You can easily get a million advice from as many free advisers who are waiting to prove their intellect by giving you tips. Even if they don’t know what the talk is all about. Every human sees the world differently and finds different probabilities and possibilities. Yet, it doesn’t mean it will be helpful. ‘Free advice’ is like freebies, can help but not sufficient. People pour suggestions on how to increase sales productivity, irrespective of its relevance in process of sales.
Then there is a tussle about those millions of advice you got, sometimes by a random person passing by even if you hadn’t asked for it. They impose themselves and their views with a scary confidence that haunts you for days. Such people often leave you really doubtful about knowledge.
I am rather a rationalist in my approach because I think logics at least give you supportive evidence to lead you to a solution that is practical and feasible. When you talk about sales, I would reach out to the elementary process of conducting sales and the relevance of answer with respective factors.
I believe productivity is easy if you determine the credibility of a process. The concept of Karma is really unambiguous and uncompromising. What you do is inevitably going to decide what you may get. So, whatever you do must be appropriate and chances of failure will always be lesser.
We should rather nurture a tree when it is growing so that it is rooted nicely. A plant will be in the most strong and healthy state if it is deeply rooted. Using medicinal substitutes or growth promoters alone will not help after the plant is fully grown. Supplements are just those freebies. They can never replace the whole process. In every sphere of life, there are fundamentals which one should always respect. You can’t let your roots weak if you wish to hold the ground for long.
The sale is a major part of the business and it becomes even more important due to the fact that it single-handedly determines the revenue that your business makes. Hence, I oppose the idea of changing business strategies on a free advice of some random stranger that passes by you. Nobody can ever know your business better than you yourself know. So just know these fundamentals and plan your moves accordingly for a productive sales model.
Factors Affecting Sales Productivity
No business can bear fruits without a proper setup. These are few genuine factors that are practically influential in sales and play a commendable role in increasing the productivity of sales. The better your sales productivity, the higher become your revenues.
The immediate requirement of any business failing at sales is to make a better plan that is suitable to your necessities. Though people may find it hard, it isn’t if you know what you need to do to achieve sales. It is really hard to implement a plan exactly in the way want but things are difficult if you don’t get expected results right from the beginning. But again, it is all about the feasibility of your plan.
Like when we are discussing sales, there are few basic factors which your sales plan should always pay a heed.
Transparency
When you don’t have an idea where the ball is, then how the hell can you kick it? To make sure that you hit the ball right, you must see it clearly. The transparency is your visibility in the sales process.
Many businesses fail to keep a track on the activities of its field force while they work on the field. The reason is obviously a practical one. Any team may not work productively if the Manager is unaware of their activities. It is highly critical to adopt a transparent plan for conducting your sales.
How to get it Right?
The technology has simplified too many things in our lives. It is high time you use the innovative tools and technologies to increase sales productivity. The GPS tracking system is one of the best ways to keep a track of progress made by your employee at a given point of time. You know that every smartphone has in built GPS location tracker which works just accurate.
Accessibility
If you want to manage your sales team, you must find a reliable and stable access to reach them within a few seconds. For instance, there are occasions when you need to convey an information to your team member but he isn’t available somehow.
A thorough accessibility is vital for a manager to notice anything important about a given work to a specific employee or even the whole team if required. There are many people who have this tendency to avoid picking up calls deliberately, then there are those who keep their mobile muted for unknown reasons. There are a lot more reasons of no particular relevance but still, it is productivity which gets impacted.
How to get it Right?
The best way to keep the accessibility intact is by using a stable medium of interactions which is specifically dedicated to the sales team. A few Sales Management App like Teamspoor are offering such services through a reliable cloud-based messenger which is solely for the manager and his team. While other notifications may be ignored by your field force but not if it is a specific messenger dedicated for the field work.
Control & Coordination
The primary weapon of a productive team is its control and coordination. The manager is supposed to play a critical role in establishing an equilibrium between the members of his team. If a manager wants to extract better results, he should at least maintain a proper coordination within the team members.
Control and coordination are decisively important for increasing the productivity of a sales team. It ensures that the workflow is equally distributed among the various members and all the distributed work is seamlessly embedded together without any mix-up.
How to get it Right?
To maintain control and coordination consistently is one of the messiest tasks that one can think of. The Manager can utilize Employee Monitoring Systems for keeping the progress of his whole team under check and tweak when necessary.
Time & Resource Efficiency
Your Sales is about selling and making a profit out of it. Whenever you take more than a specified time in the sales process, you are not only losing your probable sales but you are also reducing the profit which you ideally make on each sale.
There is a certain limit in sales. This is the reason sales team are mostly assigned targets. That simply means you have to invest a limited time and resource per sale. When your sales team takes more time on an average sale, it is just cutting your profit. Sales productivity is only achieved if you make the best use of time and resources. If you end up spending more than the expected resources, your business will dry up even if you do get sales, because the sales will not make any significant profit.
If you use too many resources on a sale, again you are just investing more on each sale which reduces the profit which you ideally planned. You don’t have to hire 10 employees if you don’t have too many leads. You should rather try to hire 3 or 4 employees and ensure that those 3 or 4 are not wasting time. You have to make your sales process cost and time efficient if you want to make more profit per sale. That is ultimately going to be a big factor if you are a developing business.
How to get it Right?
Managing time and resources in the field sales isn’t practically feasible. To maintain a balance of time and resource consumption, you need to invest on a real-time sales activity tracker that keeps a record of the time your employees spend on field duties. The record easily gives you an insight into whatever each member of the team was doing while he was away for his field work.
Accountability
The aged field reporting is nothing more than a formality. It is unaccountable and irrelevant due to the unavoidable delay which your team members can only give once they report back in the office. That is definitely not good for your sales productivity.
And there is no way you could judge if the report is factual or manipulated. You just have to go with the report irrespective to its credibility. What else can you do? Nothing, there is no option as such. You can’t go with the employee to every place which he has reported to have visited.
There is a really dubious reporting system which has ruined many businesses. The employees even if they are not working, can easily prepare a fake report to cover it up. They know that there is no way you can verify the complete report of each one of them. While not all employees do so, but you can’t ignore exceptions.
How to get it Right?
Therefore, it is must for you to make them accountable for each and everything they do on the field and fetch reports from them as soon as they complete a meeting. The DSR Automation can save your day. It will ensure that you are being informed after every meeting gets completed by any of your employee with a proper update on progress which has been made.
Flexibility
The last but nevertheless important part of sales productivity management is your ability to adapt your plans and maneuver the field employees on the go. There are many occasions when you can shift gears or change your moves depending upon circumstances.
The flexibility is a crucial factor which you will always need to increase sales productivity comprehensively and makes your sales plans immune to any hindrance. Today, you have many options to communicate with anyone from anywhere at anytime. But what if your employee is not receiving the call and it is too critical for you to maneuver his moves. You can’t always throw your phone to let off the frustration. (You can, only if you have the courage to buy one every other day.
Such situations are part and parcel of sales process and communication is the only thing which can save you. If you can’t communicate with one member when it matters, it can disrupt every other member whose duties are associated with him. Such irregularities are ultimately going to impact your sales productivity.
How to get it Right?
The flexibility is when you can guide, inform, order or assist your team member at any point of time whenever you want. Your business needs a mode of communication that works the same without any problem in any condition for any reason. There is a cloud-based messaging option given in the Teamspoor Employee tracker. That means you have a dedicated application to connect with your team. Well, that can be of great help!
