What Makes Sales Teams Successful?
To succeed in any industry, an organization must be profitable. The Sales team is responsible for turning strategy into profit. The path to an effective Sales team consists of high performance, low costs, consistent revenue, and a sales strategy. Managing all of those affects requires a high-level view of the business.
The sales team is the front line of the company - interacting with prospective clients and maintaining client relations. Despite customers being the main priority, sales teams are typically busy with non-client-facing activities.
According to research by Hubspot, only 28% of a sales representative's time is spent interacting with prospects. The rest of their time is spent on clerical tasks - the manual, time-consuming data entry and analysis.
Improving the efficiency of your sales team could go a long way toward increasing their success and making your business more sustainable.
Xactly conducted a survey on businesses and found that 91% of sales leaders do not plan on their AEs hitting or exceeding the set quota. This indicates that the Sales team is underperforming, but not necessarily at their own fault.
This could be due to disorganized data, being weighed down by data management, or outdated software. Access to high-quality data and good communication tools helps sales teams consistently meet their goals.
High-performing sales teams tend to make use of sales technology more extensively than other teams. They benefit from having instant access to the data they need to prioritize (and convert) quality leads. Introducing new technology to a good sales team can enable them to become an extraordinary sales team.
9 Tips to Improve Sales Performance
If you're aiming to improve sales performance in your organization, initiating a digital transformation is a good starting point. Having access to accurate data improves the quality of your forecasts and can improve the customer experience, too. To drive revenue, you need to know how your business operates and how to improve it.
How well is your sales team performing?
Accurately assessing sales team performance requires visibility. Sales leaders need access to performance data to truly understand the effectiveness of their sales plans and how they can drive performance and growth.
Successful companies know how their business works at a granular level. They know what it takes to bring in revenue and how to make changes across their organization to improve sales performance.
This means that hungry, growth-oriented organizations are constantly on the hunt for the right tips, tactics, and strategies to increase sales and seller performance.
Xactly can help refine your sales performance strategy by sharing the right tools and strategies to create efficiency and alignment across your organization. These tips will offer insight on keeping up, and possible staying ahead, of the competition.
1. Embrace Technology and Digital Transformation in Sales
Technology and digital transformation ensure your data is accurate and accessible by anyone in your organization. It allows you to examine your processes and provides insights to improve sales performance.
Technology is becoming inescapable for sales teams and for sales performance management, too. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 75% of businesses will be using AI-powered tools to drive smarter sales and revenue.
If you want your organization to retain a competitive edge, it's vital you invest in a sales performance management platform to automate your data for a seamless, all-in-one sales planning process.
2. Understand and Optimize Revenue Generation
Successful companies know how their business works at a granular level. They know what it takes to increase revenue generation and make changes across their organization to improve sales performance. At Xactly, we call this Revenue Intelligence.
Intelligent Revenue looks at your data, identifies trends, and provides insights to guide your planning and decision-making. It helps you make changes to your sales performance improvement plan that put reps in front of the right customers and rewards them for bringing in the best sources of revenue.
That means your sellers are focusing their time on targeting and closing the best deals. They are better equipped to do their job and earn more while helping the company drive profitability—a win-win for everyone!
3. Tailor Incentives to Strategies that Increase Sales
Incentive compensation is the main driver of sales behaviors. Getting it right is a critical step in how to improve your sales performance. The most important factor in your compensation is aligning sales incentives with overarching objectives.
This ensures your sales team is targeting the right opportunities and prioritizing the best deals to reach your goals.
However, no two positions play the same role in closing deals. Creating incentives specific to each position motivates your team and empowers them to succeed.
4. Maximize Your Sales Forecasting Accuracy
Accurate sales forecasting is essential if you want to be able to manage your resources efficiently and maximize the performance of your team. Manual sales forecasting isn't just time-consuming; it can be error-prone.
Small clerical errors can easily be amplified, leading to inaccurate forecasts and making revenue performance management more difficult than it needs to be.
Intelligent forecasting technology closes the data gap by quickly and accurately analyzing your CRM data. It uses that data to identify where deals in your pipeline often stall and highlights deals at risk due to lack of activity.
