Sales Productivity

Not getting the bang for the buck from your sales efforts? Crank up the sales productivity the sales activity the energy and the pace. What you will need is first a commitment that this sales productivity program your about to introduce to your sales team is sustainable, a program or an idea de jour will not work.

What are the activities that you expect the sales group to perform on a daily weekly, monthly basis. List them.

What are the quantities of these activities they are currently doing, current sales productivity?

What tools do they have now, what tools do they need to increase sales productivity.

What information do they have now, what do they need.

Where is the low hanging fruit? Where is there room for improvement over current sales productivity?

Now that you have a benchmark you can now work on what you really need to improve your sales productivity.

Set activity targets and collect metrics on performance.

Consider sales productivity tools that will boost your efforts. CRM tools, data collection and reporting tools, most of these should be found in your CRM program, mine the information, re gig the territories consider vertical markets. What is all this information telling you and remember "You get what you inspect not what you expect."

What training do they need ,what are they good at ,what are they lacking in.

Caution: never take you eye off the ball the ultimate sales productivity activity is sales face time or if in a telemarketing group voice time. Time in a selling situation with prospects. See my note on my blog on Suspect, Prospect? That is the question.

Everything that you do from here on should be focused on face time or voice time and if successful with this the sales productivity numbers will sky rocket.

Since sales productivity translates to increased sales then what one must do is close off all active prospects in the sales pipeline and find a source of new leads to keep the pipeline fresh.

In a recent study on sales effectiveness conducted by Accenture, out of 178 senior Executives polled the most-often cited sales performance issues were related to leads.

According to Accenture,"Along with problems with qualifying and managing leads effectively, the lack of performance metrics, inadequate customer data, and lack of capabilities for analyzing customer data rounded out the list of top performance challenges."The study reported that a total of 55% of respondents found it difficult to asess which leads were qualified.

Now what is needed is an accurate sales forecast and this you must inspect with care. If the forecast is not accurate it will trigger certain behaviors and actions that will surely de rail some of your sales productivity activities. As a manager this will be your most challenging task, question everything, from every angle until you get it right. Once that has been accomplished you are well on your way to increased sales productivity.