How to Create a More Productive Sales Team

Sales is a funny old profession. Even the most hard-working reps rarely spend most of their time actually selling. In reality, they probably spend less than half of their working day speaking to prospects.

That’s not to say that your reps aren’t performing. We bet they are. But it does mean there's significant room to make your team more productive. Whether that’s by giving them the tools to be more effective, or helping them to spend more of their day on the phone, there are several strategies you could implement today.

In this article, we’ll explain what sales productivity is, how you can measure it, and five ways you can build a more productive sales team. If you’re ready to squeeze every drop of productivity from your team, then let’s begin.

What is sales productivity?

You’ll be hard-pushed to find a universal definition of sales productivity. But the most common definition is that sales productivity is a measure of the results your sales team produces with a given amount of resources. If your sales team increases their results by using fewer resources, they become more productive.

To put it another way, sales productivity is a measure of how efficient and effective your sales team is.

Sales efficiency is a measure of how well your reps create or use resources. If they make more calls in the same amount of time, they are more efficient sellers.

Sales effectiveness is a measure of what your reps create with their resources. Their output, in other words. If a sales rep signs off more closed deals from the same amount of demos, they become more effective.

Why is sales productivity important?

The fact is that most sales reps aren’t as productive as they could be. In fact, only 23% of a rep’s time is spent selling.

That means there’s loads of room for your sales reps to become more efficient and, therefore, more productive.

Once they become more productive, they should automatically become better performers. This is important, given the majority of sellers are hitting 70% or less of their quota. If you’re serious about meeting your sales goals, then making your team more productive will be a big help. Ultimately, more productive sales reps improve your bottom line.

Finally, it will make your sales reps happier and more successful. The more productive a sales rep is, the more engaged they are with their work and the more fulfilled they will be as a result.

Sellers want to sell. So if you can find ways to reduce the time they have to spend on non-selling activities or implement tools or processes that help them to use their resources more effectively, then they’re going to find work way more enjoyable. They’ll also love the fact they receive more commissions, too.

How do you measure sales productivity?

To improve sales productivity, you first need to know how to measure it. Because it is a measure of sales efficiency and effectiveness, you can measure sales productivity in the following way:

Sales productivity = sales effectiveness / sales efficiency

Once you’ve got this basic formula down, you can use it to calculate productivity in a number of ways.

The most common is to use revenue (effectiveness) and the number of reps (efficiency) as your inputs. This gives you a dollar figure.

So if you have 10 sales reps who produce $100,000 of revenue each, you have a sales productivity score of $10,000 (100,000/10).

You can get more granular if you want. For example, you can measure the productivity of your sales development representatives by dividing the number of demos booked (their effectiveness) by the number of cold calls made (their efficiency).

They can increase their productivity by booking the same number of demos with fewer calls. Or they could increase productivity by booking more demos with the same number of calls. Or they can become much more productive by booking more demos with fewer calls.

As you can see, you can measure sales productivity on an individual and team basis. You’ll also notice that you can improve productivity by making your team more efficient or more effective. But they become much more productive if you can make your team both more effective and more efficient.

6 ways to become a more productive sales team

Enough explaining — now let’s look at how you can build a more productive sales team today.

Review sales processes

Sales productivity often hinges on the quality and suitability of the quality of your processes and sales cycle. While everyone has a different style of working, some methods and sales strategies are going to be much more productive than others.

That’s why the first step to building a more productive sales team is to review your existing sales processes.

You can do this yourself or with the help of a sales enablement manager. Start by asking the following questions:

• Do you have a defined sales process?
• Do you have other sales tools like an ICP?
• Is the method they are using the most effective for your industry?
• Why do you use it?
• Where did it come from?
• Have you researched better possibilities and experimented with them?

Reviewing your current sales processes will also help you identify where your team’s time is currently spent. Do they waste time on administrative tasks because your CRM is inefficient, for instance? Or because they can’t quickly access sales collateral like case studies? The firmer your grasp on how your team spends their time, the easier it will be to identify areas for improvement.

