What is sales productivity?

When it comes to measuring your company’s success, one of the most important places to look is your sales department. The key metric here is sales productivity — a measure of how efficiently your team makes deals. You can break it down like this:

Revenue Effectiveness vs. Resource Consumption

The ideal outcome for this metric is simple: Sales performance and revenue should be high, while time and resource consumption should be low.

But how do you measure sales rep productivity, and what does that mean for your workflows, solutions, and approaches going forward? Here’s what to know.

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How to measure sales productivity

Measuring sales productivity doesn’t have to be complicated. Your first task is to determine key performance indicators (KPIs) so you know what to track and how to compare your numbers. Once you know where to look, you can unite different data points to create a full view of sales performance and improve sales rep productivity.

Here are a few sales performance KPIs to track:

New leads

New leads are a sign of high sales rep productivity. These numbers also indicate whether your workflows, processes, and sales productivity tools are providing enough support and enablement for internal teams.

Tip: Measure new leads overall, but also gather more detailed information on different lead types — for example, qualified vs. unqualified.

Number of interactions

More interactions require more resources, but that doesn’t always have a negative impact on sales performance. For example, emailing the same contact multiple times can double response rates, which helps boost revenue. That means you’ll need to track interactions to find the ideal balance between building relationships and consuming resources.

Tip: If you look at this sales rep productivity metric by itself, you could end up with a skewed perception of how interactions impact revenue. Instead, compare interactions to deals won, total revenue, resource consumption, and other data to understand the full sales cycle and landscape.

Factors affecting sales team productivity

Keep in mind that sales productivity metrics are influenced by a number of variables. Some are within your control and others aren’t — so it’s important to have a complete, realistic understanding of the landscape.

Here are a few factors that impact sales performance:

In your control

  • Onboarding and training.
  • Coaching and 1:1 support from managers.
  • Salesperson skill levels.
  • Interdepartmental collaboration.
  • Effectiveness and reliability of sales productivity tools.

Outside of your control

  • Marketing, products, and offers from the competition.
  • Economic shifts and uncertainty.
  • Changing customer expectations.
  • Your customers’ business needs and pressures.

What are some of the best sales productivity tools?

To support sales productivity, you must provide your teams with the best, most efficient tools for all their needs. A few examples include:

  • Communication software: Sales reps should be able to use multiple channels to communicate with internal departments and customers.
  • Document management tools: Customer data — such as contact information, business name and industry, and buying habits — should be stored securely and made accessible from anywhere.
  • Scheduling software: The right software makes it easier to set meetings or schedule calls that don’t interrupt a customer’s business operations.
  • Sales enablement platforms: These platforms should track sales, resource consumption, and revenue data.
  • All-in-one solutions: Sales productivity software like Mindtickle encompasses all these functionalities, providing visibility, communication, sales enablement, data storage and tracking, and more.

3 quick tips to improve sales productivity

Once you’ve gathered the appropriate data and upgraded your tech stack, you can begin identifying weak points and making targeted improvements. Use these tips to increase sales productivity and support your teams:

Provide sales training and coaching

Onboarding and training help prepare your sales team for the unique challenges of a business-to-business (B2B) selling process. Prioritize these early steps, but don’t forget that even tenured employees can benefit from ongoing coaching and support to keep quota attainment from slipping.

 

Monitor interactions

When you monitor interactions such as calls and chats, you learn more about how your sales reps approach customers, what the conversations look like, and what the outcomes are. This doesn’t just present an opportunity to make targeted improvements; it also helps you track KPIs and understand what customers expect from your company.

Communicate clearly, effectively, and consistently

Measuring sales productivity doesn’t mean much if you don’t communicate your insights and findings to your team. Sales should always be a collaborative process — not just within the department but between teams from across the organization (such as marketing).

How Mindtickle helps to improve sales productivity

Tracking and improving sales performance shouldn’t feel like guesswork. Mindtickle can provide the insight, collaboration, and control you need to support your sales environment from top to bottom.

Mindtickle sales enablement analytics software provides multiple solutions to help increase sales productivity, including:

  • Call AI: Learn how your content and training contribute to real interactions and what that means for overall revenue.
  • Conversation intelligence: Track individual and aggregate sales performance, identify and fix deal risks, enable sales readiness solutions, and achieve better outcomes across your department and the whole organization.
  • Sales training and coaching: Understand where training gaps exist and how to address them, then follow up with ongoing coaching and support options tailored to meet individual needs.

Improving sales rep productivity starts with understanding your sales environment — and with Mindtickle, you’ll have insight into data that tells the full story. The platform also helps you turn that data into actionable next steps and solutions that support, enable, and inspire your teams.

Request a demo today to see how Mindtickle can help you close deals more productively.

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