We all know there is a vast difference between being productive and being “busy.” It is critical to reduce or eliminate
“busy work,” particularly for your well-paid professional sales staff. Left unaddressed, busy work can quickly erode sales and company profits by reducing time for the more important, truly productive work.
- So, are your sales reps productive with their time? Or, are they just “busy”?
- What steps can you take to reduce their admin work?
- How can you maximize their productivity by increasing the time spent selling?
According to the process optimizing company, Nintex, 67% of employees believe their company’s broken processes prevent them from maximizing their potential. This number is even higher for sales reps whose jobs may require them to perform busy work such as: hunting and pecking for leads, inputting leads into a CRM system, or calling on an inaccurate, outdated in-house database. (What a WASTE!)
When reps must perform “busy work,” it is a gross misuse of a valuable, expensive company resource. As a matter of fact, why would you pay a sales rep a professional, premium rate of pay, while they perform busy work?
Consider this: Value-added work for sales professionals includes any function directly related to selling – like developing, nurturing, or closing a sale. All other work is either busy work or rework (a subject for another article!).
SO – how can you MAXIMIZE the amount of time your reps are being productive with laser focus on the value-added work? If you are in charge of a team marketing and selling to corporate training & HR, finding ways to streamline your sales processes is a big first step toward providing your sales team what they really need to succeed.
The following five steps are essentially “low hanging fruit” where you can begin to improve your sales team’s productivity today. Employing these steps will cast a light on where to make impactful improvements quickly to help your salespeople get back on track doing the work that really matters – the SELLING!
- ASSESS – First, assess the daily activities of a typical sales rep. Use a work-timer if needed to capture the actual percentage of time spent on each type of work (i.e. digging for leads, entering data into the CRM, outbound calling, follow-up activities, proposal development, conference calls, etc.).
- CATEGORIZE – Of those work groupings, determine which tasks are truly value-added versus which are “busy work” for your sales reps, and then categorize each accordingly.
- ELIMINATE WASTE – Reduce or eliminate each of the tasks identified as “busy work” for your sales reps.
- What actions do your salespeople perform which could be eliminated, automated, or handed off to a support or admin person?
- The ultimate question is this: How can you free up your sales people’s time to do more selling?
- Some aspects of this step will obviously be more time consuming as you assess and reassign or automate work, but it is critical to begin to remove busy work from your sales team’s list of daily activities.
- TOOLS TO SUCCEED – Provide your sales and marketing people with the tools they need to perform MORE sales activities.
- Is your CRM system set up properly to streamline processes?
- Can you make use of automated workflows in the system to reduce or eliminate repetitive sales activities?
- What other sales aides are needed to accelerate the sales cycle (e.g. videos, sell sheets, infographics, slideshows, etc.)?
- Do reps have ongoing training to leverage best practices used by high-performing reps?
- How does your sales team find qualified decision-maker leads? Do they perform research on B2B networking sites to build lists of contacts one contact at a time? Do they wade through unqualified trade show “leads” or a stale in-house database? Are they assessing contact records from a low-cost/low quality list filled with outdated information, wrong titles and phone numbers? (Document and map out the process details in a flow chart.)
- ELIMINATE BARRIERS – Eliminate barriers to locate qualified decision-makers easily:
- Let’s remove one key barrier to selling right away: STOP making your sales and marketing people dig around for their own leads when they should spend their time SELLING instead. (Tip: They don’t like digging for leads any more than you like paying them high wages to do so!)
- Instead, invest in a high-quality list of decision makers ready for your use!
- If you are selling and marketing to Corporate Training and HR, there is no better resource than the Mentor Tech Group Market Intelligence Database. Provide your reps with access to the most accurate database of Training & HR decision-makers (including phone, email, mailing address, etc.) TO CALL AND EMAIL TODAY. With more than 40,000 highly accurate decision-maker contacts in Training and HR, MTG’s database is second to none!
The bottom line?
By improving the sales process using these steps, you will be able to leverage your sales people’s time and talent in a way like never before. Your salespeople are one of your most valuable assets – so why not give them exactly what they need to SUCCEED? What could the results look like? Employing these steps will allow you to:
- Free up your sales reps’ time so they can spend more time interacting with prospects and customers
- Increase employee engagement and morale
- Decrease absenteeism and attrition
- Increase selling time and sales revenue!
Take proactive steps to help your sales team be PRODUCTIVE with their time (not just “busy”) and your sales revenue will soar!
Of these five steps, what is THE ONE CHANGE that could have a HUGE POSITIVE impact on your sales process and results within the next 30 days? Invest in a HIGH QUALITY, TARGETED DATABASE of decision makers in Corporate Training and HR! We have the exact decision maker records you need.
If you sell and market to Corporate Training and HR, MENTOR TECH GROUP IS THE ONLY DATA RESOURCE YOU NEED. Period.
Mentor Tech Group hand-builds and maintains a top quality database of more than 40,000 decision-maker contacts in Corporate Training, e-Learning, and HR. If you have never used Mentor Tech Group’s market intelligence data, you will be amazed at the accuracy of our database and the quality of our service. We guarantee it.
See what our clients are saying. Then, to learn more, please contact us at (651) 457-8600, Extension 1.
