7 Ways To Boost Sales Effectiveness
Ryan Breneman
In this post, we’ll show you ways to increase sales effectiveness, which can propel your company in the right direction in terms of boosting productivity, staff motivation, and sales. Read on to learn more.
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In this article:
- Align Sales Goals With Overall Company Strategy
- Study The Best Practices of The Top 20% Performers
- Check Training Gaps for Your Bottom 20%
- Review Every Step of Your Sales Process and See Where You Can Make Improvements
- Work in Tandem with Marketing
- Empower Your Team With Sales Enablement
- Utilize Sales Analytics to Constantly Improve Performance
7 Ways of How to Make a Sales Organization More Effective
1. Align Sales Goals With Overall Company Strategy
No amount of high sales volume or explosive sales growth can increase the sales effectiveness of a team if it’s merely putting in numbers where the company doesn’t need it.
For example:
- Goal — Company A is targeting expansion into newer markets using a new product line.
- What the Sales Team Does — The team moves 100% of the inventory of a legacy product for Company A.
- Bottom Line — The sales team has 100% sales efficiency, but 0% sales effectiveness.
For a team to achieve high sales effectiveness, they need to ensure that their sales goals are aligned with their company’s objectives. Sales leaders need to plan the targets around the company’s strategy, then make sure each member of their team fully understands these goals.
This helps the team begin with the end in mind so everyone pushes your company in the right direction.
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2. Study The Best Practices of The Top 20% Performers
According to the Pareto Principle, or the “80/20” rule, 20% of your sales representatives will drive 80% of the sales revenue. This is why it’s important to understand what this prime slice of your sales team is putting on the table and how they’re doing it.
You’ll know how sales effective your team is when you qualify where the sales volume of the top performers are coming from. If they’re getting sales from the wrong places, then you’ll be able to correct their direction immediately.
If the top performers are already sales effective, you need to document their best practices and insights for sharing with the rest of the team. By distilling the principles, practices, and habits of your top performers, you’ll be able to educate and train the average and middle performers of your sales team and help them catch up.
3. Check Training Gaps for Your Bottom 20%
Once you understand the baseline of successful performance for your sales team, you’ll have to document what your bottom performers are doing and why makes them give poor results. Doing this helps you understand how you can coach them and what specific factors in the work environment, the organization, or the sales process have been driving them to fail.
You can also distill failure so it gives you an understanding of things that you can correct so your sales reps are more successful most of the time.
4. Review Every Step of Your Sales Process and See Where You Can Make Improvements
After understanding what makes your salespeople tick or fail, you’ll need to look at your sales process end-to-end. This means looking at every step of the process and checking them against the alignment with your stated sales goals.
Is your sales team prospecting from the right target market? When they make sales calls, do they push the right products?
Performing this crucial review will help boost your sales efficiency while driving your sales effectiveness forward.
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5. Work in Tandem with Marketing
Sales and marketing teams don’t work in tandem sometimes. This is just a waste since working with marketing teams will amplify your sales team’s efforts. Marketers prep the target market by increasing awareness of your products and arming your sales team with the right content.
The marketing team also has a fair amount of research on your target market and their market intelligence shouldn’t stay in their silo. It should also find its way into your sales team.
Marketing teams produce high-quality content that’ll help catch the eyes of their audience. You can tap into their savvy by asking their help in designing sales materials for your team.
6. Empower Your Team With Sales Enablement
Working with your marketing team is just a piece of the puzzle. You’ll need to go full throttle and create a sales enablement function in your team.
Sales Enablement Definition: Sales enablement involves giving your sales team all the things they need to be more successful at selling: the right data, the right sales materials, and the right tools.
Sales enablement arms your sales team with two kinds of information: buyer’s information and sales research data. Buyer’s information will help your team engage with your potential customers so your team provides them the solutions they need.
- Sales research data — This will be extremely helpful as it gives every member of your sales team knowledge of what best practices, tools, and industry events will help them get a leg up on the competition.
- Content — A large part of sales enablement involves producing the best sales content for your team to use.
- Tools — These can multiply your sales team’s efforts. A sales customer relationship management platform, for example, will help your team document each sales deal. Aside from helping your team stay on top of the details of each customer, these systems will help distill data for every step of your sales process.
7. Utilize Sales Analytics to Constantly Improve Performance
One final key to boosting sales effectiveness is finding points for improvement and acting on them. This is why your sales organization needs to invest in sales analytics tools so you always have a clear view of where you can do better.
Fortunately, when you invest in a sales platform like SalesForce, you can use the software to report on every step and facet of your sales process. You’ll get a clearer picture of things such as:
- Ratio of closed deals to lost deals
- Average length of time a potential client spends in each phase of the sales funnel
- Revenue generated per time period
Your team’s sales effectiveness will go through the roof with the right data set and the right steps addressing any problems that occur.
When you increase sales effectiveness, you’re not just guaranteeing revenue. You’re also making sure your entire company prospers, because you’re hitting the right targets every time you close a deal.
Do you have any other tips on how sales organizations can increase their own sales effectiveness? Please share your insights on the comments section below.
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