Optimising your sales process is an ongoing challenge, but it is vital to increasing revenue. To help you along on the right path, we’ve put together five top tips for achieving success…
Putting together a successful sales team starts with recruiting the right people. While this is the foundation for a winning sales team, equally important is a systematic on-boarding process to ensure a return on your investment, as well as a promising sales pipeline. Nonetheless, it’s believed only 55% of companies have a formal sales training process.
It is important to focus on training and coaching for a sales team, so they can learn how to sell effectively. Training should include in-depth product knowledge, the competitive landscape, buyer personas and company processes; this will ensure they have the right skills and tools to do their job effectively.
Your customers’ behaviour and your products change over time, so sales training must be ongoing, with clear performance goals. According to research, companies that follow a defined on-boarding process can yield up to 50% higher net sales per representative.
CRM dashboards provide an overview of business performance and act as a homepage upon opening the application. Dashboards can be personalised according to your needs and assist you in anything from pursuing the best leads for that day to providing instant pipeline visibility, along with the stage of each deal – all at a glance.
Dashboards are distinguished between organisation-owned dashboards and user-owned dashboards. Organisation-owned dashboards are public and available to everyone across the business, which can be helpful in keeping team members on the same page. For members of the sales team, it can also drive a healthy competitive spirit and keep them accountable for their sales activities.
71% of sales reps say they spend too much time on data entry and, according to research, salespeople only spent one-third of their time selling last year. 31% of the remaining time was spent searching for or creating content, and 20% on other reporting and administrative tasks. This obviously has a direct impact on sales productivity and your business’ targets, yet only 35% of companies are actively working on this issue.
To speed up business processes and to eliminate time consuming data entry, along with the regular search for the relevant content, many organisations invest in automated Optical Character Recognition software (OCR). It is widely used as a form of data entry from paper sources, including sales receipts or customer forms.
With intelligent capture algorithms, the solution is able convert any text and handwriting on scanned documents into text files. By converting scanned text into a word processing file, the software also lets you search through documents using keywords or phrases, which can significantly speed up processes, saving you time and money.
If you are using disparate systems to manage different processes or departments, it can be incredibly difficult and time consuming to gather real-time data about your sales pipeline, top deals and other important metrics. Consequently this can lead to reduced productivity and impact on the effectiveness of sales and strategic decisions.
According to Nucleus Research, integrating your systems, workflows and processes will not only allow for collaboration, but significantly improve productivity by up to 12.5%. Furthermore, seamless integration between systems will equip you with a complete picture of business performance, allowing you to make better sales decisions and to spend more time working with customers.
You can customise your CRM software to reflect your organisation’s processes and consequently improve your sales team’s productivity. This can be achieved by developing workflows that match your internal processes and guide sales representatives through any items or checklists that need to be completed at each stage in the sales process.
These can be in a form of notifications and alerts that notify the sales team about the status of each lead. For example, an alert to say a particular contact has not ordered for a while, a reminder to make a follow-up call or a notification to indicate potential new up-sell opportunities.
Those five tips provide a good starting point to optimise your sales team and elevate results to the next level.
This article was written by CRM Insights Ltd, a UK Workbooks Partner.
