Do you need to speed up your sales? Has your team got stuck? When you start to consider hiring more salespeople, think twice! Boosting efficiency doesn’t have to mean expanding your staff. Before you invest time and money to find the right people, or waste them to hire someone who doesn’t fit at all, make sure your current team is utilizing its potential to the fullest.
Flow and productivity of your salespeople can be hampered by mundane reasons such as improper distribution or an overload of tasks. Luckily, there’s many ways to cope with that. The keyword is: sales cycle optimization.
How do you go about it? Here are 5 efficient methods:
1. SIMPLIFY THE SALES CYCLE AND GET RID OF FRICTION
Analyze the entire sales cycle and pinpoint problematic stages – both on your and customer’s end. These can be nuances such as imprecise definition of buying triggers. Eliminate them to minimize your sales funnel leaks.
Every market abides by its own rules. If you operate globally, consider dividing a sales team into specialized units. For example you can divide your team by countries or verticals. It’s easier to work with a clearly defined customer, than to sell to everyone at the same time.
2. HELP YOURSELF OUT WHENEVER POSSIBLE
Make good friends with your CRM system. Even if you’ve been using it for a long time and daily, there’s likely room for improvement. Every CRM system has add-ons available, including widgets that can boost your sales team productivity. Among the Pipedrive plugins worthy of recommendation are Aircall (voip plugin doing the phone number entering for you), Panda doc (pipedrive-integrated doc file processing), or Ecquire. You could definitely use software like calend.ly, youcanbook.me or appoint.ly which makes arranging meetings easier, as well as makes sure you won’t forget about them thanks to reminders.
Besides your salespeople, make all customer facing teams a part of the system as well. Most likely they’re all using their own tools already. See if it’s possible to integrate them with your CRM. Teach the entire team how to use a CRM system effectively and on the regular. For instance, you want to make sure they’re not entering all details in, but only those that actually matter and will be useful in the future.
3. IMPROVE ON YOUR LEAD MANAGEMENT PROCESS
In order to turn a prospect into a client, you have to focus on the goal and quickly identify the most quality leads. Would you prefer 10 smaller deals you can close faster, or just a couple of bigger ones, that require more time and attention? Maybe an extra unit will be needed to relieve the salespeople in terms of finding and qualifying leads. A well-managed team of Sales Development Representatives is a site that sifts through unpromising leads so that sales reps can focus on the quality ones.
A Sales Development Representatives team knows how the perfect leads look like, and salespeople know how to close them. If these two units will work closely with each other, you’ll learn soon enough which of the marketing channels bring in the most revenue. Then, intensify your efforts in the area.
4. IDENTIFY REPEATABLE ACTIONS AND AUTOMATE THEM
There are fixed elements in every offer, regardless of who you aim it at. Draw up an essential offer and work out the details and variables in the email contents. Don’t type each and every message from scratch, use templates, pdf offers, etc. A great facilitator is a library of content that comes in handy in the day to day work, for instance, in terms of developing cold emails. An independent team acts faster, as it doesn’t waste time to look for help.
You’ll be surprised how powerful small things can be. Imagine saving 2 minutes on processing a single lead, while working with a database of 10,000 leads annually. It’s an extra week on a yearly scale! You probably already have a ton of ideas on what to do with this time… and if not, see if you’ve already learned all the methods for increasing sales.
5. KEEP ASKING AND GET TO KNOW YOUR CLIENT
How do you figure out if a client is worthy of your time? Ask him stuff! If haven’t already, you may want to implement the classic BANT method to learn more. Obtain answers to 4 questions concerning the budget, authority, needs, and timing. In other words, find out if the client is actually looking for a solution like yours, if he can afford it, if he needs it right away, and whether he can make the decision with no authorization from up top. You may also want to check if the client resembles some of your other customers. If so, keep on working on the relation. If not, oh well, it’s time to move on to the next one.
And what if the prospect is dodging straight answers? If you feel like you’re being messed around with, ask about it directly. Who knows, maybe this will actually force some openness and help eliminate obstacles on the way to making a purchase. He, who asks, doesn’t get lost… and oftentimes successfully closes deals.
Final words
As you can see, it’s not always about expanding, but rather supporting and motivating your sales team. It’s not multiplication, but optimization of the sales process, that leads to success. The devil’s in the detail – by eliminating a seemingly minor issue, you may release the potential of your sales department and significantly improve its efficiency.
