In a world of ever-increasing revenue targets, underperforming sales reps can be disastrous for your company’s bottom line. Company leadership has a responsibility to strategically intervene to improve sales performance and get back on track for established targets.
We examine sales cycle inefficiencies and ways to improve sales rep performance.
Teams achieve sales productivity by maximizing sales results and minimizing resource expenditure.
While managers expect their sales teams to spend at least half of their time selling, the truth is the average sales rep spends only 39% of their time selling, prospecting, or interfacing with existing customers. For an outside sales team, you can count on this figure to dwindle to a dismal 22%.
Optimizing sales productivity is a guaranteed way to drive growth and crush sales targets. Unfortunately, with increasing amounts of time disappearing into administrative and other manual tasks with more distractions than ever, it’s never been more difficult to effectively tweak sales performance.
Individuals vary, and so do the root causes of sales inefficiency. However, most sales slumps link back to:
Well-defined and actionable sales strategies are integral to producing consistent results and improving accountability through systemic measuring of sales productivity.
Without a strong understanding of selling fundamentals, new hires can struggle to gain traction, and veterans may resort to informal strategies that cost your company business.
Consider quota and compensation systems two sides of the same coin. The quota enforces a minimum level of performance, while compensation incentives motivate sales reps to increase effort and productivity. If either of these regulatory systems is vague or overly demanding, sales performance may lag.
A costly mainstay of sales positions, high turnover wreaks havoc on team cohesion, creativity, and collaboration. Turnover can lead to significant impacts on employee satisfaction and a decline in performance.
Hiring is a more challenging process than many people, even hiring managers, realize. Implicit biases and informal strategies lead to underqualified and underperforming candidates making the cut based on factors irrelevant to performance.
All of these issues can lead to the development of a negative sales culture when sales staff ‘check out’ due to poor leadership, poor incentives, or negative team influences. If left unchecked, fixing a negative sales culture can become a time-intensive and uphill battle.
These harmful situations can lead to plummeting sales numbers by creating stressed, dissatisfied, and unmotivated sales reps. Recognizing the early stages of these common issues is vital to ensuring the success of your sales team.
Successful sales teams commit to a variety of strategies and techniques to maintain their edge. These often include:
Savvy sales teams take advantage of rapidly advancing tech like machine learning, forecasting software, and CRM tools to keep a leg up on the competition.
Top-notch customer service is a hallmark of a strong sales strategy. Repeat customers spend 67% more than new customers, and 78% of customers stay loyal to brands that keep them happy.
Strong sales reps always have one thing in common: an incentive to succeed. Organizations fuel sales productivity by recognizing sales incentives as the primary motivator of sales behavior that results in good sales performance.
If you’re unsure how to improve sales reps’ productivity and performance or where to start, consider incorporating these five proven methods for success:
Tracking sales metrics keeps leadership ‘in the loop.’ The best metric trackers identify and measure multiple success metrics, such as:
These metrics are tools for evaluating existing or new sales strategies by providing real-time feedback as your sales team implements changes. Access to this data provides opportunities for coaching, allowing managers to identify areas of improvement for sales reps and provide individualized training.
Making beneficial hiring decisions is an enduring challenge for businesses. Companies are increasingly turning to cutting-edge predictive analytics like Performance Fingerprints to quantifiably improve their talent acquisition and enjoy higher ROI in human capital.
Without a systemic sales hiring process in place, expect an annual average turnover rate of nearly 20%. On average, employers spend between 1.5-2x the employee’s salary to find a replacement, and that figure can rise significantly if you lose senior and specialized members of your salesforce. So reducing turnover can have an outsized impact on your company's bottom line.
Data-driven solutions are increasingly available for all aspects of business. However, collecting hordes of data without an effective analysis and implementation plan is a recipe for wasted resources.
To effectively utilize data, make sure to deliberately collect relevant data for increasing sales, such as sales team metrics, engagement across marketing channels, and results following hires and new training or sales strategies.
To assess current and pre-hire salespeople, predictive analytics by PerceptionPredict intake organization- and role-specific data to pinpoint psychometric traits that correlate with success.
Markets, industries, and customer needs are ever-evolving, and staying up-to-date is critical for success. While many traditional sales strategies and techniques are still relevant, keep sales trainers remain informed and current in their sales approach and best practices for sales in your industry.
Regular sales training is also crucial for transitioning a stellar sales rep to an effective sales manager or team lead. Confidence and sales acumen often ‘trickle-down’ from leadership, so an investment in your trainers represents an investment in your whole team.
Administrative and manual tasks are costly time sinks for sales reps. With up to 55% of the average sales reps’ time going towards these tasks, any degree of automation will result in extensive returns in sales performance.
Start by utilizing autoresponders for emails, text messages, and other channels of communication. Using software to automate data entry and analysis, sales logs, route planning, and order processing will free up valuable time for your reps to do what they do best- selling!
Developed using industry-leading predictive analysis and data-mining, our proprietary Performance Fingerprints measure the ‘sales DNA’ of current sales representatives and candidates for hire.
Performance Fingerprints create a profile of each sales rep with a series of advanced algorithms to predict future sales numbers, length of tenure, personal motivations, and more.
Our Performance Fingerprints have helped drive success for global leaders like Mercedes-Benz and Crowdstrike.
Crowdstrike, a leading cybersecurity and technology firm, used PerceptionPredict’s Performance Fingerprints to build an international network of effective sales teams. This led to a competitive market advantage that helped Crowdstrike successfully IPO in June of 2019, raising over $600,000,000 and boosting company valuation to $6.6-6.8 billion.
Book a demo to learn what PerceptionPredict can do for your company’s salesforce.