We’re sure everyone can agree that productivity is essential in the workplace. Even more so in a sales team for it’s a link between your business and customers. The way your sales employees approach their work, collaborate with each other, and communicate with clients plays a significant role in the overall customer experience.
Effective cooperation between your company’s different departments is also a thing to constantly work on. But when handling multiple employees and projects at once, it can be easy to neglect the efficiency and quality of your work relationships and processes.
To help you avoid that and win more customers at the same time, we’ve gathered a few tips on how to make a sales team more productive so that you always attain the desired performance goals and see your business grow.
How to Make a Sales Team More Productive
1. Provide employee training
The best start towards an effortless collaboration between your employees is systematic educational efforts. Make sure all of your employees go through an onboarding process and receive training for their roles.
Once you even out the field and make sure that everyone has the basic knowledge needed for working in your team, move to company values and goals. You want to make sure everyone is on the same page and understands their role in the bigger picture.
Knowing what needs to be focused on and how to handle their workload makes it easier for people to understand the company hierarchy and their importance to every project they’re a part of.
2. Make meetings more productive
Having meetings that could have been emails will lead to resentment and loss of productivity. Here is how to change that:
- The person in charge should start the meeting by covering all the important topics. Once that is done, they should let someone else lead the conversation. Meetings are for discussing ideas and finding new ways of doing things. If the same person takes charge of every meeting, it diminishes the potential for new ideas.
- Make sure to listen to your team members and include all of them in the discussion. If your employees foresee potential problems you didn’t predict, they may not feel comfortable sharing unless they’re personally called on.
- Try not to enforce the hierarchical structure during your meetings and level out the playing field by giving everyone a chance to share their ideas and ask questions.
- The last bit of advice is to limit the number of your meetings. If you have meetings back to back, people will not have anything new to contribute to the conversation. Let people brainstorm on their own and schedule meetings once you have a new development in the projects you’re working on.
3. Choose the right software tools
Choosing the right tools for your team can majorly affect your team’s productivity. Firstly, incorporate asynchronous communication throughout your company. It includes letting people focus on important tasks by avoiding distractions in the form of messages that need to be answered right away.
The biggest benefit of asynchronous communication is the quality of responses. When you can take more time to research a topic, the answer is more detailed and the other person will get a better response. Another benefit is the number of replies which will be lower.
Furthermore, this goes into time management. Letting people rearrange their own time and tasks leads to happier employees. And to help your sales team achieve even better time management results, consider using such a smart timesheet tool as actiTIME. It lets you keep a precise record of working time, automates a variety of tasks, allows for making more accurate task estimates, and more.
4. Take advantage of team differences
Collaboration between teams is essential for sales. Sharing content with the marketing team will shorten the sales process, and your copywriters are the best people for creating content for all phases of your sales pipeline.
In the same line, customer support agents will have the knowledge about all the problems customers deal with, as well as the weaknesses your product or service may have. If you have a customer community where your existing customers and prospects are discussing your product, work with your community management team to find out key topics associated with the sales and pre-sales process.
Every department has a unique view of your brand and they can all pitch in with different ideas that can help you win more customers – so take advantage of that!
5. Have other teams pitch in during the sales process
There are usually some discrepancies between what sales tell potential customers and what developers actually create and work on. If that is the case and customers get sold on features that don’t exist or are gravely exaggerated. Which in turn leads to customer support dealing with unsatisfied customers and bad reviews.
You can avoid this by including different teams in your sales process. Have the production team chime in at the beginning stages of your sales funnel, to make sure you’re spotlighting all the right features and services.
In the latter parts of your sales process, you can include your customer support team since they’ll know which features will break or make a deal. Once your sales process becomes a collaborative effort, you can dive into organizing pitch meetings where departments can share their ideas for bettering your product or service.
6. Keep an eye out on any possible tension between teams
Company departments are like children, you can’t favor one over the other. If you see that one team’s ideas are getting disproportionately shot down to other teams, make sure to always explain and justify your stance.
If the sales team has ideas that are not realistic, would take too much time to develop, or would backfire and result in a loss of revenue, they need to understand why those ideas wouldn’t work.
Make sure you don’t disparage anyone from vocalizing future ideas and be patient with people who are coming out of their comfort zone. Departments that work on development may not know how much time it takes to create and launch a marketing campaign. That’s why they only inform sales and marketing of new products and features once they’re live.
This can create animosity between departments and open communication is the only way to fix those issues.
7. Embrace storytelling and personalize your sales content
A large portion of their working time, sales team members spend answering customers’ questions during phone calls or via emails. And as the experience of many prosperous companies shows, these communications tend to produce much better results when the information is provided to customers in a personalized manner.
So, whatever communication medium your sales team utilizes, it will benefit from embracing storytelling as the part of marketing that customers latch on to. They want to hear stories and understand how your brand can affect their lives. That type of personalized content is what customers have been accustomed to and learn to expect from brands.
This level of dedication is hard to provide to everyone in your sales funnel, so we have a few tips on how to create content that will drive more revenue.
8. Create engaging FAQ pages
Providing people with answers to questions they might have is a great way to relieve your salespeople of repetitive tasks. This is where high-quality FAQ pages come to play.
The trick to creating a useful FAQ page is communication. Create a Google document and send it to everyone in your company so that they can pitch question ideas. Once you have a great question sample, ask people in departments that pertain to the question to answer them.
That is how you secure customer satisfaction with your FAQ page. The more work you put into it, the more people will find the information they actually need and that will take the pressure off your customer support team.
Although you’re not in direct contact with customers through your FAQ page, they’ll still appreciate the fact that you gave them that information upfront without them needing to reach out to you.
9. Provide relevant content at the right time
Potential customers at different stages of your sales funnel will look for different types of content. That’s why you need to segment the content you use in your sales efforts.
Start with blogs and videos that explain your USP for the awareness stage of your sales funnel. Once your customers move to the middle part of the funnel, engage them with social media and email marketing.
At that stage people will compare you to your competitors, so make sure to create content that explains how your product or service can help them and how you defer from others on the market.
In the last stage of your funnel, people will want to receive free information they would usually have to pay for. We’re talking free samples, free e-books, and loyalty programs. This is where your content should target people’s emotions.
Make Your Sales Team More Productive
Productive collaboration is the key to successful professional relationships. This includes your employees, team members, and customers. Follow the tips reviewed in this article to make your sales team more productive and enjoy remarkable performance results.
This post is contributed to actiTIME by Petra Odak, Chief Marketing Officer at Better Proposals, a simple yet robust software tool that lets you send high-converting, web-based business proposals in minutes.
