{"id":161170,"date":"2022-06-15T07:14:44","date_gmt":"2022-06-15T05:14:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zenkit.com\/blog\/techniques-to-increase-productivity-in-your-sales-team\/"},"modified":"2025-09-18T04:22:51","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T02:22:51","slug":"techniques-to-increase-productivity-in-your-sales-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenkit.com\/zh-hant\/blog\/techniques-to-increase-productivity-in-your-sales-team\/","title":{"rendered":"Techniques to Increase Productivity in Your Sales Team"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Techniques<\/p>\n

In today\u2019s fast-paced working environments, everyone seems to have too much to do and too little time to do it. Being able to effectively prioritize, plan, and streamline your work is essential in promoting productivity. Furthermore, it is just as important in sales as it is in any other business discipline to instil a sense of success.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Though you may already have a good system in place for organizing your personal workload and sales funnel, if you\u2019re leading a sales department, your team will be looking to you for guidance on how to ensure maximum efficiency and effectiveness.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Knowing how to prioritize, plan, and streamline your sales team and their productivity is just as important as it would be for any other business discipline.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In a 2022 report on The State of Prospecting<\/a>, Sopro explained that: \u201cThe two biggest digital marketing challenges companies of all industries face are lead quality and generating enough leads. Email is the number one channel for driving leads. Prospecting is best used for businesses that don\u2019t have a reliable lead flow, or who are looking to expand and want a manageable lead flow for their sales team, without the huge competition and costs associated with PPC.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

In today\u2019s post, we\u2019ll take a closer look at productivity within modern sales teams, the challenges that tend to stifle it, and the best things you can do to supercharge the productivity of your team. Let\u2019s get started!<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Measuring Sales Productivity<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Today, sales managers have access to more data regarding the productivity of their teams than at any other point in history. However, a relatively small proportion of employers are actually using this data to monitor productivity, fearing that overbearing management methods <\/span>could harm the general work ethic<\/span><\/a> with a huge proportion of workers settling into a permanent work-from-home model.<\/span><\/p>\n

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It’s important to implement a reliable and healthy means of measuring your sales team’s productivity.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Though you certainly shouldn\u2019t be aiming to turn into Big Brother, by measuring the KPIs that are truly indicative of your team\u2019s productivity, you\u2019ll put yourself in a much stronger position for <\/span>recognising weaknesses and bottlenecks<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and taking steps to quash them.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n \n

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Measuring What Matters<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The activities of any given sales team can be categorized neatly into three groups:<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Sales Efficiency: <\/b>This covers time spent on all the \u2018background\u2019 tasks that make nurturing leads and closing deals possible, such as updating and organizing your CRM, planning and creating content, and searching for assets.<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Sales Effectiveness: <\/b>This category encompasses the middle portion of most companies\u2019 sales funnel, with time spent on activities such as email correspondence with prospects, making calls, fine-tuning and sending out proposals, and other face-to-face activities that help nurture leads.<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. Sales Performance: <\/b>This category is where deals are closed, and covers the more \u2018meaty\u2019 results that the upper echelons of your company are most interested in: the percentage of sales reps who are hitting their targets, the average value of a deal, and the win rate.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    \"\"<\/a>
    Any given sales team’s activities can be neatly divided into three categories.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    Whether through the analytics on your CRM, a separate <\/span>project management platform<\/span><\/a>, or another DIY system, you should have a system in place for monitoring these kinds of KPIs closely in order to give you a good starting point for identifying weak spots and improving your sales team\u2019s productivity. This brings us to the next step in the process\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

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    Auditing the Current Productivity of Your Sales Team<\/strong><\/h2>\n

    Before you do anything to actively improve your team\u2019s productivity, you\u2019ll first need to run a thorough audit and establish benchmarks for performance. Here\u2019s a step-by-step overview of how you should go about this.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Step 1: Auditing Regular Sales Activity<\/strong><\/h3>\n

    Start your audit by creating a comprehensive list of all the activities that members of your sales team partake in during the course of a normal working week.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Proposals and calls will likely be at the front of your mind, but make sure that you\u2019re getting as granular as possible in this phase, and not brushing over the smaller, more \u201croutine\u201d admin tasks like organizing CRM views and replying to emails.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    Though the impact of these things may seem insignificant at first glance, inefficiencies in these \u2018smaller\u2019 tasks can all add up, and represent a significant drain on time if you don\u2019t take steps to remedy them.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Step 2: Assign Values to Tasks Based on Their Impact<\/strong><\/h3>\n

    Here, the \u2018impact\u2019 of a given sales activity refers to its direct correlation to how effective your team is at closing deals. Though everything your sales team does is likely essential, some activities are obviously going to have a greater impact on the KPIs that your higher-ups are going to be chasing you for.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Now that you\u2019ve run an inventory of all the activities that are routinely carried out by your sales team, <\/span>sort them based on impact<\/span><\/a> so that you\u2019re able to draw a line roughly through the middle, separating high impact activities from low impact activities.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

    The activities that are designated \u201chigh impact\u201d should be anything that actively moves prospects down the sales funnel, such as account research, proposal drafting, and calls. \u201cLow impact\u201d activities, on the other hand, are pieces of work that are still necessary but don\u2019t have the same immediate effect on progressing a deal, like CRM admin, reports, and company-wide meetings.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Step 3: Categorize by Urgency<\/strong><\/h3>\n

    Urgency is closely related to, but not the same as, impact and will have a profound effect on the way you prioritize activities carried out by your sales team, based on factors like the ability of team members to outsource the activity and its correlation to driving revenue.<\/span><\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a>
    There is some overlap between urgency and impact, and understanding how to categorize your team’s activities is an important step.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    The activities of most sales teams can be categorized as follows:<\/span><\/p>\n