Sales team! They are the frontline business saviors. While all the other departments make an effort in the background, they are the ones who engage with customers and ensure that every effort of every team converts into sales.
Thus, they must remain at the top of the game. But how is it possible? Most of their time goes into arranging meetings, emailing, and planning upcoming meetings and demos. All these activities are essential but not productive for a sales rep. The productivity of a sales team correlates with the time spent on actual selling.
By eliminating the in-between hurdles, you can increase your sales team’s productivity. Let me tell you how. It won’t be easy. You will need technology or, to put it more precisely, a Dynamics 365 field mapping tool as your partner. The tips below will help you understand it better.
Alright! Let’s start.
Automate Repetitive Tasks
Do you know that sales reps spend only one-third of their time selling?
Rest, 21% is spent on writing emails, 17% on entering data, 12% on internal meetings, and the remaining 12% on scheduling calls.
That’s doing no justice to their actual task.
While giving 100% to the selling task won’t be practical, increasing the time spent by more than 50% can be possible. The simplest way to do it is to automate their tedious tasks. Every administrative task, like sending emails, logging data, scheduling meetings and appointments manually, can be automated with a sales tool. You can even use tools like Dynamics 365 field mapping to auto-schedule, optimize the route, and share detail visually.
Stop Multitasking
While multitasking sounds great, it’s the most unproductive way to work. Besides, jumping from one task to another, trying to balance out everything, ends up in exhaustion.
Thus, encourage your sales team to handle one task at a time. It might be to cluster and wrap all the phone calls or send out the emails. Make sure they finish one before jumping to another.
Likewise, it would be better if they could handle the entire work in one place. Dynamics 365 field mapping, a tool for sales teams, ensures that your team never misses an appointment and maps all the records with maximum efficiency.
Lead Automation
Sales reps spend a lot of time sourcing leads. And once they are in, the sales manager spends the other half on manually assigning them to sales reps. It means the time that can be utilized to close the deals is wasted on unnecessary work.
The sales reps first need to analyze the geographical and behavioral characteristics. Based on it, they can create a list of prioritized accounts. Dynamics CRM field mapping makes it more manageable. It provides a lead scoring feature that assigns a score to the leads based on different criteria. The highest scoring can then be your first bid.
As for the sales manager, the way to efficiency would be territory defining. Instead of rotating manually, sales reps can be given a particular territory, and the rep would handle the leads within the area. Again, Dynamics 365 field mapping jumps in with its territory management feature. It’s just what you require.
Pro tip: While marketing and catching up with leads, make sure that your database syncs with your CRM.
Communicate with the Team
To turn a lead, the sales team should provide relevant content and stay updated with the marketing trends. This is possible only when both sales and marketing teams communicate and create an overall plan.
Have your sales and marketing team research, identify pain points, strategize, and define a “quality lead” together. Also, content plays an important role. Ask your marketing team to add ideas to the content creation pipeline. They would ensure that there’s actionable content.
An internal discussion with other teams is also a good idea to have a gist of business flow. Encourage all your teams to have internal communication.
Track Performance and Records
How do your sales team divide their time? Often, it’s about spending two hours on selling and an hour on administration tasks – creating contacts, logging tasks, creating opportunities, and so on.
If they can cut on this administrative work, they would be able to sell more. And you can measure their performance.
How can you do this?
Integrate the Dynamics CRM field mapping tool that allows data updating, real-time reporting, and performance measurement. It provides a custom dashboard for you and your sales team to track every detail at once.
With real-time tracking, you can follow up on your team and see where they’re heading. This check-in and check-out feature help you avoid micromanagement, which usually hampers productivity.
Invest in Sales Tools
All the businesses are turning digital, and so are the customers. It is the reason why your sales team should have all the necessary tools like a sales management mobile app, CRM, and others.
People like to buy while on the go. And thus enable your sales team to sell the product/services instantly. That’s not the only benefit of having a sales tool. With it, the sales team can automate all the manual tasks like administration work, communicating with the teams, sourcing leads, and more.
The sales tool would also help them generate more leads and spend quality time on productive tasks.
One Last Tip
Productivity doesn’t come by saying, “Be productive,” or giving out a motivational lecture. You need to make efforts for your sales team to be productive. You need to invest your time and money in it. With proper guidance, training, and tools, you can direct your sales team to do what they do best, i.e., sell more. In this journey, the tips along with a sales tool like Dynamics CRM field mapping can be more beneficial. However, always check what works for you!
