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How to Improve Sales Productivity

4 mins read

Sales teams all over the world would be ecstatic if every single lead was created equally. It would be even better if they were all a good fit so they could close them one after another. Sadly, sales teams have become somewhat unproductive because they’re too busy chasing lower-quality leads when they should be focusing on high-quality ones.

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Obviously, that’s not their fault. Luckily, there are some useful steps you and your sales team can take right away so that they’re becoming more productive and closing out even more amazing leads.

Here’s how to improve sales productivity.

  1. Say No to Bad Opportunities

  2. Lead Scoring

  3. Use a CRM and Automation Technology

  4. Align Your Sales and Marketing Team

1. Say No to Bad Opportunities

This one is simple and can be done without having to buy or implement anything specific. Your sales team should be saying no to bad opportunities, rather than pursuing bad leads for the sake of trying to close them.

So, help the sales team recognise when it’s time to leave a cold lead on the table and shift their focus to warm leads they could have greater success with.

It’s normal for sales teams to get excited when new sales prospects come their way. While that’s a great source of motivation, lead generation is challenging because no matter how talented or convincing your sales team is, not every lead is going to convert. 

For example, your sales team might come across an amazing lead, but trying to close them could take a while. This means that closing the lead is inefficient as it takes more time and money to close them.

Instead, that effort can be used on warmer leads which increases productivity in the long-run as multiple warm leads is a lot more efficient than trying to close one big one over time. 

2. Lead Scoring

One of the best and most efficient ways of improving sales productivity is by lead scoring. Lead scoring helps your sales team focus on high-quality leads and saves a lot of valuable time which is often lost in chasing low-quality leads and can lead to more unproductivity.

When lead scoring is done right, your sales team will be able to tell which leads need more marketing materials, if they should have already made a purchase or even if they’re ready to talk to your sales team at all. This all depends on the lead score they’ve been assigned based on the criteria you’ve set.

Lead scoring will help your sales team become more productive because they’ll lose fewer opportunities. Having too many leads to analyse makes it difficult to see which ones are the most qualified. But lead scoring helps your team rank marketing qualified leads (MQLs) or sales qualified leads (SQLs) so only the most valuable leads stand out.

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Time isn’t wasted either. Your sales team can prioritise leads to save time as they’ll instantly know where leads are in your sales funnel and your team can get to work right away. This means while your marketing can leverage marketing automation to nurture warmer leads, your sales can begin working on those red-hot leads instead.

It also makes your sales team a lot happier as there’s better sales productivity. When your sales team has a smaller pool of qualified leads, they can speed up the sales process by not wasting time on poor leads as they can see the scores assigned to them.

3. Use CRM and Automation Technology

To effectively use lead scoring and for your sales team to become more productive, they’ll benefit from using a customer relationship management (CRM) and automation technology, such as HubSpot’s sales automation platform.

Sales automation software takes the manual, time-consuming tasks from your sales team and everyone else involved and automates them. This massively improves efficiency, accuracy and accelerates your team’s sales process.

Some of the features available through HubSpot which help to improve sales productivity include:

  • Prospecting: Your sales team can receive prequalified lists of prospects on a recurring basis without seeing the same names over and over again.

  • Lead Enrichment: This feature helps your sales team gather information from thousands of data sources to provide them with up-to-date and detailed profiles of any prospects.

  • Contact and Deal Creation: Workflows can be set up with marketing software to automatically create and edit record for leads that meet certain criteria.

  • Email Templates: Your sales team don’t need to create emails from scratch each time. Personalising certain sections from a list of templates can increase response rates while certain fields are filled in automatically to boost productivity.

  • Sales Email Automation: HubSpot Sales lets your sales team send multiple emails to prospects in a row.

  • Meeting Scheduling: HubSpot Meetings automatically creates a record for new contacts in your CRM when a prospect books a meeting. This avoids the back and forth which can kill momentum.

  • Deal Management Automation: HubSpot Sales records when prospects open emails your sales team have sent, click links or downloads as an attachment. Automating deal-related activity also records calls, meetings and emails.

  • Reporting: HubSpot’s CRM can be used by you and your sales team to create automated email reports to keep everyone informed and motivated.

An automation platform like HubSpot’s CRM allows your sales team to actually know your leads and track their interactions in real-time. This enables your sales team to interact much better with leads and manage the leads pipeline more efficiently as well as being able to close more deals as the software does the majority of the legwork.

Along with all of these, lead scoring - which we mentioned in the previous point - are all ways in which your sales team can become more productive. If you’re interested in finding out about how you can effectively lead score in HubSpot, how it benefits your sales team and some more tips and tricks, then head over to this blog for a more detailed explanation.

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4. Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams

Although it’s not something that can probably happen overnight, one of the most effective ways of improving sales team productivity is by aligning both your sales and marketing teams.

There’s always been somewhat of a blame game between both sides, with marketing teams claiming that sales team approached leads at the wrong time when they’re not qualified enough whereas sales teams can put the blame on marketing content. That’s why it’s important to bring them together with it all coming under the bigger umbrella of sales enablement.

Part of the reason is that both teams have different goals. However, productivity can be increased if they’re brought together with shared goals so that both teams are working towards similar targets. This allows them to rely on each other and makes them more trustworthy which isn’t always the case right now.

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By aligning your sales and marketing teams, they can both work hand-in-hand to create killer campaigns which can help the sales side improve their productivity because they can pursue much better leads while reducing the number of people they need to speak to. Plus, it makes the conversations they do have a lot more productive.

That’s why the sales enablement process is important to productivity and success. As they can receive the necessary assistance where they’re provided with information, content and tools so that they can sell more effectively.

Want to Find Out More About Sales Enablement? Check Out Our Free Guide

It’s clear just how much sales and marketing alignment can boost sales productivity. When it comes to sales enablement, everything above needs to be taken into consideration - and more. In general, they’re all tools and techniques to help your sales team close leads and successfully engage buyers.

To make the sales enablement process easier to understand, we’ve created an in-depth sales enablement eBook for you to download. It covers a wide range of topics from how you can align your sales and marketing teams right through to how marketing teams can help sales and how sales enablement actually works.

To download your free copy, hit the button below.