5 tips to radically improve your sales productivity

Getting smart at sales productivity means maximizing your time and that of your sales team. Which of your daily tasks actually lead to profitable conversions – aimlessly scanning your social profiles, striving to achieve inbox zero (pfft), or making that one sales call you’ve been putting off? We hereby invite you to cut the noise. By streamlining processes and eliminating busywork, you can begin embracing a more productive & profitable workflow.

1. Work smart

To work smart is to embrace automation. If sales pitches could be successfully computer generated, we’d all be out of a job, because they can do pretty much everything else faster and more efficiently than most humans can. So why not let them? Implement great systems to do the menial work, so you can focus on what you’re good at – selling!

At the root of every successful business is a great CRM and it’s not only management who stand to benefit from its use. Your CRM is the first step in streamlining your work processes. Save time and money by creating a sales ecosystem, where one great tool complements another.

2. Strategise first, execute later

It’s a catch 22, you dive headfirst into a task under the guise of being productive, only to hit a wall an hour in, inevitably having to stop and reevaluate your whole approach. Smart people strategize first and execute later. Having a plan of action for what you want to accomplish for the day is the best way to get yourself motivated. 

“Sometimes the biggest gain in productive energy will come from cleaning the cobwebs, dealing with old business, and clearing the desks—cutting loose debris that’s impeding forward motion.”—David Allen

3. Quit multi-tasking

While it may feel like you’re accomplishing more, studies show that multi-taskers are much less productive. Why not leave the juggling to the clown folk and learn to prioritize your work. It’s the first lesson in productivity; by dividing larger tasks into smaller more measurable tasks you’re more likely to succeed. So why not apply this same ideology to sales?

By using the OnePageCRM Next Action Sales methodology, your focus is always on that one Next Action required to move a sale forward. By encouraging up-front decision-making, you’re instantly more productive. What’s more, as your Action Stream displays your sales actions in order of urgency, you maintain constant clarity and focus.

4. Get smart at social listening

Nowadays to get social is to get smart.

As it turns out, all that time spent trolling social profiles wasn’t a complete waste of your day. In fact, social listening is now wholly encouraged by sales managers who view social media as an invaluable resource for gleaning insights into the market. Now let’s be clear, we’re not suggesting you spend an hour of your day creeping on your best friend’s work colleague and pawn it off as ‘market research’. We’re talking smart, efficient use of social listening tools to gain real market insights.

Social media management tools like Hootsuite, are great for targeted lead generation. You can also use Lead Clipper to parse contact data from social media profiles and create new contacts directly in your CRM in one click. This is especially useful if you are looking for clients on Twitter, or Xing, or any other networking platform.

If you’re using Twitter or LinkedIn for prospecting or staying in touch with your clients, it’s called social selling. To put it simply, social selling is a process of building relationships with potential and existing clients via social media. Social selling isn’t a new concept. It’s very similar to networking but can be done with the help of social media tools and should focus on quality not quantity.

5. Colleagues vs. Competition

As a salesperson who are you really competing against? The days of cross-departmental competition are thankfully long since passed. Collaboration and the open flow of information are key to company-wide success. Aligning your sales and marketing teams is by far the most productive change you can implement in an organization. It’s the perfect marriage of knowledge and practice. The marketing team have an acute understanding of market trends, customer behaviours and spending power. Your sales teams know your real customers, they’re the guys on the ground, building relationships.