17 Hacks on How to Continuously Improve Sales Performance

Post Views: 168

(Last Updated On: )

It is one of the most important questions in any business, how to improve sales performance? Without a question, most sales organizations are under a lot of strain these days, as the bad economy and diminishing margins make meeting quotas more difficult. Throughout it all, the major focus is always on boosting the organization’s sales productivity.

Because there is one fundamental reality that applies to all businesses: no matter how good your project or service is, if your sales productivity is poor, your firm will definitely fail. In this article, I am going to share some tips so that you learn how to improve sales performance.

How to improve sales performance

First and foremost, it is critical to understand that sales productivity cannot be raised until customer service is improved.

While sales professionals spend 30% of their time prospecting, they only spend 18% of their time really connecting with buyers, according to a Sirius Decisions research.

Sales professionals, according to Accenture, spend the bulk of their time selling to prospects. Here are 17 useful suggestions that will help you know how to improve sales performance:

1. Be desperate

Assume you’ve followed the fourteen steps above and observed a significant increase in your sales. Though it may be tempting to celebrate your accomplishments, you must resist. Your opponents are close behind you, waiting for you to get complacent.

Always be on the lookout for innovative methods to improve your offering and satisfy your consumers. It’s the only way to win in the fast-paced world of modern sales.

2. Produce High-Value Leads

You’re all working on generating leads. But, more importantly, are you producing leads that will convert? Or are all of these leads really worthless?

Let’s say you’re selling high-end shoes, but your email list is flooded with broke college students who don’t care about such things. Do you believe this will be of any assistance to you?

As a result, it does not treat your lead creation as a numbers game. The quality of the leads should take precedence over the number.

Creating a lead qualifying system to steer your sales staff in the correct path is the best approach to go about it.

To begin, create an ideal customer profile to determine who your target audience is and where they may be found.

Some of the elements that must be included in your ideal client profile are as follows:

What should the prospect’s company size be?
What is the location of the company?
The ideal prospect’s age and gender.
Turnover on an annual basis.
What is the benefit of your product to the prospect?
What are the obstacles that the prospects must overcome?

These are some of the questions you should consider when creating your ideal customer profile.

This will allow you to focus your lead generating efforts and only pursue prospects that will benefit you in the long run. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time chasing something that won’t help you.

In reality, according to a study, 25% of leads are genuine and should be sent on to sales.

3. Track Key Performance Indicators

It’s simple to measure ‘sales,’ i.e., revenue and money are strong indications of performance. The difficult aspect is determining how much is being sold.

Because they don’t track productivity increases and outcomes on a regular basis, many companies aren’t constantly boosting their sales productivity.

Consider monitoring productivity indicators in addition to performance measurements. Consider indicators like call rate, win rate, sales cycle duration, pipeline conversation rates, productivity software adoption rates, and the average number of contacts between calls.

Use these measures to determine how productive a salesperson is, since this will indicate how effective your productivity methods are and allow you to solve any issues. Use dashboards to see trends and learn more about what your sales reps are up to.

4. Put money on onboarding and training.

Good onboarding and training are the foundations of every successful sales team. Before your salespeople ever make a sale, onboarding gives you the chance to influence their future productivity. With a tech-enabled onboarding program, you can quickly bring your new hires up to speed.

Effective training allows new sales agents to get up to speed quickly without becoming overwhelmed. Your representatives will learn better and quicker if you use online training software with video courses, information libraries, and testing features.

As a result, sales professionals are more confident in their talents and have the information they need to be successful and productive. The faster your salespeople learn about your firm and its goods or services, the faster they can complete deals.

5. Invest in technology and stay away from multitasking.

You might address nearly every aspect of sales productivity, but without technology, you will fall behind.

Consider this: if your investment does not include technology, does it make sense to invest on onboarding and training?

Unless you’re living in the past, of course!

Every forward-thinking business is utilizing new technologies to increase sales productivity. As a result, if you don’t want your firm to lag behind, keep up with the times.

