This is a guest post by Robert Seymour, Marketing Director, at VoIPstudio.
What is the biggest challenge sales teams face? Productivity. According to Forbes, sales reps spend only 35.2% of their time selling and 64.8% on everything else.
How can you help your sales teams improve their productivity? The answer is not to work longer hours; the key to success is to give sales reps the tools and support they need to work effectively.
Standardize your sales process
One way to make your sales team more productive is to standardize the sales process. Do you have a consistent system from start to finish? Almost every sales rep will have their way of doing certain tasks. But the business should have a system with clear, step-by-step actions for sales teams.
It is important to teach this system to all sales teams and continuously improve it. Managers can evaluate the latest deals teams have closed and find common success factors. They should find ways to incorporate them into the standard sales process, thus helping everyone across the board.
A consistent sales process brings other benefits as well. It makes it easier to onboard new sales reps when they have clear instructions to follow. You can reduce the time it takes for new hires to start getting results. Managers can also use it as a training tool to help improve the performance of individuals and teams.
Utilize sales tools
Do you know that sales reps spend as much time on administrative tasks as they do on selling? Research shows that a salesperson spends 21% of their time in administrative tasks. These tasks are required for the job but do not generate revenue for the business. Admin tasks include things like filing, replying to email, meetings, and paperwork.
Organizations can use sales tools like a CRM to automate routine tasks. A CRM can reduce the time spent on non-sales tasks like data entry. Users can set up triggers to automate repetitive tasks such as sending follow-up emails.
Other sales tools can help sales reps track the sales pipeline, manage leads, and other routine tasks. By reducing the time spent on redundant work, sales teams can focus on revenue-generating activities like selling and customer service.
Promote collaboration
Promoting collaboration in an organization is easier said than done. One way to do it is by implementing a business phone system.
Modern phone systems handle more than simple voice calls. They bring together several channels into a cohesive, enterprise-wide system. These solutions often include video and conference calling, messaging, and other communication tools.
The advantages of using an effective business phone system cannot be overstated. Just like sales tools, it helps minimize time spent on unproductive tasks. Sales reps shouldn't have to struggle to collaborate with others. Communication—both within and without—should be seamless and quick.
Sales teams often work with other departments as part of the sales process. You should make it easy for everyone to collaborate. Collaboration is more than a buzzword or something that is important only for big projects. It is how businesses get work done every single day.
Integrate your phone system with sales tools
As the number of tools your organization uses increases, it becomes difficult to move data from one to another. How can you help your sales teams avoid this problem? The solution is to integrate your business phone system with the applications your sales reps use every day, most importantly your CRM.
A good business phone system should offer easy integration with a CRM tool. For instance, VoIPstudio seamlessly integrates its phone system with Zoho CRM. This integration allows sales reps to call customers from within Zoho CRM. Also, call timestamps and call duration data are automatically added to customer records in Zoho CRM.
The above four ways can make your sales teams more productive and yield results that last. They are not big projects, but they pay off quite handsomely for organizations.
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