dollarbreedersAdapting to business disruption is simple. If you don’t catch the wave of change, you’ll find yourself under it. While the way businesses operate changes dramatically during a pandemic, adaptation to that change is not uniform.
Businesses that changed and adapted quickly thrived, while those that did not face collapse. At the heart of all this change and adaptation to it is sales efficiency.
What is sales efficiency?
To understand what sales effectiveness is, we must also understand what it is not. It is often confused with terms such as sales effectiveness; however, they are neither.
Simply put, sales effectiveness is defined as a ratio. It is the result achieved, divided by the resources used to achieve that result. To simplify it further, improving sales effectiveness means increasing your total sales results while using as few resources as possible to achieve that result. The resources used can include time, money or both.
To simplify it further, improving sales effectiveness means bringing in more sales revenue than you spend on acquiring or trying to capture markets. The more revenue you bring in and the less you spend to achieve it, the more sales efficient your business will be.
Common Sales Efficiency Challenges
Let’s dive into some of the most common barriers to achieving greater sales effectiveness.
Untrained sales reps: If you think it’s not worth it to train employees because they might leave, wait until you find out what happens when you don’t train them and they stay!
Not only will they lower your sales performance, but they will also make it more difficult to increase sales productivity.
Unproductive tasks: It’s simple, improving sales effectiveness means improving your sales process. It is a serious problem for sales professionals to waste company time on tasks that do not help you achieve your sales goals.
Improving sales productivity means that your sales training needs to focus on identifying and completing the right tasks that will positively increase productivity. In short, focus on high-value activities and track them using work management software.
Ignore key metrics: A sales strategy that ignores metrics and the big picture is doomed to failure. You can’t achieve more sales if you don’t stop to analyze what helps you achieve your sales goals and what is a waste of time.
Metrics will tell you the whole story. When used properly, they are the best sales productivity tool.
Lack of internal communication: Communication within your team is critical to lead generation and conversion, closing deals, achieving sales goals, and helping you improve your overall sales effectiveness.
If your sales team is not communicating effectively, this is an issue that needs to be addressed as soon as possible. Consider streamlining communication or using team management software.
Outdated software tools: As businesses adapt to a more digital presence, sales tools need to keep up. Make sure your sales team is using the most up-to-date software possible. Outdated tools are often accompanied by outdated sales strategies. Make sure you keep up with the latest tools.
Sales and marketing teams out of sync: This is self-explanatory. You want the marketing and sales teams to work like a well-oiled machine.
Unenthusiastic sales reps: There’s nothing worse than sales reps, sales managers or even worse, sales leaders who don’t care about sales. Lack of enthusiasm gets in the way of everything from lead generation to customer enthusiasm. Avoid hiring people who are not enthusiastic.
Sales strategies that drive business revenue
Now that we’ve discussed some of the obstacles and challenges sales teams face that don’t help improve sales effectiveness, let’s look at what team members can do to add more value, and some strategies to improve sales.
With the right strategies to improve sales effectiveness, a great product, and enough marketing time spent in your target market, your sales effectiveness will inevitably be at an all-time high. Now let’s take a look at some great strategies.
1. Leverage training and coaching
When first starting a new sales team, you can’t expect too much. Initially, focus on properly training and equipping your sales team with the skills they need.
Training must be an ongoing process, with a focus on sales support. Take the time to refine your sales pitch and teach its sales process in depth. Encourage new hires to take sales calls with more experienced representatives.
Now, if you want to know the ROI involved in training a sales team, it is 353%. That means that for every $1 a company spends on training, it gets about $4.53 back. But don’t just blindly follow the statistics, if need be, calculate the ROI of your own training programs in the past and see for yourself.
This means that if you are not training your team, you are setting yourself up for failure, because training is one of the best ways to increase sales.
2. Use the right tools
In today’s sales world, it’s critical to use the right tools for the job. Fortunately, good software can be found for almost any purpose, making the entire sales cycle more manageable.
Software can be used to generate leads, manage your sales funnel, your entire sales team and sales process, all the way to customer retention and relationship management. You can even use sales prospecting tools.
Where possible, create useful sales videos that can be re-watched by new hires and rely on automation so you can free up your sales team to focus on more important tasks and process more deals.
Avoid relying on older tools or software and try to stay up to date. This will be an ongoing process, but well worth the investment.
3. The Power of Online Sales
Virtual selling is an area that you may find difficult to adapt to, but it will either adapt or die out. With more and more online sales happening, experts expect online sales to reach $145.8 billion by 2023.
This means you must optimize for online sales. The good news is there’s plenty of room to get creative. You’re no longer limited by old-fashioned sales tactics and can close more deals online with the right sales team.
Try to capture your customers’ attention with a great website, online store, social media marketing or just using the right platform. Make creative videos, experiment and find out what works best for your brand.
There is no one size fits all formula here, so you will have to keep trying until you find what works best. 4.
4. Set smart goals and keep re-evaluating
Goal setting is the key to ensuring your sales effectiveness. The combination of goals and strategy is an unbeatable winning combination.
While achieving goals can sometimes seem like a marathon, the best way to achieve them is to break them down into smaller steps and achieve those sub-goals.
You can ensure that the smaller goals are achieved first. This also helps prevent over-analysis from leading to paralysis, which usually happens when goals are too big and you can’t measure progress regularly.
You also need to continually reassess your progress, because if you get off track, reassessment can help quickly resolve any issues that arise.
5. Know your target audience
Finally, know who you’re selling to. There’s nothing worse than selling a great product to the wrong audience. Know your ideal customer, what their needs are, and what you can help them achieve.
Knowing your customers intimately will put you way ahead of the competition. This is best accomplished by creating a customer database. It allows you to fine-tune and focus your efforts and adjust them to who you are selling to.
Instead of wasting time generalizing and using blanket techniques, you can now ensure that you tell buyers exactly what they want to hear.
