A statistical report from Docurated States of Sales Productivity mentioned how sales team hurt their productivity and what can be done to avoid them. We have based our article on this report as many organizations realize the mistakes, only a few of them take any actions to prevent these errors from happening.
Marketing and sales team agrees that high-quality content attracts qualified leads and helps in driving the sales. While the majority of the companies’ stress on improving the content database for their marketing and sales cycle, only 35% companies work towards countering this issue, eventually leading to wastage of precious time of your whole sales cycle.
Between searching for the apt content, spending the time on administrative and CRM based tasks, your sales reps are wasting so much time that they are only spending one-third of their work hours making any sales. Moreover, time is of quantifiable value for your organization; we do not need to emphasize on that.
What we need to emphasize on is how your sales reps are wasting their valuable time while making sales:
Pursuing Wrong Leads
Make 100 bad calls and get zero meetings or make five right calls with 20% response rate – Jill Konrath
In the race against time of achieving their daily, weekly and monthly targets, sales reps make numerous calls (let’s say 300) per day. Your sales reps lose precious time when they fail to convert any leads into customers; you need to make amendments to your strategies.
Sales reps must first bifurcate their leads into business and contacts that are relevant to your business’s product and services. Make sure your sales reps have a strategic approach towards the lead pool after doing a thorough and satisfactory research.
Manual Data Management
Around 20 percent of reps have a complaint that 40% of their productive hour is lost while making data entry to the CRM manually. CRM systems should make the task of data entry seamless for your team, so, while choosing a CRM system for your team, ensure that it can automate the process of data capturing easy, especially data of logging the calls made by your sales rep. We are not saying that manual data entry can be avoided, but it can be simplified to suit the sales flow of your team like having drop-down features in places so that your sales reps can save time and enter accurate data into the system.
Following Avoidable Process Steps
We are not asking that your employees should not adhere to the process steps because we understand their worth, but sometimes sales teams waste too much valuable time while following the long or misplaced process steps, ultimately stretching the entire sales cycle, and eventually losing the deals because of that.
We would recommend that as an organization who wants their sales team to deliver results, review and revise your sales process at regular interval. Nothing is stable, not your business, not the market and not even your sales process. Be dynamic in understanding and adjusting to the change that takes place in your organization to get the desired output for achieving your sales goals.
Have a private conversation with your reps to find out where they are facing difficulties; we would also suggest that you make effective use of the stage duration analysis report, as it allows you to observe the average time deals spent in various stages in your sales pipeline before they were won or lost.
Weak Sales Scripts and Templates
Let’s take an example to prove this point, the lead that you are pursuing is a prospective buyer for your competitors too. Moreover, being the fish in the pond means he gets various emails in his inbox. Let’s say he gets 40% promotional emails a day and clicks only on 2% of those emails because he liked the subject of those emails. Rest of the emails were a failure for the day, as far as the companies who shot them are concerned. Another fact to add here is that around 2% of cold calls make it to the appointment stage.
How to turn the odds in your favor and get your leads?
Make sure to measure the communication that your team has with the leads.
Check the templates that are being used in the promotional emails.
Observe which template or script was a success with the leads depending on the response rates, which you can derive from the outcome reports.
Now that you know which template is driving your sales work on those low conversion rate templates.
Stop Wasting The Time
The short span of sales cycle means that sales representatives have less time to work on the conversion rate to achieve their sales targets. Every moment counts, and if your sales reps are wasting time due to a flaw in your sales process, then you need to rely on several factors to eradicate the issue.
Make sure that your team gets the best and smart CRM system so that they can successfully achieve their quota and manage and convert their time making those perfect sales pitches. We hope that our article has helped you in understanding that apart from the human error, many factors play a critical role in your sales reps’ time management.
If you want to understand how Salesmate can be helpful with the above-discussed points and much more than feel free to get in touch with us.
Saptarshi Das
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