Today’s sales world is fast-paced and competitive. As a result, only businesses that recognize managing time as an essential tool in their arsenal and wield it will experience laudable success in sales. A popular saying goes, “Time is money.” It applies powerfully to the sales world, where productivity is the watchword. Every salesperson understands that they must do a lot of work behind the scenes to accomplish a sale or to achieve a sales target.
At times, this can be hectic and time-consuming. But it gets much better when your salespeople figure out how best to utilize time and focus on the actions that move the needle. Whether attending a sales meeting, generating high-quality leads, or closing a deal to ensure a smooth sales transaction, time management is key to success.
This post will discuss 7 practical sales productivity strategies to improve your sales team’s time management discipline in daily routines. This will help them achieve the company’s sales goals in record time and scale your company’s growth.
What is Sales Productivity?
Sales Productivity refers to the effectiveness of your sales team in maximizing resources, time, and strategies to accomplish the company’s established sales targets.
It involves getting excellent outputs (positive client interactions, closed deals, or higher sales revenue) while minimizing inputs (cost, effort, resources, and time).
What is Sales Time Management?
As the name suggests, sales time management involves planning and organizing how to utilize time to execute various sales-related activities.
Statistics show that 42.8% of sales professionals hit their quotas — poor time management is a primary reason. However, with effective time management, your sales team gets more done in less time.
How Does Effective Time Management Influence Sales Productivity?
Since sales are the lifeblood of any business, effective time management is one key factor in ensuring sales productivity.
Businesses with the most significant advantage in the market space are those with sales professionals who have mastered the act and art of time management. This is why it should be highly ranked on your to-do list. Every time your sales team isn’t partaking in sales-related activities, it is a missed opportunity. The average salesperson spends 51% of their day on low to no-value activities.
Hence, it’s a big win for your company if your sales team understands how to channel the time they’ll normally waste into ensuring successful sales. Without further flur, here are a few ways time management tips on the sales productivity for your company:
- Excellent work-life balance of your sales personnel
- Execution of urgent tasks with higher quality
- Enhanced customer experience
- Enhanced self-discipline of your salespeople
- Heightened productivity level
- Increased sales
- Improved focus on innovative ways to generate revenue
- Job satisfaction
- Prioritized purchasing funnel
- Reduced procrastination and burnout
- Reduced operating costs
- Saved labor costs
- Stronger team culture
7 Sales Team Time Management Hack to Maximize Sales Productivity
Below are the 7 sales best practices that can help your sales team manage time and improve sales efficiency.
1. Set SMART Goals
The scattergun approach to setting goals leaves things to chance and allows for distraction and procrastination. Conversely, you can set your sales team on the path to success by setting SMART goals that channel their focus.
Here’s how a SMART goal works:
- Specificity: Specificity is key to getting your sales team to buy into the vision and pointing them in the potential direction. Here, they get to know what the short-term and long-term goals are and the desired outcome.
- Measurability: Set works in motion to ensure consistent and close monitoring of the goal advancement.
- Attainability: Ensure the goal is achievable with the accessible or available resources.
- Relevance: The goal must align with other business objectives and be worthwhile to your salespeople
- Time-bound: Fix a realistic timeframe or deadline for the goal to be fulfilled.
2. Create a Structured Plan
An adage says, “Failing to plan means planning to fail.” This emphasizes the relevance of planning in different walks of life, and the sales world is no exception. An organized plan and schedule will make your sales department a world of good.
Encourage your salespersons to start their day by reviewing their daily tasks and ranking them based on priority or urgency. Tools like calendars, project management software, and to-do lists are handy for this.
This will help them assign specific time blocks for pressing tasks like following up on a potential client, meeting a high-ticket client, or prospecting. Amidst all these, allow them to take breaks to maintain their sales productivity and avoid burnout.
3. Get Rid of Administrative Tasks
One of the most effective ways to improve your sales team’s time management is to evaluate the situation and remove any administrative tasks assigned to them. Most of these tasks are important.
However, they can consume a large chunk of your salesperson’s time, leaving them with little time to take actionable steps to drive up sales. Their performance and team morale can suffer as a result.
Hence, it is best to take this burden off their shoulders by employing suitable sales apps and tech tools to handle this aspect. You can’t recover lost time. However, with technology’s task automation options, you can catch up in the market space. Here are a few instances of how automation relieves your salespeople and boosts sales team productivity:
- Deploying automation to lay down the groundwork for background insights and research on prospects
- Use of automation to ensure seamless nurturing of leads and effective outreach to clients
- Use of applications to monitor your purchase funnels and handle the leads it generates
- Employing CRM to compile data on your sales lead and customers in one location for easy access and management.
4. Get Back in the Game
Things can go south during a sales transaction. But what matters is how your salespersons react to the situation. Do they keep their heads down for too long, be in a bad mood, or think about a missed opportunity? Or do they get their heads back in the sales game immediately?
The sooner your salespeople recover when a promising business deal falls through, a client stands them up, or pulls out of a deal at the last minute, the better.
This is one of the reasons a salesperson must be emotionally and mentally fortified. These things happen occasionally—there will always be some big hits, and some misses on this sales journey. It won’t take them by surprise or slow them down if they’re ready for the likely storm.
5. Ace Those Emails
Email is one of the most used tools in the business world. Hence, it’s no surprise that it is an easy and effective way to reach decision-makers at different companies.
Since your sales team must hit the soft spot of these decision-makers, one thing is certain—they don’t want to ruin the company’s chances of closing a game-changing client. This explains why they dedicate time and effort to crafting compelling emails that ensure the company makes a good impression on the recipient.
Thankfully, with the emergence of email templates and tools like CRM software, churning out emails can be much easier for your sales team. Support the creative use of these time-saving options for crafting high-quality emails that do the job.
6. Multitasking is Not the Real Deal
Salespersons take on more tasks than they can handle daily, which, at times, fills them with a sense of purpose. But the truth is that multitasking does more harm than good. It hurts the quality of work they deliver.
Here’s the thing: Attention to the minutest detail can sometimes be the difference between making and missing out on a sale. Sadly, multitasking divides attention and causes loss of concentration, as it takes time for our brains to shift from one assignment to another. For this reason, you can only achieve sales productivity when you allow your sales team to focus on the real deal — doing one activity at a time.
7. Ride the Wave
Your sales team just bagged the company a lucrative business deal or ticked a significant milestone off the box. What’s next? Throw a party to celebrate this laudable feat. Or give your salespersons the day (s) off to rest on their oars?
Now, this isn’t negative; nonetheless, business owners have gone overboard with these acts in the past to the detriment of their sales productivity. Therefore, take advantage of your recent success’s momentum rather than taking your foot off the sales pedal. It can fuel the minds of your sales team and drive them to replicate another success story or even do one better.
Maximizing Time as a Tool for Greater Sales Productivity
Many repetitive actions go into making a successful sale, so effective time management is crucial. Give your sales team this as a key by applying the tips in this post and watching them flourish on the sales front.
By leveraging these sales time management techniques, you can rest assured that your sales team will maximize sales productivity and improve efficiency. With more free time, they can jump on calls, generate and convert leads, give more attention and care to business prospects, and close deals in record time. We’re rooting for your company and sales team to make a killing in the coming days. Hire an outsource inside sales company to improve your business growth.