How do you plan to grow your sales teams productivity? Being an entrepreneur or a sales team manager, I am sure that growing your sales and raising the productivity is something that must be the most troublesome factor for you. It is generally observed that sales team spend most of their productive time doing unproductive tasks.
So being a manager ask yourself a question, how do you want sales team to work and spend their time in doing productive things? Before you answer this question, just analyse what are the current tasks in your sales process and what actually keeps your sales team busy?
When you analyse you will seek and answer that your sales team is busy with tasks like:-
1] Updating spreadsheets/CRM.
2] Manually doing follow-ups.
3] Reporting.
Your overall sales process revolves around these 3 major activities. These 3 major activities can be easily automated using a sales automation software and your team can spend time selling. Now, we will help you break these activities in further steps and show you how exactly this will become simplified for you.
1] Updating spreadsheets/CRM:-
Updating spreadsheets/CRM means that your team means that your team gathers leads from different sources and then they are entered manually. Further there are possibilities that there is no way to assign these leads and prioritize them. With an automated CRM this task can be completely skipped and you can directly integrate your website or social media channels with the CRM and capture leads automatically. This removes the manual intervention completely leaving your team some scope to focus on other activities.
2] Following up with clients/prospects:-
Your relationship building with a prospect and brand building with existing clients (by showing how strong your after sales support is) starts with how well you keep in touch with them or follow-up. To close one deal it is observed that sales team need to do at least 5-6 follow-ups and only then a deal is closed. If the volume of open deals is high, it is highly impossible for sales members to follow-up with each deal and there is a very high possibility for you to lose a deal due to lack of follow-up.
This follow-up process can be automated with a sales automation features in CRM. Using features like scheduling bulk emails, making custom email templates, tracking the email communication you can easily follow-up with each of your prospect and build relations.
If you wish to make a call follow-up with prospects, you can automate your process to setting up a task or a follow-up and make make calls to your customers.
3] Reporting:-
This is the maximum time in a week/month/quarter etc that your sales team is spending time. Making and sending reports to managers is the highest time consuming task and it is a cycle. For sales team to send managers reports, they first need to update the CRM, find data which matters in reports and then make a report. This cycle is never ending.
Sales managers can easily make these reports themselves using a smart CRM where managers do not need to spend high time in finding data required for analysis.
Key Takeaways:-
Invest in tools that will remove the unnecessary steps in your sales process and lets your team focus on core selling.
Author: Abhishek Agrawal is the Founder & CEO at CompanyHub CRM. A technology lover and a writer who loves to give simple solutions on making sales teams lives easier. You can get in touch with him on Linkedin.
