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How to Increase Sales Productivity During Off-Peak Seasons

sales productivity

By Shayla Price

Every sector has peaks and valleys. It’s just a given. So, how can sales leaders keep sales productivity high throughout the year?

How your business handles the off-peak seasons will determine if you miss or exceed your annual sales goals. And that all starts with increasing sales productivity. Here are a few strategies to maximize your team’s success.

Automate Sales with Branded Templates

According to the 2016 Ultimate Marketing Automation Stats by Emailmonday, 55 percent of B2B companies already use automation. The other 45 percent are missing an opportunity to be more effective.

Take advantage of using professionally-branded company templates. They help automate document management. Therefore, your sales team can focus on closing deals, not complying with marketing standards.

“Automating as much of the template deployment process as possible is the ideal solution,” writes Henrik Printzlau, CTO at Templafy.

Give your sales team the ability to access documents on demand in an organized system. A document management solution will help maximize performance.

Boost Productivity with Account Management

Account management tools assist your team by providing accurate forecasting. This saves your business time and resources. These tools will uncover revenue-generating patterns for your company – and bring valuable insight to develop a more effective sales process.

Moreover, with automated apps, important customer details can be delivered directly to your sales reps’ mobile devices. Deal tracking and account history ensure all team members receive the most up-to-date information.

Let your sales team focus on building the customer relationship. Technology will handle the rest.

Keep Sales Teams Accountable

Tracking sales performance from week to week is vital for management. Managers need to know how to adjust their strategies during slow and busy sales periods.

Online platforms offer businesses the ability to connect with sales rep performance in real time. It’s easier for sales leaders to track daily, weekly, and monthly goals.

Most sales activity management systems include performance data collection, historical trend tracking, personalized analytics, and peer comparisons. In addition, you can create customized campaigns to raise morale with team competitions.

You want a 360-degree view of your enterprise. Invest in an interactive dashboard for easy communication and on-the-go sales management.

Be Social Online and Off

Based on the 2016 State of B2B Marketing report by Regalix, 74 percent of companies plan to increase their events budgets this year. Social events are essential for connecting with prospective customers and generating leads. Off-peak seasons are ideal for planning conferences, trade shows, and online Webinars.

Also, consider hosting internal events. Facilitate sales training to transform good sales reps into great sales leaders.

Bring it All Together

Integrating your entire sales process helps with efficiency. Seek all-in-one solutions that allow you to combine pipeline and project management. These tools enhance productivity by aligning functions within one interface. Then, your team doesn’t have to jump back and forth between multiple software programs.

Managers desire a more collaborative work environment. So, shift from scattered resources to a streamlined software.

Stay Productive

Give your sales team an advantage during off-peak seasons. Focus on upgrading your sales productivity activities. Generate sales all year round.

ShaylaPriceShayla Price creates and promotes content. She lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology, and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter: @shaylaprice.

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VPs of Sales: Challenge Your Managers to Think Differently About Sales Productivity

status-quo.jpgNo one ever said that you had to be an Einstein to run sales, but his thoughts do apply: “Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.” Yet many sales leaders seem to accept living with the insanity of sales ineffectiveness, or sales enablement programs that lack focus.

These sales leaders don’t know how to challenge their HQ team to change the status quo. If you run sales, take this as an opportunity to challenge your team to think differently. Here are five questions to ask.

1) “Tell me your plans for onboarding and sales training/enablement?”

What’s the first thing that your marketing and product managers will mention? If they respond with something about new product capabilities, it’s backwards. We guarantee the results will be out of alignment, and will not be well received by the field sales team.

Bottom line: if you don’t have a single sales-led definition of the strategy and the outcome, go and get one.

2) “Whose journey are we on?”

Progressive sales teams don’t just think about sales process; they start by thinking about their buyer’s journey. At a minimum, it’s a progressive engagement model. Properly adapted, it’s a sales culture change that matches 2012 reality and means better selling results, less waste, and a far better way to organize your training and content.

Bottom line: if you don’t have a well defined buyer’s journey, and then properly map your sales process to it, then get your top field sales practitioners in the room with your sales ops and marketing leadership and develop one.

3) “Do John and Jane know when to ‘go/no go’?”

Do your average sales reps understand what they need to discover and discern, and how this relates to the key “go/no go” decisions they need to make at each stage in the buyer’s journey? Sometimes the best decision might even be to disengage and nurture for the future. Top performing reps intuitively get this and mediocre ones don’t. Therefore, mediocre reps struggle, believing every deal is worth winning. Again, it’s simple. Knowing what you need to know and what you don’t at each stage for “go/no-go” can dramatically improve your sales effectiveness.

Bottom line: get your best reps into a room and ask them to map their “go/no go” decisions against your buyer’s journey. Then bake this into your sales process and ask your sales managers to instill this discipline into their forecast calls.

4) “What sales capabilities are we missing?”

Play “find the missing sales capabilities” with your best people. When critical sales capabilities are not well developed, they prevent your team from engaging, closing bigger deals, or compressing the sales cycle. A hint: less is more.

Bottom line: identify the top three sales capabilities that are the common denominators within your best performers. Then ask your sales managers – does our sales enablement address these? It doesn’t? Perhaps it’s time to send you to pasture.

5) “How well do we coach?”

You probably have multiple levels of sales management. Ask yourself: “What impact do these coaches have on our overall selling effectiveness, and where are my coaches?” Hard experience as professional coaches has taught us that any program where we can’t find committed manager-coaches is flawed.

Bottom line: get your top coaches into a room and ask them how they’re improving performance and how can you help. Document the responses, coach the lesser coaches, and bake it into the performance review process. John Wooden would approve.

Steve Crepeau
Steve Crepeau and Jeremy Barnish are panelists on the “Challenge Your Company to Think Differently about Sales Enablement” breakout session at the Sales & Marketing 2.0 Conference this October in San Francisco. For a copy of his book, Effective Enterprise Sales Enablement, email him at screpeau@truesalesresults.com.