Frequently, sales agents will finish a call and then take a break to conduct administrative tasks. However, this is not the most effective technique of accomplishing tasks. When a salesman is in the zone and making calls, taking a pause to input data might slow down the process.

Encourage your sales staff to make a particular number of calls before taking a break to finish administrative duties.

If they need to recall something important, they may scribble it down quickly on a notepad for later reference. This method eliminates the need for salesmen to multitask and encourages them to focus entirely on the work at hand.

6. Create a strong referral network

Customers that are happy with their purchases are your best salesmen. They’re real-life case studies, and if you’ve developed a strong customer advocacy network, you can simply tap into their enthusiasm for your product to drive new revenue.

Creating satisfied customers in the first place is the key to turning on your customer engine. So start by investing in your customer success and support teams to ensure them have all they need to provide outstanding customer service. Over time, you’ll amass a team of evangelists that will gladly talk with prospects on your behalf.

7. Prioritize your people

Employees who are unhappy are unlikely to be best-sellers. Never lose sight of the people who make it all possible as you seek to improve sales performance throughout your teams.

Whether you put your employees first or not will decide your long-term performance, from employee recognition to increased benefits and bonuses.

And if you’re not sure how your staff are feeling, just ask! Listening to and adopting their input will guarantee that you have their passionate support when you launch new initiatives and explore new markets.

8. Make your sales process more automated

Time spent on tasks that are ineffective, repetitious, or do not follow best practices is time not spent selling. Giving your sales people extra time to sell is one approach to increase their productivity.

Remove the extra physical labor. Automate sales procedures whenever possible to save your salespeople time and hassle.

Reduce or eliminate administrative chores like data entry, and automate as much of your sales process as feasible. You will save steps and time by automating a task, allowing sales people to return to their primary selling duties.

Businesses who utilize marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451 percent boost in qualified leads, according to data.

Using email templates, implementing trigger workflows in Salesforce, or even employing a firm to conduct phone calls on their behalf are all options for automating procedures for your salespeople.

Consider using triggered events, like as follow-up emails, to help salespeople reply to prospects more quickly.

Your sales staff will be happier and have more time to focus on closing transactions if some of the daily grinds are removed. Also, be aware of how you spend your time.

Use a free time monitoring software that runs in the background and records the amount of time you spend on different tasks. Then, in a clear and transparent report, examine the findings to see what can be altered to achieve optimum efficiency for you or your team.

9. Manage the clutter in your sales content

The thing that propels transactions ahead should be sales content. But, all too frequently, the difficulty of managing, organizing, exposing, and locating it obliterates its effect.

Fortunately, sales enablement technology now provides really transformational solutions for controlling the cacophony of sales material.

Allow this to be your cue to invest in a sales enablement platform if you don’t already have one. If you do have one, make sure you’re successfully sharing your material.

One thing we can’t say enough about? Taking merchandising advice from your favorite shops, consider how your material is presented, selected, and marketed internally to increase engagement when exposing it to representatives.

10. Marketing and sales should be in sync

This could appear to be self-evident. After all, aren’t sales and marketing intimately linked?

The disparities between the two departments, on the other hand, may surprise you.

According to Forrester Research, just 8% of business-to-business businesses have tight sales and marketing alignment.

However, alignment with common goals and measurements may lead to 25% higher quota attainment, 15% higher win rate, and 27% quicker three-year profit growth, highlighting the importance of teamwork.

When certain departments or groups within an organization refuse to share information or expertise with others in the same organization, this is known as the silo mindset.

As a result, the silo mindset, in which departments such as sales and marketing operate as separate entities, has become a big issue in the B2B selling arena.

While the two sides may appear to be waging separate wars, they should be cheering each other on. As a result, a symbiotic interaction between these two divisions is required to enhance sales productivity.

11. Start selling on social media

The power of social selling may help salespeople connect with and engage with customers more intelligently.

