It’s not hard to find opportunities to improve sales performance. Sales cycles can always be shorter, win rates better and sales larger. But sales leaders are expected to “make it happen.” This post on Business2Commuity shows a few places to start. In Harvard Business Review and our own research, we found a couple more.
Clear up the bottlenecks to reduce sales cycle times.
The payoffs for a shorter sales cycle can be huge. Say your average deal takes 22 days to close. Cut 2.5 days off that and you yield about 14% more sales per rep. Break down the sales cycle by stage and see where reps are spending the most time. That’s the area you can look to shave.
Fix the leaks in the pipeline to improve your win rate.
Most reps, asked to improve their win rates, look to the bottom of the funnel. If 80% of the deals in the proposal stage close, those will get their attention. But what if only 50% of all deals may make it from consideration to proposal? Improve that rate and you can ultimately get more wins.
Shift priorities to increase bookings per rep.
Going “upmarket” is a strategic shift that means rethinking goals. Reps should look down the pipeline at better-qualified prospects who could turn into larger deals. Give reps time to cultivate these deals by reducing win rate and cycle time demands.
Coach individual reps for greater revenue growth.
Spend at least three hours a month managing each rep’s pipeline. Harvard Business Review reports companies that did this saw 11% greater revenue growth. Use your pipeline meetings to help reps develop a game plan to move deals forward and close more business.
Cut administrative time to drive more selling time.
A 2015 study by Docurated shows reps only spend about 32% of their time selling. Time spent updating the CRM is a particularly notorious time sink. Simplify data entry to produce one extra hour a week of selling time, and you can see an additional $900K per year in revenue.
The 900K calculation is based on benchmarked data that you can see in the Rollio white paper, Increasing Sales Productivity with Micro-Moments. Download it here. The white paper shows how micro-moments, the reflexive use of mobile and other connected devices, can deliver large productivity gains when applied to selling.
Rollio turns CRM data entry into a micro-moment. It lets reps update Salesforce the same way they map their next meeting and text home about dinner. Click here for a demonstration.
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