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Rollio Oct 14, 2016 10:28:03 AM 4 min read

Are You Giving Your Sales People Enough Support?

If not, it may be the reason you aren’t hitting your revenue goals. According to a recent study by the Harvard Business Review, In the Best Sales Teams, About Half of the People Are in Support Roles, the “Goldilocks Quandry” is this:

Too little support, and your sales people can’t do their jobs well; too much, and you’re wasting money. But get it just right and your sales efforts can drive productivity and growth.

So how do you maximize sales support to get it just right?

It’s clear that giving your reps the tools to succeed makes a difference in how much they sell. According to the study, the top 25% of companies analyzed had a sales ROI more than twice that of the bottom 25%. And these top performers have a 30% higher level of sales support than the rest of the companies.

Clearly the right balance of sales operations and administrative support staff can help by freeing up your sales people to focus on customers and spend more time on the front lines.

Does that mean you should rush to hire more staff? Absolutely not.

Hiring more support staff becomes less important when we can optimize and mobilize our sales teams in the field – freeing up their time without adding more overhead. And the HBR study agrees:

Our experience has shown that maximizing the benefits of sales support requires companies to focus on building a fast-moving organization where some support activities are automated, streamlined, or cut entirely.

Let’s take one of the cornerstones of admin support to task – data entry. Not everyone’s favorite – which is why many companies find their data incomplete. And unusable.

Some companies choose to hire “virtual assistants” which seem, from the recent email we got offering services, “Secure! And Error Free!” Until we read the email:

Security: We understand the importance of having a secure sharing provider, therefore all the information it's properly handled by all of our personal.

Not quite the error-free experience our personal was looking for… and if an email wasn’t properly checked for grammar and syntax, what about security? Let’s not go there.

But even with dedicated in-house admin support, the data entry process can get bogged down from sales rep to assistant logging calls, meetings, follow-up requirements and appointments and typing all of that in as soon as its handed over. Which can be a day to a week later. Not to mention the $37,000 annual salary.

The right support strategy should be about “hitting the sweet spot” - optimizing sales and support staff ratios and digitizing the sales process to become a “leaner” organization.

Don’t just hire more bodies. Give your existing sales people the tools and support they need to get the job done quicker, with more accuracy and efficiency. Like utilizing mobile applications that let sales people talk or text to automatically update CRM data from anywhere, at anytime - in a matter of seconds vs. hours, days or weeks.

What does that mean for you? Data that is timely, accurate and transparent for projecting revenue.

What does that mean for your sales team? A reduction in the time it takes to close deals.

What does that mean for your support teams? Less time spent on data entry, and more time on revenue-boosting activity to improve your ROI.

Just right.

At Rollio, our solution is to take the complexity out of your CRM by automating the update process. What used to take 30 minutes to update can now be done in less than 5 minutes. Without the need for training or timely updates, implementing a CRM is now as seamless as ever. For more information on what Rollio has to offer, check out our product or contact us.

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