Salespeople often waste their time and resources in day-to-day work lives. When efficiency is reduced, sales performance is also reduced.
Building efficient sales practices allow you to obtain a higher ROI through reduced costs and greater performance. All businesses can do more to boost their sales, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be complicated.
To improve sales efficiency, you need first to enhance your employee management because your employees are the ones who will make those sales happen. Therefore, your focus should be on solving your employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention problems.
On the other hand, you need to implement a customer loyalty program as loyalty is important when it comes to sales. Remember, it’s easier and less expensive to market to your current customers rather than acquiring new ones.
Events can boost profits and sales, build your brand, spread brand awareness, and establish connections between you and your customers.
Luckily, Facebook’s implementation of events has changed the way businesses market their events. Now, creating an event is so simple that it’d be a missed opportunity not to use Facebook Events for your brand. Just be sure to use the right Facebook event photo size to build strong visuals throughout your event, and you’ll be all set!
With all that said, let’s check out the ten best ways to improve your sales performance and efficiency.
#1: Streamline With Technology
It’s not easy to achieve efficiency when your salespeople have to spend most of their time inputting data, making reports, and finishing other administrative tasks. This takes time away from selling your product/service.
Reducing the time spent on administrative duties is beneficial to your bottom line.
There are many sales enablement tools that reduce the time spent on creating reports to ensure the reps can utilize that time to sell. Technology simplifies your administrative process and lets you and your team focus on other important matters.
#2: Create a Stellar Sales Team
Evaluate your current sales team.
Identify if someone’s not performing well or struggling with the current workload. Perhaps it’s time you added more members to the team so that everyone feels less overwhelmed. Incorporating more reps to your team will boost sales efficiently when tasks are evenly distributed.
When you’re hiring more salespeople, make sure to look for reps who have incredible time management and organization skills. Also, ensure that all reps balance each other out.
For instance, if your closers are not selling because they’re already working on building presentations and inputting data, consider recruiting a junior sales assistant or sales rep so he/she can take care of these tasks.
Build a stellar sales team with the right team members, and you’ll improve sales efficiency in no time.
#3: Combine Sales and Marketing
Combining sales and marketing is the best thing you can do to boost your sales team’s efficiency.
These two teams are mostly in their own fields, working alone. However, they have a lot more in common than what you might think.
When your sales and marketing teams are working together to share content, data intelligence, and customer queries and complaints, the sales team will be more efficient to sell as it will have the right assets, information, and data.
#4: Clarify Your Sales Process
An effective sales process requires a yin-yang approach.
It cannot be overengineered to the point where it becomes complicated, nor can it be avoided since sales reps will get confused about what they’re doing.
A standardized process determines how to approach and work with clients to close sales. When the process is complicated, sales reps won’t truly understand how to approach clients and customers.
You need to provide guidance to steer clear of a “trial and error” process, arrange regular training sessions, and repeat this to achieve positive outcomes each time.
Your sales team will be able to work more efficiently with clearly defined steps. The right data, training, preparation, and communication among your sales department will make all steps of the sales process clear and concise—this way, your salespeople won’t waste their time on ineffective tasks.
#5: Perform A/B Testing
Every business is unique, and so are their consumers; therefore, you need to learn how to deal with difficult customers on your site.
Remember, different strategies work for different businesses. By A/B testing, you can define what works best for you and speed up your website accordingly.
Below are different tests you can perform across your site:
- Test using fewer fields in your contact form—this will promote a positive result.
- Test different headlines, and you’ll notice pages leap from a 1% conversion rate to 4.5% just by figuring out the headlines at the top of your traffic-heavy landing pages.
- Change the text in your call-to-action buttons—this simple yet significant change may result in a 2-to-3%increase in your conversions.
- Try replacing the stock images you have across your website with more candid photos of your employees or business.
#6: Create A Simple Homepage
It’s better to showcase fewer items on your homepage.
According to Entrepreneur, offering fewer products or services on your homepage with more text describing a specific topic will boost your overall sales.
This method works like a charm as it allows you to focus on one or two products at a time and answer any queries your visitors may have.
#7: Set Up a Live Chat
Live chat tools are one of the best ways to generate sales in today’s world of eCommerce.
You can also use live chat to address any queries your customers may have.
Live chat will help you get an instant response, so it’s more likely to be used by an online shop than a contact form. According to LinkedIn, all types of brands can benefit from live chat tools, even businesses that don’t generate sales through their website.
Another big advantage of live chat is that you can actually use it to capture email addresses. So, if you want to increase your sales, consider setting up a live chat tool right away.
#8: Build Trust and Loyalty With Case Studies, Testimonials, and Associations
Most businesses are already aware of the importance of social proof. If you still don’t have a way to promote customer trust and loyalty on your business website, you’re missing out on a whole lot of rewards.
Informative, relevant things like images of your staff, testimonials, and case studies about your products or services help to convince your customers to choose you instead of your competitors.
#9: Convey Your Objections
A great way to improve your website’s quality is to address any questions or objections that cannot be answered directly via content that’s already available.
According to the Harvard Business Review, it’s more important to focus on keeping up with your customers—not your competition.
Take a moment to go through your website and create a list of any hesitations you think your visitors may have based on the content available. Evaluate your site strictly in this step—don’t simply assume that your visitors will easily find all the answers they need.
When everything is easily accessible, provide the right solution to the problems you uncovered—this will help to boost conversions across your business, as well as make your site more user-friendly.
#10: Communicate
Communication is key.
Besides everything we mentioned above, you need to have strong communication with your team.
The lack of communication makes it difficult to know what’s working and what isn’t. You need to ask your sales reps for feedback regularly—this will give you a better idea of areas that require improvement or what can be eliminated completely.
Your reps know what’s killing their time. Ask them where they’re wasting resources, where your processes could be enhanced, and which tools would help them provide enough time to sell.
Wrapping Up
No two sales companies are alike. What boosts efficiency is one business will be ineffective in another.
Look to your sales team for answers, and implement the changes required, whether it’s doing away with weekly/monthly meetings or adding another system or strategy in place that’s currently missing.
As you can see, there are several ways you can improve sales efficiency and increase conversions. The tactics explained above are the most effective and surefire strategies applied by many large and small businesses that drive real results.
Did you find this article helpful? Share your thoughts and suggestions with us in the comments below regarding how to improve sales efficiency.