How to Improve Sales Productivity

Ali Sabeti, VP of Sales and Marketing, ZeroCater

Increasing sales productivity is one of the most powerful levers a company can pull to improve the overall health of the business, and one of the best forward-looking metrics for growth and financial performance. Before we dive into how to improve productivity, let’s first define what strong sales productivity looks like:

• Actual sales productivity is greater than the assumed level of productivity that what was built into the sales plan (assuming the plan was built by finance and sales teams, and achieves a company’s cost of sale and operating margin goals).
• The productivity distribution between high-, medium-, and low-performing sales reps is relatively balanced and a good portion of the sales team is consistently seeing success.
• Productivity stays consistent or even improves as sales headcount increases and territories become smaller.

Pretty ambitious goals — so how do we do it?

Build a sales process, grow, break it, then do it again.

Increasing sales productivity per agent while growing sales headcount is nearly impossible if you don’t build a repeatable sales process that’s tailored to the companies and personas you’re selling into. The first step to building a repeatable process is knowing and defining the steps successful reps take to win. Having a defined and proven sales playbook, and ensuring all reps are trained and enabled to use it, is the first step to increasing productivity and consistency.

After building your sales playbook, investing in a scalable technology infrastructure that grows with your business is a necessity when it comes to improving productivity. Real-time insight into the performance of your sales team is the only way you can solve execution issues and take the necessary steps to iterate and improve your sales process.

Align sales, marketing, and product to win as one team.

As a sales leader, aligning with your marketing and product counterparts is one of the most impactful and underused methods for increasing sales productivity. Marketing and product teams that partner with sales gain insight into what prospective customers want, while sales teams that share that insight are able to influence corporate messaging and the product roadmap. It’s a win-win: the stronger the partnership, the more each team benefits.

Build a culture that values trust.

A culture that’s built on a foundation of trust is what separates high-performing sales teams from teams that merely perform well. Playbooks can be copied and people can be poached, but culture is unique, and the lifeblood of every sales team. Trust becomes the foundation of a sales team’s culture when management creates an environment where safety is established and empathy is shown. In these environments, teams embrace and learn from failure, rather than hide it. When trust exists, teams debate and find the best way forward, rather than work in silos and reach a failed state.

To read the complete article, “How to Improve Sales Productivity,” visit Quotable.com.