When sales managers are looking to increase revenue, they typically concentrate on getting more qualified leads, more conversations, and more deals. Unfortunately, sales reps are often spending much of their time putting out fires, running between prospects and clients, attending meetings with management and marketing, and hunting for new leads. The good news is that your sales reps don’t need to work harder, or longer hours, but they do need to be more efficient. In this post, we will talk tips for sales time management that will create efficiencies for your sales reps, while boosting their ability to generate more revenue.
SCHEDULE REP DAYS/TASKS
Your reps know when they’re at their best and which tasks they can do easily and which ones they dread. Take this into consideration and schedule your reps’ days so that they are performing their sales and administrative tasks at the best time for each task. For example, if they have a lot of email to check each day, they may want to do that first thing in the morning or when prospects are not generally available. If you find that your prospects and customers are more open to talking to your reps towards the second half of the day, schedule their calls then. If they need to sharpen a proposal, then have them do it at slower times during the day when they can afford to be away from the phone. You should determine the best times for calls. Salesvue’s analytics can give you insight into the best times to call by day, job title, industry and more, so that your sales reps get into more conversations.GET REFERRALS
Marketing delivers leads, but finding leads is also part of a sales rep’s job. To maximize the number of closed deals, it’s essential for reps to temper the time spent searching for new leads and nurturing the ones who may turn into valuable customers. By asking your customers for referrals, your sales reps will get to follow up on leads who have already heard about your product from a loyal customer, while saving valuable time on prospecting and qualifying leads. If you still need more convincing, consider these statistics:- According to a Nielsen study on trust, 84% of buyers are mostly influenced by recommendations from friends and family, making referrals the most effective tool salespeople have for cold calling.
- A Wharton School of Business study found that customers won through referrals are about 24% more profitable than other customers, and the speed at which referred customers churn and leave is about 18 % lower than that of other customers.
- Texas Tech University found that 83% of those polled are willing to refer after a positive experience—yet only 29% actually do.
STAY SOCIAL SAVVY WITH PROSPECTING
While sales reps understand the value of social media in finding new leads, they may not have the time to engage with people online. Salesforce Marketing Cloud is one way to stay on top of what’s happening on social channels. ADP, a Fortune 500 company that provides a wide range of corporate and human resources services, uses Marketing Cloud to keep up with social interactions and identify leads. Marketing Cloud is like a virtual scout, culling information on leads and funneling it to Sales Cloud, so sales teams are pursuing only the most promising prospects. Salesvue is native to Salesforce, so while Salesforce Marketing Cloud is funneling your leads into Salesforce, Salesvue can instantly pick up these leads and put them into a cadence while keeping all your prospect data secure.LOG ACTIVITY
To save time trying to recollect what transpired during the last touch, sales reps should log their activity as it happens. Make sure to record who they spoke to, who they tried calling but failed to reach, who asked them to call back later, and who gave them a positive response. When your reps know where they stand at the end of each contact, picking up from where they left off becomes easier and speeds time to better conversations that result in more closed deals. While sales leaders would agree on the importance of recording activity, 71% of reps say they spend too much time doing data entry. Logging activity should be easy for reps, or they will end up spending more time on it than they should. Salesvue makes logging calls and recording activities very simple and stress-free. You can log calls with the click of a button, track leads and log calls, as well as detail how the call ended and whether a conversation happened. Save over an hour each day in logging activities with Salesvue. Plus, save even more time by automatically triggering other activities based on the outcomes of these calls, such as automatically sending a follow-up email or scheduling a task to follow-up.ELIMINATE COMMON TIME-HOGS
Searching for documents gobbles up valuable time that could otherwise be spent in conversations with prospects and customers. According to a Hubspot article, a study revealed that “31% of reps' time is spent searching for or creating content.” When documents are stored in Google Drive, SharePoint and Microsoft OneDrive for Business, workers end up playing a virtual shell game, trying to remember where they last saw what they currently need. Sales reps need the appropriate content at the right time through the entire sales cycle. With Salesvue, set up email templates with content attached and ready to be sent with a single click, and save significant time that can be used for conversations instead. Another common time suck is irrelevant emails. If you rely on Microsoft Outlook as your primary method of communication across all departments, your sales reps might be bombarded with emails that aren’t relevant, but may still have to take the time to read them. Salesforce’s Chatter app eliminates all the extra information that can decrease productivity. With Chatter, you can create groups and include only the employees who need to be in on the discussion. Within groups, you can share files, videos and include customers, which is a helpful feature for sales teams that need regular input from clients.GET SALESVUE
Salesvue has proven to increase productivity, efficiency and rep happiness. Here’s what just a few of our satisfied customers said about us on Salesforce AppExchange: “ I love how my days’ activities are already laid out. Follow up reminders on the same page too makes it easier to remember to get back with someone. Just an overall wonderful application for increasing productivity.” —CHRIS D “If your sales team struggles with the organization of prospecting, updating Salesforce activities, tracking productive vs. unproductive sales reps, identifying how many touches are needed to get to a meeting/sale, tracking what messaging is resonating with your targets, then you should look at Salesvue.” —TINA C “Salesvue has made me much more efficient, and helps me stay organized!” —KALEE G “Our rookie and veteran team members alike love Salesvue. It automates the contact flow while also allowing them freedom and empowerment to make touch-points and track progress as needed. The ability to segment your client base also allows for more flexibility and a more custom approach to how we manage relationships and see to customer success. Reps love the ease of use, and our leadership team loves the consistency that this tool brings to our client experience efforts.” —SASHA W Sales time management is challenging, and leaders and reps need the best technology to increase efficiency, so they can engage prospects and customers across the sales life cycle (and close more deals). To see how Salesvue can help you with your sales time management, get a personalized demo.
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