Forecasting tools can also offer guided selling suggestions to coach sellers, increase sales productivity, and improve sales performance.
5. Make Customer Experience Your Top Priority
Put simply, successful companies have satisfied customers. Your current customers can play a huge role in improving sales performance. According to a recent report by Bain and Company, a 5% increase in customer retention produces an increase in profit of over 25%.
It's cheaper to retain existing customers than it is to recruit new ones, so any efforts you can make to improve customer service or make your loyalty programs more appealing are likely to pay off.
Today’s saturated markets bombard buyers with thousands of sales messages every day. One-third of customers surveyed by American Express say they'll consider switching brands after just one incident of poor customer service.
To retain consumer loyalty, you'll need to position yourself as a partner to your customers. Understanding each individual's needs builds stronger relationships and improves your sales performance.
6. Improve Transparency
A recent report, on the Great Resignation, by Mckinsey showed that 51% of people who left did so because they didn't feel a sense of belonging. Giving credit for work done, and transparency in processes and plans go hand in hand with improved performance.
Employees need to feel that their time, work, and wellness are appreciated and respected. This can differ for every company, but some of the most successful initiatives include offering:
- Work flexibility by allowing employees to work from almost anywhere
- Stipends to create productive, comfortable remote workspaces
- Mental health days to promote employee wellness
- Direct, clear communication with leadership and executives
- Educational opportunities and training
Tools that make plans more transparent, increasing a sense of belonging and involvement in the growth and successes of an organization.
7. Investing In Performance Is An Investment In People
Tools that improve performance may seem like a direct jolt to the bottom line, but at the end of the day, they are a direct investment in your people and key to keeping your talent engaged.
It is important to remember that all businesses are people businesses. Leaders need tools that will help them empower their employees and optimize team performance.
Organizations need to dig deeper into performance analytics, ask the tough questions we may have yet to think of asking a year ago, and beat out the competition when trying to hire the best of the best. These factors combined lead sales organizations to be more competitive when trying to attract and retain top talent.
8. Don’t Just Spend Money
A typical organization spends $24,000 per person on improving productivity, yet 49% of organizations have zero or limited means to measure productivity.
The average-performing sales reps spend only about 35% of their time in direct selling, and 65% dealing with non-selling activities.
These non-selling activities (aka time sinks) include:
- Non-sales calls
- Internal conversations/meetings
- Networking
- Administrative, manual tasks
All of these activities seem harmless on the surface, but like all things, they add up.
Focusing on employee engagement is more than just buying tools, it’s knowing how to use them effectively that’s essential.
Once you know the cause of the low productivity, you can take steps to remove the roadblocks and get your sales teams back to selling.
9. Consistent Performance Requires Attention
Organizations where salespeople use the company’s sales training methodology and get consistent coaching see 73% quota attainment.
If spending more time training reps leads to better sales numbers, why not figure out what training your team needs in order to sell more effectively.
The Causes of Low Sales Productivity
Low sales productivity is a problem no company wants to face because it means we could be doing better and performance could be higher.
Ultimately, low sales productivity is the result of two main problems: poor morale and inefficient processes.
Poor Morale
Low morale and poor productivity go hand-in-hand. When sales reps are unhappy at work, they're unmotivated. This can result from sales burnout, disengagement, or even poor territory planning. Either way, when morale falls, productivity and performance often follow suit.
Inefficient Processes
When reps spend their time doing things besides selling, their productivity suffers.
While Salesforce data shows that much of this hinges on administrative tasks, low productivity can also result from non-administrative tasks, such as shadow accounting commissions if payments are inaccurate or not on time.
Once you know the cause of the low productivity, you can take steps to eliminate the barriers—whether it be poor morale or inefficient processes—and increase sales productivity. Ultimately, this allows you to be a more strategic organization and operate more efficiently.
How to Increase Sales Productivity
The more productive your sales team, the better your overall performance. Find out how to increase your sales productivity with sales performance management.
Traditionally, sales representatives have been tasked with doing one thing—selling. Today's sales representatives have a growing set of responsibilities in their roles.
