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Want a more productive salesforce? You came to the right place. We're about to break down 10 ways to drive sales productivity.
Like washboard abs, a perfect golf swing and the total respect of your in-laws, the quest for sales productivity is one in which the end goal will likely never be obtained.
The journey still matters. Incremental improvements in sales productivity leave everyone thankful. And as we've profiled here on the Ambition Blog, you can never get enough good sales productivity advice.
10 Proven Sales Productivity Hacks
For this post, we've selected 10 of our favorite sales productivity enhancements that are proven, cost-effective and relatively easy to implement.
We recommend trying all of these at least once in your sales team, especially if you follow an inside sales process. As for selection process: We've tried dozens of sales productivity hacks in our own sales force. We whittled down the 10 that worked best for us, and profiled each one below.
1) Run a Team Sales Contest
Want your next sales contest to enhance productivity better than any you've run before? Run a team sales contest.
Team sales contests work better than your regular ol' sales leaderboard. Your goal is to achieve sales productivity enhancements across as much of your sales force as possible, right?
These types of sales contests add another layer of motivation that reaches not just top performers, but middle and lower-tier performers as well.
Last but not least, a team sales contest shakes things up. The average sales rep's brain will respond much better to this type of contest than participating in your company's 35th consecutive monthly sales contest focused around individuals striving to end up on a leaderboard.
Enhancements to sales productivity:
- Shake things up.
- Get the whole team involved.
- Create opportunities for peer coaching and collaboration.
See also: Best Practices for Salesforce Gamification
2) Track an Advanced Sales Metric
Nothing hurts productivity more than the feeling that you're a hamster on a wheel. Which is why you should throw advanced metrics into the mix of sales metrics your team is tracking.
Advanced metrics (example: lead conversion rate) track performance, instead of productivity. Your hard-working reps will appreciate that their core competencies are being valued as much as their hustle.
And perhaps most importantly, advanced metrics add continuity to your sales reps' conception of their sales process. They illuminate the foundational "Why?" behind the "How?" and clarify the path to success.
Enhancements to sales productivity:
- Emphasizes performance, not just productivity.
- Increase understanding of the sales process
- Add a "Why?" to the "How?" of your sales process.
See also: The 6 Step Guide to Finding Your Moneyball Sales Metrics
3) Experiment with Social Selling
As we discussed in our guest editorial for the Salesforce Blog, the best way for sales managers to combat the inevitable distractions their team faces is to co-opt them.
Bonus points if they shout out your Marketing Director.
All joking aside, though, social media is a prime example that adds additional value by breaking up the repetition of one's daily cold call/email grind. In other words, it leads to a less monotonous sales process.
Sales-Marketing alignment receives benefits as well, as social selling forces reps to take a step back and think like a marketer. Efficient sales teams will use this tactic to foster more and better conversations between sales and marketing.
Enhancements to sales productivity:
- Break up the monotony of calls and emails.
- Proactively combat potential distractions.
- Increase sales-marketing alignment
See also: 16 Tips for Social Selling.
4) Trial a Sales Automation Tool
For those unfamiliar, sales automation tools are platforms you can add-on to Salesforce, phone systems, etc.
They perform a few key functions, such as automating CRM data entry, mapping out your call and email list for the day and providing insightful analytics on where you are excelling and struggling in your process.
Sales productivity enhancements:
- Automate CRM data entry and tedious productivity-killers.
- Puts the process in front of the rep.
- Less uncertainty. More action.
See also: How Sales Enablement Impacts the War for Talent
5) Create a Sales 'QBR' Leaderboard
QBR stands for Quarterback Rating and signifies the NFL's preferred method of measuring overall QB performance.
Incorporating a number of metrics into its algorithm, QBR provides a holistic, single score conceptualization of performance. Your sales reps should have their own version of this.
Sales QBR Leaderboards are perfect complements to standard, revenue-based leaderboards. They offer recognition not just to high performers, but those who brought the highest levels of process adherence, sales competency and sales productivity for the duration of the contest.
Sales Productivity Enhancements:
- Rewards total performance.
- Puts focus on process.
- Complements classic, revenue-based sales leaderboards.
