They say that improving sales efficiency is a surefire way to boost your revenue. Let’s take a quick trip down your sales team to see how true this is.
The goal of any business is to greatly skyrocket its revenue to the top. And this boils down to your sales efficiency. No wonder 75% of businesses prioritize closing deals above any other sales activity.
But, how efficient is your sales team? How many projects do they complete within the delivery time – and on a budget? How much time do they spend on each project? Are the leads converting?
Answering these questions will definitely give you an insight into the performance of your sales team.
While the growth of any business can be traced to several factors, your sales and marketing team wield the highest pull or push.
Why do you need to focus on sales efficiency?
It is because they make use of the three key ingredients – time, resources, and money. Believe it or yes, the manner at which these three ingredients are managed in a firm determines the growth of that business. Handing over these success ingredients to an inefficient sales team is paramount to failure.
Before we gobble down these cool hacks to bolster your sales efficiency, let’s take a quick look at what the term actually means.
What is Sales Efficiency?
As the name suggests, this is basically the efficiency of your sales team. Sales efficiency refers to the process of streamlining your sales operations to get the highest possible return on your investment.
With a great number of projects left incomplete, it is no wonder most businesses are yet struggling to leave the ground level. By increasing the efficiency of your team, you will successfully increase the number of sales and, of course, revenues flowing into your business.
Here is a simple formula to calculate your sales efficiency.
Sales Efficiency = (Revenue/sales & marketing investment) x 100.
In simple terms, the efficiency of your sales team can be calculated by dividing the revenue generated within the specified period by the amount spent by your sales and marketing team during the time. And multiplying the resultant value by 100.
Say you invested a million dollars in the past quarter and generated $2million in revenue, the efficiency of your sales team in the past quarter would be
(2,000,000/1,000,000) x 100
That is 200% efficiency. Not a bad way to go!
Typically, a score of less than 100% means your sales team is doing something wrong. You should aim at scores within the range of 100 – 300%
5 Cool Tips to Bolster Sales Efficiency
There is still no hard and fast rule that can improve your business’ efficiency. It may vary for different businesses. But, here are some tips you can use to achieve some amount of success.
1. Optimize Your Team for Success
To succeed in any team, everyone has to be on board. This is why we advise sales managers to take the time to train team members before entrusting them with any project. Sure, they will learn on the job, however, you will greatly expedite the process – and ultimately your success – if they are adequately trained beforehand.
At the end of the day, you will not have to waste your time correcting errors and practically doing their job for them. Instead, you get to optimize your time by spending it on the bigger fishes only you can fry.
2. Make Your Team Tech-Savvy
It is 2019! Gone are the days when salespeople have to do everything manually. Today, every successful business spends a ton of dollars on sales enablement tools. As a matter of fact, stats show that high-performing businesses spend almost 3 times more on sales enables tools than under-performing businesses. (Ref. sugarcrm.com/resources/sales-statistics)
Sales efficiency is directly proportional to time efficiency. By providing your team members with all the necessary sales tools, you have grossly reduced time wasters and prepared them for only sales.
3. Create a Foolproof Sales Process
A recurring time waster that salespeople spend time on is devising the best sales technique or process. What we fail to understand is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach in the business world, not even in the same industry. Salespeople tend to learn this later than they should and end up spending their time jumping from one approach to the other.
To help scale up their productivity, experts advise you to create a repeatable foolproof sales process that they can ‘rinse and use’ at all times. Be sure to draft out one that works for your business and help your sales team learn to employ these little hacks.
4. Ensure Your Sales and Marketing Team are Aligned
Anyone who knows his onion in the business world will categorically state that the alignment of your sales and marketing team is the very first key to success. As far fetched as that may seem, it is actually as true as they come. Your sales and marketing team, as I stated earlier, wield the highest pull or push among other success factors of any business.
You can still fail if your marketing team does everything right and your sales team is inefficient. Just as an efficient sales team cannot do much with an inefficient marketing team. Therefore, experts advise sales managers to ensure their sales and marketing departments work hand in hand if success is the goal.
By aligning these key departments, you will make it easier to for both teams to work, leading to higher productivity – which ultimately increases sales efficiency and, of course, revenues.
5. Lastly, Always Set a Goal
Sure, you have got one of the best sales and marketing teams on the planet. However, motivation is the fuel that keeps any sales or marketing team going. Remember the goal is to optimize your time and activities in order to get the highest possible return on your investment.
Therefore, your sales team should always be goal-oriented. Be sure to keep them on top of the game by giving them a definitive goal within a period of time. This will help keep them motivated as they are have something they are fighting to achieve. You can’t build goal-getters when there is no goal. Keep the fire burning!
Conclusion
Optimizing sales efficiency is unarguably one of the major problems facing most businesses today – both small and large businesses. This is because it holds the key to the growth of the firm. I am positive these little hacks will produce significant changes in your revenue this quarter. Do try them out!
But, if you need a good CRM that can help you expedite the entire process, I recommend LeadSquared. Why don’t you take a trial and find out yourself?
