How to Double Your Sales Output Without Increasing Headcount

Times are tough, and with the threat of a recession looming, increasing your staff size may not be in the cards. Luckily, there are many ways you can increase the productivity of your existing team without adding new members to your roster. Whether it be utilizing time more efficiently, improving the quality of your training, or taking advantage of the best tools of the trade, increasing your output is a perfectly achievable objective.

How to Increase Sales Productivity

When we talk about productivity, it boils down to the tangible results your team can produce within a set period of time. You’ll want to weigh how much your expenses are against your total sale volume, and hopefully, your productivity percentages are sustainably growing over time. The key to accomplishing this is finding your team’s strengths and facilitating their natural talents to the best of your abilities. Let’s look at a few tips you can use to boost productivity, increase your rate of conversion, and grow your profit volume over time.

Increase Sales Productivity Tips: 3 Proven Ways to Boost Output

Tip #1: Establish Well-Tuned Training Protocols

Training creates the foundation for all sales-related businesses, and the right programs can turn even inexperienced sales associates into high-production closers. Unfortunately, many training programs fail to give sales reps sustainable tools they can use to increase conversions; Imparta estimates that 87% of the skills learned during training are lost within a month, and 85% of programs fail to deliver a positive R.O.I.

The issue comes from skill utilization: if your training uses the shotgun method of covering as many topics as possible within a short time period, a lot is lost in translation. The best way to optimize your sales training is to go through the program yourself, preferably with the more senior members of your sales team. Certain aspects of your company’s sales training may be out of date or fail to illustrate why a topic is useful during day-to-day operations. You may need to hack and slash through the unnecessary sections of your program and punch in new lessons that apply to the current sales landscape.

Tip #2: Assess Your Team’s Needs

Making sure your team performs to the best of their abilities isn’t just about giving them the right sales tools; you’ll want to make sure your reps know how much you appreciate their work. Let your team know when they are doing well, and add incentives for staff who show higher productivity rates. Turnover can be detrimental to sales, and every new employee added means additional training costs and increased time loss due to onboarding. Streamlining these processes is important, but it’s also just as important to keep your experienced representatives happy.

The sales tools you provide can also boost team morale by making the more tedious parts of the job easier. By equipping your team with sales automation tools, you are making sure they don’t fall prey to the productivity-killing qualities of burnout. Watch for the signs of burnout in your team members, and make sure to deal with those issues early on. It’s better to give a rep a break than to push them too far and end up losing them as an employee forever.

Tip #3: Use Sales Automation Tools

Many parts of the sales process are repetitive tasks that soak up your team’s time, reducing the space in their day for acquiring new customers and closing sales. There are many activities your reps take part in every day that can drain their overall productivity, including:

Dialing Customers
Leaving Sales Voicemails
Dealing with Spam Detection
Sorting Through Leads
Losing Time to Call Rejections

The time lost while dealing with these problems is directly correlated to your total sales volume. To avoid losing these valuable working hours and risking a drop in productivity, you’ll want to use the best available sales automation tools. There are a few tools in particular that can dramatically increase your company’s productivity, including:

Sales Dialer: Sales dialers allow your team to automatically connect with potential customers, saving the time usually lost sorting through leads and dialing new numbers. It may not seem like much, but getting back 15-30 seconds with each call adds up throughout the day. It also distracts your reps from the task at hand; overall, sales dialers are a great tool for boosting productivity.
Voicemail Drop: Automated voicemail drop software allows your team to “drop” perfectly recorded versions of your sales script into potential customers’ inboxes, eliminating the productivity loss associated with a missed call. Not only will your reps be able to move on to a new call while the voicemail is recording, but the message they leave will be virtually error-free.
Local Presence: Customers are more likely to pick up the phone if they recognize the area code, leading to more active conversations and subsequent conversions. By automatically choosing trusted local area codes, local presence dialers give your reps the opportunity they need to make a higher volume of sales. More active calls means less time wasted hoping a potential customer picks up; this means sustained growth in your productivity numbers over time.

All of these programs combine to help you create an automated sales funnel, so potential customers are fast-tracked the second they pick up the phone. By simplifying the transition from each step of your funnel to the next, you increase your possible conversion rate and make each hour of the working day significantly more productive.

Where Can I Get the Best Sales Automation Tools?

If you want to double your sales output and increase productivity, some of the best tools currently on the market are provided by Kixie. Kixie gives it’s customers access to every tool they need to reduce lost time with automated programs like:

Increasing your headcount can be expensive, with higher training costs, lengthy onboarding times, and inevitable new employee turnover. You can avoid these pitfalls and give your team the tools they need to dramatically boost their productivity levels. If you sign up now, we are offering a one-week trial of Kixie completely free; you don’t even need to enter a credit card. Time is money, and every moment that passes is another sale lost. Don’t wait; start your free trial today!