Improve team productivity with these simple sales enablement tips

In a competitive business environment, sales staff constantly look to improve their performance and increase revenue. In this article, we explore five simple sales enablement strategies: how they can help your team improve productivity; and how to employ them.

Regardless of how well your team is performing, there’s always room for improvement. In today’s competitive business environment, most sales managers are constantly striving to increase sales.

Enhancing team productivity is a key part of this challenge, enabling managers to maximise revenue without significantly increasing resources. Unfortunately, it’s not always as easy as it sounds, with many companies losing sight of just how much time and effort is lost through inefficiency. Without tools to measure, understand and increase productivity, many sales managers are working blind.

Sales enablement strategies can help address this blind spot, providing salespeople with the tools and resources they need to succeed. But what is sales enablement and how can you facilitate your team to boost output?

What is sales enablement?

The basis of any sales enablement strategy is to provide your team with the tools they need to successfully engage the target buyer throughout the buying process. By equipping reps with appropriate information, content, and tools, you can help them to sell more effectively.

The resources you provide will usually fall into two categories: content to be consumed by the buyer; and information for your sales team including resources, processes, and tools that will help them increase their hit rate.

With the right tools and training at their disposal, your sales team will be empowered. Utilising best practice insights can thereby help you increase productivity, scaling your sales organisation beyond a handful of super achievers to drive increased revenue without expanding your team.

Careful analysis of team performance can help you understand which team members are driving growth, which resources will be the most effective, as well as identifying any areas where inefficiency is holding your team back.

How to benchmark productivity?

Benchmarking performance and current productivity is a great place to start for any sales improvement strategy.

Key areas to measure and track include:

• the average sales cycle length
• the number of reps achieving quota
• the average deal size.

Metrics such as these provide an important window into the sales process, but you should also explore productivity on an individual and team level to eliminate inefficiency.

From inconsistent sales strategies to poor prioritisation, lack of communication to distraction, most sales reps fall foul of unhelpful work practices at some point.

To help flag up inefficient activities, a productivity-focused interface can offer enormous benefits. At Strenstone, we currently use a tool called Prodoscore, which allows you to see, measure and monitor productivity so you have an accurate picture of how your sales reps are working.

The software, which overlays existing team tools such as Office 365 and Teams, measures daily activity, providing a simple dashboard score for ease of use. With this real-time information to hand, you’ll have a clear idea of individual performance, helping you to spot best practice, and providing an accurate benchmark for the introduction of sales enablement strategies.

How to enable your team to sell?

The following sales enablement strategies can help your team maximise sales productivity and drive revenue for your organisation.

1. Sales tools

Most sales reps spend a significant amount of time on administrative tasks. By embracing sales tools, however, it is possible to automate repetitive jobs, freeing your team up to sell.

Not only will reps spend more time selling, but sales tools can also reduce human error and improve concentration for sales staff. By removing distractions, such as admin or unnecessary meetings, your team are more likely to accomplish their core sales goals.

Checking in on daily activities via the Prodoscore interface can help you keep staff on track when new routines slip, or users are reluctant to embrace new technology.

2. Best practice

Ensure your team understand sales best practice, the core focus of which is lead qualification.

Many reps waste time chasing poor quality leads that ultimately don’t convert into a sale. This reduces productivity and impacts on employee motivation when efforts fail to yield results.

Qualifying leads using well defined criteria helps to combat this problem by assigning a value to leads, depending on the prospect’s engagement and level of interest. Establishing where the buyer is on their buying journey helps sales staff to use resources wisely, directing their time and effort in the right place, at the right time to get results.

3. Daily goals

Setting daily goals is a simple way to improve sales productivity. Consider setting short-term and long-term goals but be sure to make any targets realistic.

Bear in mind that even the best salesperson can have an off month, however, increasing targets due to one-off poor performance, can have a negative effect. Ensure sales staff are well motivated but avoid loading on the pressure as this can lead to high staff turnover or poor customer service.

Once appropriate goals are set, motivate your team to achieve their quota and provide a plan to help them hit targets.

4. Innovate

With ever-increasing competition, it can be hard for salespeople to keep prospects interested and close the deal.

Sales enablement is all about empowering sales staff to engage the buyer, so make sure all sales staff know who your buyer is and the journey that they are on. Create high quality content to support reps, enabling them to deliver value to multiple buyers in a scalable, controlled way.

Finally, invest in innovation. Make sure you are introducing new tools and techniques and educate your reps about the latest trends in the market.

5. Training

Effective onboarding and ongoing training are the cornerstone of sales productivity. Equipping your staff with the skills to engage buyers is a vital part of your sales enablement strategy.

Remember that while sales reps each have their own unique strengths, it is important to maintain one sales process for all reps, and to communicate this clearly through regular training.

Consistency in following the process will help build a strong foundation for sales productivity, even though individual sales strategies may differ.

Ensure outcomes are monitored

Even the best sales enablement strategy can fizzle fast if no one is assessing how sales use the resources and tools provided to them. As a sales manager, it’s important to insist on the use of best practice, new content, or software amongst those in your sales organisation.

Track, measure and monitor sales activity to ensure strategies are implemented consistently and sales productivity is increasing. Although collecting and collating data manually can be a drain, Strenstone will set up processes to make this task simple.

With productivity data available in real-time, it’s easy to observe and assess individual performance, even if your sales team is performing well as a whole. Accountability for everyone in the team helps manage and optimise your sales organisation, ensuring you uncover new opportunities for improved performance and increased revenue.

Interested in seeing how Strenstone can support your sales teams? Request a Discovery & Demo call with a senior consultant. They will explain and demonstrate how you can layer productivity intelligence over your cloud-based systems.