Introduction
Having excellent productivity is a prerequisite in sales.
Many sales development representatives struggle with being productive and meeting sales quotas. Therefore it is essential to take time to audit your business’s sales team and optimize it for ultimate efficiency. The goal is strong sales performance.
There are many reasons for a sales team to fall behind on its projected sales outreach, for example –
- Untrained sales force.
- Uncoordinated sales team sections.
- Poor communication between team leads.
- Unverified leads.
- Outdated sales techniques
A company’s primary growth depends on the sales of its services or products.
Sales Strategies
This article will highlight ways to optimize productivity levels and smash your sales quotas. These sales strategies will help skyrocket your team’s sales output and lead generation numbers.
Harness the Power of Technology and Customer Data
Lead management, scheduling emails, and automating follow-up are a few of the many things you can do with the help of data or information. Business teams have insights to prospect behavior and intent with just a few clicks. Few tasks that could be achieved with technology
- With the proper information, sales development representatives can target the right leads and understand what kinds of content they would be interested in.
- Helps SDRs adopt techniques to make correspondence more personal without spending too many resources or time.
- Personal information can often be integrated with email automation tools without much effort from the SDR.
- Using marketing intelligence software, SDRs can get a sense of a prospect’s preferences and personal information.
Information and technology can help optimize your workflows and generate more sales-qualified leads. SmartReach.io allows native integration with CRMs and bi-directional syn with the CRMs. This ensures that the prospect data are up to date and accurate. This would also save time for the SDRs from entering the data manually and reduce the risk of errors. With data integrated accurately, the prospect and customer receive relevant information on time.
Prioritize Your Top Activities
Sales is like a complicated machine that has several cogs working in tandem to result in more leads, more meetings and more sales. There are so many activities that it is impossible to give every task a high priority. And this is where many junior SDRs go wrong. They try to prioritize every task and burn out in the process.
An effective SDR will rearrange tasks based on importance and urgency.
Putting endless hours into tasks that can be automated will waste time and mental capacity. It’s important to work smart and not work hard. Many sales processes can be automated through niche state-of-the-art sales automation software like SmartReach. In addition to leveraging sophisticated sales automation software like SmartReach.io, integrating AI scheduling assistants can further streamline your sales team’s routine, ensuring more efficient allocation of their time and efforts towards engaging with leads and closing deals.
SmartReach.io can make the tedious process of prospecting and sales outreach seem like a cakewalk through their specialized software. The task manager for the multichannel outreach displays the list of tasks based on their priority and urgency. This can help you stay on top of your work and ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. This saves a lot of time for SDRs and reduces the risk of errors or duplicative efforts. Thus increasing the productivity of the team.
Focus, discipline, and effort are essential to achieve a smooth sales workflow. Utilizing allotted work time efficiently will drive up productivity and generate more sales leads.
Managing Emails Well
When at work, SDRs often (unknowingly) spend a lot of time checking and responding to emails. It is important to respond to emails, but remember it is just one part of the many tasks you have to complete throughout the day – and shouldn’t consume all your time.
Here are four steps to how you can manage your emails well.
- Prioritise emails that range from the most important to the least important.
- Allocate a fixed time (maybe 30 minutes) to only respond to the most important emails.
- Attend first to the most important emails.
- Attend the least important ones later in the day
- Craft short, to-the-point emails, as this shows that you respect the receiver’s time.
Using these steps can help you manage your emails (and time) well. SmartReach.io provides a shared inbox that helps with the seamless management of emails. Email received is categorized based on prospect and non-prospect. It also provides reply sentiment which would help the SDRs to concentrate on important emails. The SDRs can easily switch between multiple inboxes and this saves a lot of time. The shared inbox also provides a feature to snooze an email for a particular period of time.
Keep Meetings with Prospects Brief
An SDR will probably have to deal with the client at the very nascent stages. A short meeting lasting no longer than 15 minutes will be far more impactful.
Usage of presentations and screen-sharing software helps with reducing meeting time
Talk about your product offering but also listen to the prospect and figure out the pain points your product can help address. If you have to set up a meeting, make sure to send an email beforehand that mentions that you are eager to ‘connect’ or that you look forward to ‘setting up a meeting’ with them. These action verbs will prompt the prospect or lead to set a concrete meeting date and timing.
