Sales productivity may measure how effectively your sales team turns its time and resources into revenue.
But knowing how to increase sales productivity requires more than simply asking reps to work harder. You need to have efficiency, focus, and the right technology.
Want to know how to improve sales productivity within your organization?
Keep reading to learn more about improving your sales productivity and 15 strategies that actually make a difference.
What is Sales Productivity?
Sales productivity is how efficiently a sales team turns its time and resources into sales results. It looks at both sales output and the amount of effort required to achieve that output.
A productive sales team is one that spends more of its time on activities that move prospects through the sales process, such as prospecting, having conversations with qualified buyers, conducting demonstrations, and closing deals.
Why is Sales Productivity Important?
Sales productivity is important because it directly affects how much revenue a sales team can generate with its available time and resources. When reps spend less time on administrative work, they have more time to engage prospects.
Higher sales productivity can help businesses:
- Increase sales output
- Reduce manual processes
- Improve sales efficiency with streamlined workflows
- Shorten sales cycles by removing bottlenecks
- Scale sales operations as the organization grows
What Impacts Sales Productivity?
Now that we know why sales productivity is important, let’s take a look at what actually impacts it the most. In general, sales productivity is about getting more valuable sales work done with the resources available at your disposal.
This means that some of the factors influencing it include:
- Time Management: How much time reps spend selling versus performing administrative tasks.
- Sales Processes: How efficiently leads move through the sales funnel.
- Morale: How the sales reps and teams feel.
- Technology: Whether sales tools automate repetitive tasks and make information easier to access.
- Training: How effectively reps are equipped to perform their roles.
- Data Quality: Whether reps have accurate customer and prospect information.
15 Ways to Increase Sales Productivity
Ready to find out how to increase the efficiency of your sales team? Here are 15 ways to increase sales productivity that actually make an impact.
1. Get Sales Reps Involved from the Start
The best way to create an organization that helps reps sell better is to figure out what your team needs in order to sell more effectively. Gather rep feedback on their work environments, training sessions, enablement materials, incentive plans, etc.
This empowers them to work in the most productive way possible and have the tools and resources they need to hit their quota. It also ensures they understand goals laid out in the comp plan and the actions they need to take to succeed.
2. Clearly Communicate Goals and Priorities
Clarity amongst the sales team is essential. They must be able to prioritize accounts, deals, and actions in order to make progress towards their individual quota and contribute to company goals.
A good place to start is by optimizing your sales plan rollout strategy so you can effectively communicate from the start and have the processes in place to continuously analyze performance.
3. Rethink Your Sales Compensation Plans
You want sales compensation plans to motivate, push reps to succeed, and ideally, exceed their quota. Make sure that they align with goals and individual sales roles, encourage the right behaviors, and use industry data as a benchmark.
Doing so will help your sales incentives be competitive enough to attract and retain top talent.
4. Automate Incentive Compensation Management (ICM)
Managing incentives is a critical piece of successful revenue organizations. Manually calculating compensation can take upwards of six weeks to complete, which is a waste of valuable time and resources. But automating Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) helps you better measure the effectiveness of your incentives, allowing for continuous analysis and faster decision-making.
5. Optimize Your Sales Process
An optimized sales process allows reps to spend less time going through unnecessary steps and more time selling.
With a clear, consistent process for selling, you'll be able to not only reduce repetitive tasks and minimize bottlenecks but also make it easier for reps to move opportunities through the pipeline.
As processes become more efficient, sales teams can dedicate more time to revenue-generating activities.
6. Leverage Sales Tools and AI
Sales tools can support productivity by automating routine work, organizing data, and providing greater visibility into each opportunity. They also give sales leaders better insight into how they can improve sales performance and find areas where reps may need support.
Note: Use sales technology powered by AI to improve sales efficiency even more. Use it to analyze customer data, prioritize leads, summarize sales conversations, and even orchestrate sales performance as a whole.
7. Create a Structured Sales Pipeline
Having a structured sales pipeline gives you a clear view of where each opportunity stands and what you need to do next to move them forward.
To increase efficiency, make sure to:
- Define consistent pipeline stages
- Set clear criteria for moving opportunities between stages
- Prioritize opportunities based on deal value, buyer intent, and closing probability
If your pipeline isn’t helping you spend more time on high-value opportunities while reducing time spent managing deals, you have room to improve sales productivity.
8. Design Effective Sales Territories
Designing sales territories gives your sales teams more manageable workloads. How? Simple! It’s easier for them to narrow their selling activities and identify the accounts that contribute most to their business objectives.
Note: You can also improve sales team productivity by grouping similar prospects to make outreach and account management more efficient.
9. Automate Sales Quota Creation
Automating sales quotas can reduce the time you spend calculating targets and updating spreadsheets. Naturally, this speeds up the sales process and productivity.
Because the automation removes administrative tasks, you’re able to spend more time on other sales activities.
Time spent on quota management can be spent on scenario modeling, performance analysis, or territory balancing.
10. 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.
But if you operate with a 3% error rate, $15M is being mishandled and incorrectly paid in compensation. That's a large amount of money and a huge sales compensation mistake.
Automating incentive compensation can significantly reduce the need for sales shadowing while also reducing the need to review sales commission accuracy. The result is a faster, more efficient, and more productive sales organization.
11. Provide More Visibility
When you give sales reps more visibility into their compensation, your reps can see the commissions they earned. This motivates them to reach goals and thus increases sales productivity.
Leadership can also use the data to measure sales performance fully and completely, giving leadership access to customizable reports and course-correct to keep on track with goals, if needed.
12. Enhance Team Collaboration and Strategy
When your sales team operates as one, deals close faster. Encourage reps to share what's working well with other reps: winning email templates, proven strategies, objection-handling techniques.
If it works for one rep, it can work for others.
And if you keep that knowledge in circulation, the entire sales team gets a huge advantage.
13. Develop Your Sales Coaching
A high-performing sales team is built through consistent, structured coaching. The more you dig into call recordings, performance metrics, and role-play scenarios, the more your reps begin to sharpen their skills.
However, it’s important not to provide general feedback.
Personalize it as best as you can. That way, you can help reps build specific sales skills they need to build confidence that shows up in conversations.
14. Align Sales and Marketing
Silos between sales and marketing often lead to wasted resources and lost opportunities. To avoid this from happening and to increase your sales productivity, you should make sure to clearly define what constitutes a sales-qualified lead (SQL).
If marketing knows what types of leads you need, you make it easier for them to know who to target as marketing qualified leads (MQLs).
This alignment then helps both teams generate high-quality leads that increase the overall productivity of the sales pipeline.
15. Use a CRM with SPM Software Integration
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms can help increase sales productivity by themselves. But when automating processes with Sales Performance Management (SPM) integrations, you can further improve productivity by creating a single source of truth that reduces the time reps spend on administrative tasks like data entry.
Then, when a customer calls in, you don’t have to shuffle through the CRM files to figure out where the customer is in the buying process, where they’re located, or when they last spoke to a rep.
Instead, it’s all right in front of you.
Use Xactly to Increase Your Sales Productivity
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