Strategies to reverse sales productivity problems

Ihave been working and leading salespeople and advising sales organisations for over 20 years. During that time, I have identified two trends. 1. Sales technology and sales force automation has increased in prominence, price, and company investment.

2. Sales rep productivity — the time salespeople actually spend selling — has decreased.

Research shows that today, good salespeople spend less than a third of their time selling. On the other hand, more and more time is spent managing various administrative tasks surrounding sales and demand generation.

Basically, salespeople spend more time managing their sales than making them.

Whether you are a salesperson, sales executive or stakeholder in a growing organisation, I don’t need to tell you the direct and collateral damage done when salespeople aren’t selling.

Hence the need — to help you reverse your sales productivity problem and empower your team to get back to what they love.

Sales Productivity Challenges

Before sharing the key to increasing sales productivity, let’s look at the three root causes for the problem sales organisations have dealt with for decades:

1) Complexity

Selling is more complicated today. More touch points are involved, buyers are more sophisticated, and the technology that reps use changes and grows almost every day. 2) Chaos

As the third law of thermodynamics demonstrates, entropy is always increasing, and so does the chaos involved in managing today’s selling interactions. Differences between sellers are increasingly nuanced, consensus has taken over the buy-side, and despite record investments in data and analytics, and sellers face more uncertainty than ever.

Selling today is a lot like playing a speed game while — partially blindfolded. 3) Context

The term, Zero Moment of truth has blown up the alignment that existed in traditional buy/sell situations.

This has put salespeople at a contextual disadvantage and, when combined with modern demand generation strategies, has forced salespeople to spend more time managing administrative tasks than managing the sales process.

What’s more, the approach of most selling organisations to solve the problem is by focusing on the strategy side of selling (which, candidly, has contributed to the first two problems above).

A great general once said, “Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics.” Solving the sales productivity problem is more of a process/logistics issue than it is a strategy issue.

Reps are happier when they spend more time doing what they love and less time doing what they don’t — while generating more income in less time. Moreover, executives are ecstatic as it equates to an additional sales rep’s production for every three to five reps on staff, with no additional headcount.

While these strategies are far more effective implemented at an organisational level, sales reps looking to gain better results can apply many of these strategies to enhance their individual production, even if their organisation doesn’t.

1) Map the customer acquisition process. The fundamental problem with “process” is that the purpose is to eliminate variance. Yet, in sales, the value lies in the variance. Selling is a highly dynamic, open loop system. The more complex your offering, the greater the variance and complexity that must be managed.

While creating a repeatable process when the process is different every time may seem like an impossible problem, in reality, it’s not. The key is to view the process through an “object-lens.”

Don’t build out your methodology from A to Z; instead, map the system and find the waypoints. Mapping the system in this manner enables you to find those key inflection points where adjustments occur.

This enables you to make your repeatable process a series of repeatable mini-processes that can be plugged in as needed. This is typically seen when in action by watching how a soccer team executes their playbook in a game — how Italy took the Europe cup during the penalty shoot out clean strategy at play.

2) Create a defined Service – Level Agreement

Having reviewed more than 100 sales organisations, their playbooks, and their processes. The single biggest — and most common — mistake I see made is a lack of clear definition to leads, situations and progression.

Great selling organisations have crystal clear service level agreements that define what every lead definition means, the processes and protocols for managing those leads and what’s expected from every aspect of the revenue generation team(s).

A strong SLA enables everyone — especially salespeople — to spend their “thinking time” focused on selling situations, rather than figuring out what to do and when to do it. This creates greater discipline and velocity. 3) Stop focusing on efficiency.

CRM, video, chat, email tracking, document sharing . . . today’s sales reps need a scorecard to keep track of the technology they’re supposed to use. Add marketing automation, lead scoring, forecasting and more and you begin to realise that it’s a near miracle reps are able to spend even a third of their time selling.

While this technology, content, and strategy is designed to enable reps to “sell smarter,” it also creates multiple systems, too many databases, and mass confusion. Reps are forced to spend too much time simply figuring out where to go for what they need, and executives are unable to get a single view of the entire process.

This results in a focus on efficiency. The problem is we’re trying to maximise each disparate system’s efficiency, which makes things less efficient and usually slower.

Your goal should not be to focus on efficiency, but instead to focus on velocity. To do that, you must have a single system of the truth. It’s fine for reps to use multiple apps, but it must all connect into a single system and a “database of truth.”

4) Design and execute contextual play. What kills sales productivity is when Sales reps either spend no time thinking or execute their sales cadences like a poorly programmed bot, or they’re forced to spend so much time thinking about what to do they have no time or brainpower to focus on the conversation taking place.

The secret is to build the genius into the system. Contextual plays free up a sales rep’s genius to execute and engage with their most important asset: the prospect/customer. 5) Integrate and automate your playbook. Playbooks are powerful. If you don’t have a defined and documented playbook, you’re competing at a disadvantage and predictability and scale are highly unlikely.

However, if your sales reps have to think about or refer to the playbook, your playbook isn’t going to work.

Manual processes can drag on sales and revenue velocity. Reps shouldn’t have to think about the playbook.

The playbook should be integrated and automated within the existing systems.

In conclusion, maximise your sales productivity. Sales reps are the striker, goal scorer of the customer acquisition process.

The key to maximising the productivity (and economic impact) of this crucial role is to create, execute, and optimise the processes that enable them to dedicate their energy and focus on the high-value actions that cause sales.