Administrative tasks are becoming a larger part of day-to-day sales responsibilities. According to Salesforce, representatives only spend 34% of their time selling. That's not ideal. This means that sales takes a large hit.
When any team is less productive, performance will always suffer. Being aware of possible pitfalls in sales productivity allows higher-level business leaders to assess opportunities for improvement and growth.
Equipping sales teams with the tools and structure they need can lead to an increase in sales productivity and ensure that representatives continue to hit their goals.
Using Sales Performance Management (SPM) to Increase Sales Productivity
The number one way to increase sales productivity is by optimizing sales planning and execution processes. How do companies do this? Sales Performance Management (SPM) platforms enable organizations to create a central source of truth.
By automating processes, leadership from sales, sales ops, finance, and all other departments can access data in the same place—meaning teams are better aligned and on the same page. However, SPM technology does more than just automate processes.
Here's a high-level of SPM helps companies do:
- Increase productivity more than 12.5% (Gartner)
- Achieve 20% higher gross margin (Harvard Business Review)
- Be 2.6x more effective at connecting sales efforts to revenue (Aberdeen Group)
- Streamline Sales Processes
SPM platforms create a single source of truth, which makes planning more strategic, and it enables leadership can make better-informed decisions.
When using data, sales can ensure plans are based in fact rather than a best guess based on gut instinct. Finance can also ensure sales forecasting accuracy and that data is accurate for compliance with commission expense accounting requirements.
Automate Compensation Administration
Compensation errors can wreak havoc on sales productivity and can be a costly mistake. For example, paying 5,000 reps $100k equates to a $500M investment.
Operate with a 3% error rate and that means $15M is being mishandled and incorrectly paid in compensation. That's a large amount of money—considering the average company spends at least 10% of annual revenue on incentive pay.
Automating incentive compensation increases sales productivity by eliminating the need for sales reps to shadow account. In fact, one company—Cox Automotive—automated their incentive compensation and was able to:
- Achieve 99% payout accuracy
- Save 172 hours per month of admin time
- Reduce expenses by $2.5M
Automation not only reduces errors and time consumed by manual entry. It offers a higher level of visibility, which means a higher level of strategizing.
Gain More Visibility
When you have more visibility, you can use your data more effectively. With access to real-time analytics, reps see up-to-date earned commissions and leadership can measure sales performance fully and completely.
This also gives leadership access to customizable reports, and in the event a problem arises, plans can be course-corrected to keep on track with goals.
Integrate With Your CRM
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms are perhaps the most robust tools for increasing sales productivity. CRM helps to manage leads and prospects from the beginning to the end of their sales cycle.
Each time you make a call, send out a note, send a newsletter, have a meeting or qualify a lead, you can enter the details into your CRM.
Perhaps the most well-known and popular CRM is Salesforce. When you automate processes with SPM, you can easily integrate with Salesforce to ensure your single source of truth feeds into one of your most crucial sales tools, reducing the time reps spend on administrative tasks like data entry.
Then, when a customer calls in, all you have to do is instantly pull up their information to ensure you understand what they are talking about.
No more searching through emails or files to figure out where the customer is in their buying process or when was the last time they were contacted.
Using Sales Performance Management (SPM) to Increase Sales Productivity
Successful companies know how their business works at a granular level. They know what it takes to bring in revenue and make changes across their organization to improve sales performance.
With intelligent data insights, organizations can identify where the business has the greatest growth potential and determine whether they have the sales resources needed to achieve goals.
Using data, organizations can see how their plans compare with other companies and easily track actual performance versus expectations.
Sales Performance Management (SPM) can be an extremely useful tool to increase sales productivity, but it does more than that. The true benefit of ROI is taking advantage of the wealth of sales data your organization has and turning it into your biggest strategic tool and become a data-driven sales organization.
The more you know about your customers, target demographics, and sales pipeline, the better equipped you'll be to boost your sales team's performance.
Xactly offers both Sales Performance Consulting Services and Sales Performance Management software to help your organization achieve its goals. Contact our team to request a consultation and learn more about our services.
