. After reviewing your profile, I’d be honored to have you as a connection so I can learn from & network with you! What do you think? YOURFIRSTNAME.”
Prospecting Messages:
“Hey PROSPECTSFIRSTNAME! LinkedIn highlighted your profile. It’s likely because we share some LinkedIn connections. Given a recent post you shared, you might find this of value too: BLOG/VIDEOLINK. YOURFIRSTNAME.”
Trigger Events:
“Friday birthdays are the best. All weekend to celebrate. HAPPY BIRTHDAY!”
Upsell:
“Hi CUSTOMERFIRSTNAME,
Thanks for your recent purchase of PRODUCTNAME — all of us truly appreciate your business.
I’m reaching out today because I want to make sure you’re getting the most out of that purchase. PRODUCTNAME is fantastic by itself, but it shines even more alongside some of our other products.
For example, XXX.
Does this sound like something you’d be interested in? If so, check out PRODUCTLINK or send me a quick reply.
Best,
YOURNAME. ”
Welcome Messages:
“Hey PROSPECTSFIRSTNAME! Thanks for connecting with me on LinkedIn. I’ve attached an article other BUYER’SFUNCTION leaders found valuable for dealing with PERSONA’SGENERALBUSINESSCHALLENGES. Are you facing these challenges too? I’ll follow up with you in the coming days to see what you thought. YOURFIRSTNAME.”
General Admin:
“Hey INSERTFIRSTNAME:
I’m writing to request a favor. Would you be willing to write a brief recommendation of my work that I can include on my LinkedIn profile? If you are willing, please use the following three words in your write up:
Keyword 1 (i.e., Social Selling Training)
Keyword 2 (i.e., LinkedIn Profile Makeover)
Keyword 3 (i.e., Professional Speaker)
If you have any questions, or if there is anything I can do to help you help me, please let me know. YOURFIRSTNAME.
P.S. If it’s easier, I’m happy to write a first draft for you to customize. Please just let me know what works best for you.”
Cold Outreach:
“Hey PROSPECTSFIRSTNAME! LinkedIn highlighted your profile. It’s likely because we share some LinkedIn connections. Given a recent post you shared, you might find this of value too: BLOG/VIDEOLINK. YOURFIRSTNAME.”
It is just a short preview of our rich template library. To see all FlyPlates, create your free account today.
Craft Impactful Sales Messages With a Rich-text Editor
You don’t need advanced technical knowledge to use FlyMSG. Our Word-like text editor allows you to write and format your messages any way you like.
You can include links, images, videos, GIFs, and emojis to make them more attractive.
You can also format your messages correctly, add bullet or numbered lists, change text or background color, and proofread your content.
And here comes the best part – you need to do this only once because each message will be autosaved and ready to use when you add a FlyCut to your email.
Use FlyMSG With Your Favorite Tools
FlyMSG perfectly integrates with your existing tech stack. You can use it in Teamwork, Salesforce, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, HubSpot, and more.
Type in the shortcode you want, and you will automatically paste all content within that FlyCut or FlyPlate into your message. It’s so easy that you will find it hard not to use it.
Save More Than 20 Hours Per Month
FlyMSG can save you and your team one hour, or more, each day. If you need additional time during the week and want to improve your sales results, it’s one of the right sales productivity tools for you.
Imagine what can you do if you had 20+ hours more per month!
Communicate More Effectively
By storing your best content in the cloud and reducing manual, repetitive writing, you will communicate more effectively internally and externally while maintaining brand consistency and tonal uniformity in your emails and messages.
Dedicate Time to Customers and Drive Better Results
FlyMSG helps you drive better results by freeing the time you can dedicate to customers.
You can focus on providing a better customer experience and driving more sales by automating writing tasks that would otherwise eat up your day.
Additionally, automating writing tasks helps you improve efficiency and accuracy, leading to better results, more closed deals, and increased revenue.
How to Sign Up for FlyMSG?
FlyMSG is easy to install, and you only need a few minutes.
Create your account and download Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browser add-ons to start using FlyMSG immediately.
All plans include unlimited FlyCuts. If you’re interested in using FlyPlates, there are two FlyMSG premium plans:
- Starter costs $2.25/mo and includes up to 50 FlyPlates.
- Growth costs $5.50/mo and includes unlimited FlyPlates.
See pricing for more details.
Want to #boost your #sales team's #productivity? 🤔 Check out this helpful blog post from @@M_3Jr for #SalesProductivity #strategies and #tips! Click To TweetSales Productivity: Summing Up
Sales productivity is a measure of how efficiently your sales team works. It’s also known as sales efficiency, indicating how effectively a company uses its resources to generate revenue.
Sales productivity measures the time employees spend on closing deals and the effectiveness of those efforts. It has become increasingly important as organizations face increased competition and tight margins.
In this article, we shared 16 valuable tips to help you ensure that your sales team increase sales effectiveness, increase sales productivity, and work as efficiently as possible while improving sales performance.
We also explained how FlyMSG works and enables you to automate the written word by removing the time sink it takes to find, copy, paste or write messages with just a few short keystrokes.
What to Do Next?
If you want to streamline productivity, communicate more effectively, increase engagement and sales performance, and drive better outcomes, sign up for FlyMSG today. See why thousands of individuals and teams across 2,000+ companies choose FlyMSG as their favorite sales productivity tool.