See also: 4 Steps to Smarter Sales Metrics
6) Challenge Another Office
If you manage a larger sales force, with multiple offices, and you really want to get the juices flowing - challenge a rival office to a week-long sales competition. Up the stakes by creating your own version of the Golden Egg Trophy and let the winner keep it until the next matchup.
The sales productivity benefits here are more short-lived than from others. But for prideful, closely-matched sales offices, the competitions themselves will be epic enough to justify the cost of a trophy.
Sales Productivity Enhancements:
- Increases sales force transparency.
- Creates unique, compelling stakes (office pride and reputation).
- Incentivizes pervasive coaching and collaboration.
See also: The Sales Director Who Turned Work Into a Fantasy Sports Competition
7) Invest in an Email Signature
For $40 per person, you can automatically increase the credibility and effectiveness of your cold emails. Further, you can reinforce professionalism in your sales team's overall email correspondence.
Having an image automatically generate at the end at the end of your emails lets recipients adds humanity to your outreach, provides multiple ways for them to connect with me and my company and projects an all-around more professional sensibility.
Best of all, it gets you in the right mindset and makes you feel more ownership of my correspondence's content. It's worth the investment and better for sales teams than it is for any other department.
Sales Productivity Enhancements:
- Personalizes cold emails.
- Increases inclination to correspond savvily and professionally.
- Give prospects links to key sites and media.
See also: The Importance of Persistence in Cold Emails
8) Adopt an Email Tracking tool
Ever since Cirrus Insight integrated Salesforce and Gmail, sales teams have been able to track and update the results of their email correspondence in simpler, more insightful fashion. Cirrus and similar tools like Yesware let senders see who keeps opening their email, when and how often.
Again, a few of our reps began paying out of pocket for Yesware ($10 per month) and haven't regretted it. Our whole sales force uses Cirrus Insight and gives it rave reviews. All in all, a highly justifiable expense that will boost your sales productivity.
Impacts on Sales Productivity:
- Cheap, effective way to gauge prospect interest.
- A/B test subject lines, attachments/links and messaging.
- Typically fun to use and integrate with Salesforce.
See also: 20 Tech Companies Who Are Saving the Millennials
9) Replace Sales Gongs with Song Clips
Our industry colleagues at Hoopla did it first and we've followed suit. For Ambition users, the sound they hear upon closing a huge deal is no longer a gong, but a 10-second song clip of their choice, taken from Youtube.
Unsurprisingly, sales reps in their mid-20s tend to get much more fired up by hearing "Started from the Bottom" by Drake as opposed to a gong that was en vogue way back in 8th century China.
Sales Productivity Impacts:
- Much more powerful recognition.
- Able to customize/personalize.
- Appeals to Millennials.
See also: How Peek Increased Monthly Sales Activities by 142%.
10) Put 80s Action Movies on Office TV
Just saying -- it works for us.
Learn More About Ambition
Software solutions like Ambition can dramatically improve employee performance on key goals. Contact us to learn how Ambition's sales management platform can drive your most critical sales objectives, and make employee goal setting, tracking, productivity and accountability incredibly easy to manage and optimize.
Drive Daily Sales Metrics with Ambition
Ambition is a sales management platform that syncs every sales organization department, data source, and performance metric on one easy system.
Companies use Ambition to enhance sales performance visibility and codify daily sales goals. Ambition's drag-and-drop interface lets non-technical sales leaders create custom scorecards, contests, reports, and dynamic TVs.
Ambition is endorsed by Harvard Business Review, AA-ISP (the Global Inside Sales Organization), and USA Today as a proven solution for increasing sales team recognition opportunities. Hear from our clients below.
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- FiveStars: Adam Wall. Sr. Manager of Sales Operations .
- Filemaker: Brad Freitag. Vice-President of Worldwide Sales.
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- Cell Marque: Lauren Hopson. Director of Sales & Marketing.
- Access America Transport: Ted Alling. Chief Executive Officer.
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- Clayton Homes: HBR finds triple-digit growth in 3 sales efficiency metrics.
- Coyote Logistics: Monthly revenue per broker grew $525 in 6 months.
- Peek: Monthly sales activity volume grew 142% in 6 months.
- Vorsight: Monthly sales conversations grew 300% in 6 months.
Contact us to learn how Ambition can impact your sales organization today.
