Increase Sales Efficiency to Improve Sales Performance
One of the concerns that many businesses have is the effective use of time and resources to get better deals and engage customers. Though the KPIs may differ from organisation to organisation, tracking sales efficiency and ensuring productivity should be considered important. Sales efficiency measurement is essential to provide insights into individual and team activity. It further helps make effective business decisions that can contribute to boosting sales efficiency.
Sales efficiency is not only relevant to generating more sales but also ensuring consistent growth while streamlining your sales process for faster funnel movement.
‘65% of B2B organisations find sales productivity to be their #1 challenge.’ (Spotio)
Let’s begin with understanding sales efficiency.
What is sales efficiency?
Sales efficiency can be defined as the revenue to sales and marketing spend in a given period. It’s the way companies evaluate their revenue by investing in sales and marketing efforts. Sales efficiency gradually grows as companies scale. Investing in operations that can improve revenues that will help identify and close process gaps.
Sales efficiency refers to the speed of sales operations which is how quickly sales teams can convert prospects into buyers while also ensuring a high return on investment. Efficient sales would be a process where teams can close deals in a reasonable time frame, at a sustainable cost and on the right terms.
So, what are the ways to improve it?
To boost sales efficiency, you can follow some of these important tips:
1. Sales Enablement- Efficiency and enablement are interconnected. If you want to improve your team’s efficiency, you need to step up your sales enablement strategy so that all your teams are well-informed and have access to sales and marketing material to pitch right.
2. Seamless Onboarding- Focus on improving your training and onboarding process by providing access to training & learning materials, pitches, and coaching to the new hires and existing teams for efficient sales.
3. Evaluate Sales Process- An inefficient sales practice and process can cost you millions. Hence, it is always necessary to evaluate the sales process from time to time. Consider things like: What are the strengths and weaknesses of the existing workflow? What are the loopholes? Where does the communication break? Which resource needs reshuffling? And any other questions you consider important for sales productivity. Continuous optimisation and integrations can improve your sales workflow.
4. Easy access to Asset Library- Often, a lot of time is wasted looking for relevant marketing and sales content by teams. Organisations have a lot of useful assets and resources, but sales teams often lack systematic access to them- affecting the productivity and efficiency of different teams. Hence, easy access to the asset library at the right time will support boost sales efficiency.
5. Embrace Automation- A lot of work is still done by sales teams manually. It wastes a lot of time for the teams whereas they should be focusing most of their time selling. By automating redundant tasks and streamlining the workflow, you can optimise a lot of sales productivity. Hence, empower your teams with tools to help them do their jobs more effectively and efficiently.
Why is it important?
An essential aspect of evaluating sales performances and revenue is transparency. Hence sales efficiency metrics help you achieve that transparency and key performance indicators.
Sales enablement has always been about maximising sales productivity and efficiency, where sales teams can spend more time growing the sales pipeline, engaging leads, nurturing customers, creating engagement and eventually higher revenue. Define SMART goals, get a better picture of the people you are selling, enhance the sales process, and provide effective training & coaching to uplift your sales performance.
When we mention metrics, there is a way to calculate your sales efficiency.
SalesPanda’s sales enablement and acceleration platform have capabilities that help organisations align their sales and marketing efforts to make their sales teams more productive and achieve desired goals. So, if you want to shorten the sales cycle and build an efficient sales team, consider evaluating a sales enablement and acceleration platform.