How to maximise your sales reps’ time – and your money

How have you star sales performers spent their time today? Were they putting in an Oscar-worthy performance to highly-engaged potential clients, or did they spend three hours leaving messages on voicemail?

We all know that sales teams are some of the most skilled and energetic professionals in the B2B world, and they put in famously long hours (50.8 hours a week,on average). It takes resilience and dedication to spend hours on researching potentially cold leads, smile in the face of rejection – and then to go back in to face a new prospect with yet another star performance.

It’s easy to think that this is the way of sales – hard work, chasing your tail, getting all the prep done again - that’s just how things have always been done. But honestly, is that the best use of their time and energy? How many training or motivational courses have you had to put on this week – month or quarter – to keep your team on top of their game? And how much return is your team actually seeing for all those hours? Are they reaching their targets? Are they happy?

Have you asked yourself: is my team really set up and operating as cost-effectively as it can be? How much time have my expensive, star performers spent researching job titles and phone numbers – rather than actually selling? Is everything they’re doing really the best use of their time and your money?

It’s not just sales and commission that are at risk from the overload of admin: some 67% of sales professionals agree or strongly agree that they are close to burnout – and sales professionals are three times more likely to experience anxiety and depression than the general population.

No matter how outstanding your sales managers and their teams are, if they aren’t getting enough time in front of clients, then they won’t be performing as optimally as they could be – and want to be.

It doesn’t have to be this way, as our clients will attest. There are clear steps you can take to differentiate between productive sales and non-productive admin and pre-sales time. This will free up your teams’ time and head space that, in turn, will boost team morale and productivity, leading to more sales, bigger bonuses – and make managing your team much easier.

Determine the most efficient use of your sales teams’ time

So how do you solve the problem? At this stage it’s helpful to remember how common the issue is. And that you are not alone.

Lead generation, research, finding people’s email addresses and phone numbers, confirming their job descriptions are all essential tasks – and traditional elements of the sale’s rep job.

But time is money, as the old saying goes. A Forrester case study revealed that, purely by reviewing how their sales rep were spending their time, one of its clients had managed to improve the number of reps achieving their sales quota by 60% in only a year.

We see this time and time again with our clients.

We’re here to help you take the load off your teams by doing the lead generation and pre-sales tasks for them, and putting them in front of the right people in the right accounts to make the pitch. The result is more effective and productive teams – and happier managers (and families).

[H3:] Pure Business Development: doing the heavy lifting for you

As B2B lead generation and pre-sales experts, we take your brief and research your future clients, by account, sector or vertical. We qualify prospects personally, so you can be sure that when we’ve found you the relevant person to speak to, and you’ll know that you’re getting a genuinely warm prospect, with a real need and appetite for your products or services.

In addition, you will have a confirmed diary appointment, and a full brief as to who you’re meeting and why, with any other insights we may have uncovered to help you convert.

Because we also know, from years of experience and many happy clients, that having that additional time and pressure taken off your sales teams is the most effective way to help them be more efficient, to set them up to do what they do best: land the sale.

Want to find out more? Book your introductory call today.