Sales is a fast-paced environment and juggling multiple leads and tasks can be a challenge. Sales productivity is a key factor in ensuring business success, so how can you increase your productivity when it comes to sales?

1. Qualify Prospects More Effectively

Wasting your time on prospects that will never convert into customers is one of the biggest mistakes you can make in sales. By qualifying your prospects early on in the sales process, you’ll avoid wasting valuable time. So, how can you qualify your prospects?

• Know your ideal customer profile

By having a clearly defined target customer, you can ensure you target the right people with the right pitch from the get go. If however, you don’t know who your target customer is, you’ll not only be taking a shot in the dark at who you’re targeting but also the message you’re sending out.

• Ask the right questions

Asking the right questions on your first call with a prospect will help you to qualify them successfully. Questions like:

“Do you have a budget allocated for this project?”

“What are the biggest challenges your company is facing at the moment?”

“Are there any obstacles that could prevent you from implementing this solution?”

“What results would you like to see after implementation?”

“What time frame are we looking at to implement this solution?”

There are many more questions you should be asking your prospect, but the main thing is that you identify their needs and whether you can help them, establish that they definitely have the budget to make a purchase and establish the time frame. Asking questions to determine whether there may be any obstacles in the way further down the line is also important so you can prepare for them and overcome them successfully.

• Find out if they’re the decision maker

Finding out if the person you are talking to is the decision maker also comes under asking the right questions. This is absolutely vital in the early stages because you don’t want to waste your time convincing the wrong person that you are the right company to work with. If you are not talking to the decision maker, find out who does have the authority to make the decision and politely ask to speak with them.

2. Set Time Aside to Respond to Emails in Bulk

If you are receiving emails throughout the day from various people and respond to each of them as and when they hit your inbox, you’ll never get stuck into a task and your sales productivity will be restricted. By setting time aside to go through your emails and respond to them, rather than responding to them instantly will help to increase your productivity. This could be an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon for example. By doing this, you’ll ensure that you’re not distracted by every email that comes in and you’ll stay focused on the task as hand.

3. Keep your CRM Organised

Keeping your CRM clean, organised and updated will really help to increase your sales productivity. Every time you engage with a prospect for example, you should be updating their record with details of the conversation. Linking a contact to a task in your CRM (which you can do in InTouch), means you don’t waste valuable time searching for a prospect within your system. Making use of lead scoring in your CRM is also essential to increase your sales productivity because you can clearly see the leads you should be concentrating on to bring over the line.

4. Use Automation

Using automation where you can is a hugely effective way of increasing your sales productivity. Marketing automation will nurture your leads with the right kind of information based on their actions and it’ll do so in the background while you concentrate on converting your hotter leads.

5. Align your Sales & Marketing

By ensuring your sales and marketing teams communicate and work together is key to sales productivity and success. Having regular meetings to ensure your sales and marketing teams remain on the same page and are supporting each other is key. Marketers may not do the selling but they should always be focused on helping to close more sales.

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