From networking and prospecting to customer support, sales professionals may utilize social media at each level of the sales process.

Sales reps may more quickly and efficiently conduct an engaging and relevant discussion with prospects by knowing their demographics, preferences, what’s going on at their firm, what’s going on in their sector, and where they encounter pain spots.

According to data, 73 percent of salespeople who use social selling as part of their sales process outperform their counterparts, exceeding quota 23 percent more frequently.

Keeping track on your prospects’ activity and engaging with them appropriately is the essence of social selling.

12. Improve your customer service

It should come as no surprise that client satisfaction affects sales results. Customers will be hesitant to acquire your product if they have difficulty connecting with your company, whether on the web or as a result of specific sales procedures.

As a result, investing in a superior customer experience will only help sales. Individual representatives can only handle one-to-one elements of customer contacts; improving your overall customer experience involves aligning with marketing, customer success, and other sales-related departments to ensure consistent, easy encounters throughout the customer lifecycle.

13. Turn on all of the channels

Take use of every sales channel accessible to you since you never know where your next buyer will be. This might imply establishing and utilizing a partner-sales cycle. Exploring hidden treasures, such as hyper-specific business events or that new social network you passed over, might be part of it.

As you try out new channels, be sure to provide your representatives training, content, and advice on how to get the most out of each one. Your team’s pitches will land effectively wherever buyers meet them if you customize message, introduce particular sales plays, and adapt content to these new audiences.

14. Rethink your sales approach.

Another important aspect of sales effectiveness is the method you use to enable your salespeople to go to market. Unfortunately, too many sales plans are created in January and then forgotten about until December, when it’s time to prepare for the next year.

If this sounds like your sales strategy, it might be time to reconsider: Organizations must be flexible and sensitive to changing customer requirements in today’s marketplaces.

Examine your sales approach at least twice a year, quarterly, and even weekly. Though this may appear to be a lot of work, it’s critical to make sure your approach is still relevant to the market you’re selling to.

15. Employ the best employees possible

The first and most important step is to hire. Businesses have always viewed hiring through the perspective of attracting top talent. However, it is critical for salespeople to understand that high talent is the product of excellent training.

As you choose who to hire for your team, keep in mind the talents and personality qualities that will make someone responsive to your training and coaching efforts.

High emotional intelligence, a can-do attitude, and a strong desire to collaborate are just a few examples. Keep a little wiggle space in your ideal candidate persona as you build it out – candidates will occasionally surprise you.

16. Recognize and Appreciate a Victory

Team members that are motivated and engaged will be more productive. Dale Carnegie relates the story of Charles Schwab in his renowned book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

He was the president of the United States Steel Company at one point. This powerful man credited his enormous success to one key skill: the ability to encourage others rather than criticize or correct them. Approval, according to Schwab, drives individuals to strive more and put up more effort.

You could wonder how it relates to your sales productivity. In contrast to popular belief, motivation and incentives are critical to a company’s sales productivity.

Take the time to evaluate your team’s different strengths and shortcomings, as well as discover more about their personal interests.

Give sales people the chance to perform more of what they do well if at all possible. Also, remember to acknowledge a win because it will rejuvenate their thoughts, resulting in a more productive team.

17. Mentor your mentors

As previously said, sales training has an influence on both representatives and sales managers. Sales managers must be taught on how to improve rep performance via coaching. Too many companies believe that just because a salesman is a terrific seller, they will also be a great manager.

This, however, is not the case. To accomplish their duties well, frontline managers require just as much commitment and assistance as salespeople. Determine what good looks like in sales rep performance before investing in sales coaching.

You may educate coaches to not only assess rep performance against those behaviors, but also to provide remedial help if they fail to execute critical steps, after those behaviors have been documented.

This method guarantees that your coaches understand what they are meant to do and say and when they are supposed to do it. I hope these information will be help foo your learning how to improve sales performance.