Optimise The Process of Follow-ups
A successful sale does not happen overnight. It requires patience, persistence, and lots of follow-ups. Many times a prospect is written off as unsuccessful. However, a review of sales interaction will show that there has been minimal or almost no follow-ups. Follow-ups are the most important part of a sales strategy.
Your follow-up must be professional and well thought out, and not too pushy or salesy. It’s best when sales managers provide SDR with a playbook for meetings and follow-ups. Sales managers should have a process to follow up and the software to implement the process. Additionally, send your prospects practical and valuable information they can apply to their business. In this way, they know that you’ve done good research and that you genuinely can help their business grow. Sales engagement software like SmartReach.io provides the option to sequence your outreach choice via various channels like email, Linked, WhatsApp, SMS, and calls. The outreach campaign can also be paused at any given time in case a response is received from the prospect.
Besides email, SDRs should use multiple communication channels like calls, voice notes, messages or LinkedIn Inmail to follow up.
Lastly, know where you stand with every prospect after a follow-up. Frequent follow-ups ensure brand recall.
Improve Communication and Collaboration.
Sales is slowly becoming a mechanical process that has almost no human touch. Establishing an efficient and one one-on-one line of communication with a prospect will make you stand out in the sea of salespersons.
An SDR should be equipped to answer all sales-related queries. SDRs should probe and understand the pain points of prospects and accordingly provide solutions. A confident-sounding SDR having the most answers inspires confidence. SDRs should have a clear prospect communication sales strategy and process in place to optimize sales productivity and generate more leads.
SmartReach.io offers a shared inbox feature that facilitates communication and collaboration across the marketing and sales team. It improves transparency across the team allowing all the members to view the incoming email. This helps to reduce the sales inquiry resolution time thus improving the consumer experience.
In addition to sales, tracking employee hours is essential across various departments in your company, such as project management, construction management, and other roles that involve time-sensitive tasks. Effective communication and collaboration, supported by project management templates, rely on accurate tracking of employee hours to ensure proper resource allocation, task prioritization, and project planning.
Wrapping it Up
There are many strategies SDRs can follow to increase their productivity without sacrificing time and resources.
Client follow-ups are one sales strategy that can do wonders for your sales team. These strategies will ensure that SDRs optimize their workflows and maximize lead conversions.
SmartReach.io is a sales engagement software designed for SDRs to automate their cold outreach communication workflow. Its powerful multichannel capabilities allow for outreach through a variety of channels, including email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, SMS, and calls. By utilizing a variety of channels, sales reps can reach a wider audience and increase their chances of connecting with potential customers. This increases the chance of getting a response from the prospect. Multichannel outreach can help build trust and credibility with prospects by showing that the business is willing to go the extra mile to connect with them.
The platform also features a shared inbox that allows sales managers and SDRs to streamline their sales cycles and maintain a healthy sales pipeline. This leads to improved team collaboration, faster response times to sales queries, and better insight into customer sentiment. Ultimately, the use of a shared inbox can result in reduced costs and increased ROI for businesses.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How can we catch sales strategy discrepancies at the grassroots level?
Constant internal audits of a sales team and sales strategies can help catch discrepancies at grassroots levels and increase the productivity of the sales team in the long run.
Sales managers and frontline managers should also evaluate sales strategies against the sales standards of today! Sales strategies that worked even two years ago will not work these days. The discrepancies can be worked on and corrected if caught on early.
2. How can sales engagement software increase productivity?
Sales engagement software like SmartReach.io can provide sales teams with a complete suite of features to increase an SDR’s productivity.
For example, you can use the Leaderboard function to see who is staying on top of the lead follow-ups. You can also verify lead email addresses and other related data on the go with its inbuilt email validation feature. You can integrate your CRM and track when and where the leads are visiting the websites and how traffic is reacting. All these features will allow you to take actions based on data, and won’t leave you fumbling.
3. How important is email personalization in a sales strategy?
It has been seen that emails with almost no personalization and sales-heavy language usually get unsubscribed, or get sent to the spam folder. The best way to avoid email bounce and being sent to the spam folder is by email personalization. A personalized email also garners more responses than a normal email with no personalization.
Email personalization is very important in a sales strategy as it would help SDRs receive the most replies from prospects while also steering clear from being sent to the spam folder or having email bounced.