While you can do this task yourself, hiring a third-party sales enablement manager can give you some much-needed perspective on your existing processes and suggest other, potentially more productive methods to implement.

Alternatively, you can look at the actions of your top sellers. If you have a handful of reps who are far surpassing your other reps, take note of the actions they take each day and encourage the rest of your sales team to follow suit. After all, you don’t have to lift a page from a sales book if one rep already has an effective sales process nailed down.

Optimize your onboarding

Another way to make your team more efficient and, therefore, more productive is to speed up your onboarding process. The quicker new sales reps are brought up to speed, the more time they’ll have to start meeting their sales goals.

A thorough onboarding process isn’t just a one-day event. It should be a structured, multi-week process that trains new reps on the intricacies of your sales process and integrates them into your company culture.

If you’re in any doubt about the comprehensiveness or effectiveness of your onboarding process, hire a sales enablement consultant to review it. They can take the burden off your sales managers by creating, optimizing, and running onboarding programs.

Provide regular sales training

Providing ongoing training is the best way to make sure sales executives continue to follow your newly optimized sales process. Training can come in a number of forms, including one-to-one coaching, group sessions, mock sales calls, or even sales conferences and workshops.

Where should you start? Compare your reps’ current sales performance with the sales process you want them to use. Which areas are they struggling with? Which parts of the sales funnel are failing? These are easy wins that can send sales productivity soaring if you fix them quickly.

Who should run the training? We recommend using a sales enablement professional to manage and run your company’s sales training. One of the reasons is that sales leaders typically don’t have the time necessary to provide in-depth training. But it also makes sense if you trust your sales enablement manager to optimize your sales processes, then they should also be responsible for training your team on it.

Centralize access to sales enablement content

You know the importance of empowering your sales team with the tools they need to succeed. That’s why you’ve created sales enablement content like one-sheets, case studies, and ebooks.

But that content can actually hamper productivity if your sales team needs to spend 10 minutes every time trying to find where it’s stored.

You can fix this by using your CRM or sales enablement tool to centralize sales content and keep everything sales reps need to succeed in a single place. Not only will this mean that reps will waste less time hunting down that elusive case study, but it also means sales reps will be more likely to use your sales enablement content, too — and that can lead to a big uptick in sales effectiveness.

Integrate your sales playbook

Sales playbooks are an incredibly powerful tool that makes it simple for your sales reps to follow each step in your sales process. If you’ve made an effort to develop a sales playbook (and updated it based on the sales process you developed in our first strategy above), then make sure your reps have easy access to it by integrating it into your CRM or sales enablement tool.

By integrating your sales playbook into one of the two tools mentioned above — as you can with TigerLRM — your reps won’t have to think about what’s in your playbook — they'll‌ be able to refer to it every single time they make a sales call.

Use AI to automate tasks

A lot of a sales rep’s time is eaten up by non-sales activities, as we’ve already discussed. A quick and easy way to make your team more productive is to increase their most important resource (their time) by using AI and other technology to automate as many time-consuming tasks as possible.

This is where having a firm grasp of how your team spends their day can pay dividends. When you know where the most time is wasted, you know where to focus your automation efforts.

For example, let’s say you find your reps spend a lot of time writing emails to prospective customers. Your reps can use an AI-powered platform like TigerLRM to create pre-populated emails and build intelligent auto follow-up campaigns rather than manually typing out the same message over and over again.

Or, your sales reps can jump on the ChatGPT bandwagon by having the large language model act as an AI assistant. ChatGPT is integrated into TigerLRM’s sales enablement and CRM platforms, allowing users to use the program to complete tasks, get answers to questions, or have it write sales copy in seconds.

Build a more productive sales team with TigerLRM

Everyone wants to build a more productive sales team. But it won’t happen if you don’t help your sales reps ‌become more effective (to sell more with their current resources), more efficient (better use their resources), or both.

Luckily, you can do all three with TigerLRM. You can use our sales enablement service to review and optimize your sales processes, as well as improve training and onboarding. Or use our free CRM, which comes packed with automation tools, AI capabilities, and an integrated sales playbook. Book a demo to start improving your sales productivity today.