7 Sales Efficiency Tips

Many sales businesses focus their efforts on generating more sales. Increasing sales is important, but it is also important to efficiently generate those sales. Every sales team has a limited number of resources and the more efficiently your team is able to make sales, the more revenue you will be able to generate.

1. Plan Your Sales Routes

If your business depends on traveling to customer locations to make sales or generate leads, it is important to make sure your routes are as efficient as possible. You do not want to waste valuable time driving around town when you could be selling. Route planning software can help you determine the most efficient way for your team to travel to all the locations they need to visit without wasting time backtracking.

2. Set Specific Measurable Goals

To make your process more efficient, you first need a way to measure how well your sales team is performing. The SMART goals method can help you set specific measurable goals. Through this method, you will set specific, realistic and meaningful goals, map out the steps you will take to achieve those goals and set a deadline for achieving them. Once your goals are set, you need to periodically review how well you are achieving them and make changes to improve performance.

3. Identify Your Target Market

Randomly sending your sales team out to make contact with anyone they can try to sell to will result in wasting time trying to market your products to people who are extremely unlikely to purchase them. To make your process more efficient, you need to identify your target market. To identify this market, you need to determine who your most likely customers are, what those customers want and where those customers are located. Once you have identified your target market, you can focus your sales efforts on the customers who are most likely to make a purchase.

4. Provide Quality Training

Inexperienced sales teams tend to waste time with inefficient processes and ineffective sales techniques. Rather than sending your team out into the world and relying on natural talent to get the job done, you should create a high-quality, consistent training process. Your training should teach your team how to effectively identify customers and sell your products to them. Even experienced sales people can benefit from ongoing training, particularly as sales environments, markets and technology change.

5. Avoid Duplication of Effort

For your team to be efficient, they need to be deployed in such a way that they are not competing with each other for sales. Assigning your reps to specific territories can prevent them from pursuing the same leads. You can make the process more efficient by matching your team's strengths and weaknesses with different customers. You might want your best people to tackle the toughest customers or the most lucrative sales, while newer team members might focus on repeat, loyal buyers or less important sales.

6. Manage Leads Effectively

Your team will have more success selling to leads who are familiar with your brand and have been primed for the sale than selling to cold leads who have never had any dealings with your company before. Utilizing a computerized lead management system can help you keep your leads warm and set your sales team up for success.

7. Spend More Time on Sales

Most sales reps spend a lot of their time doing non-sales tasks such as traveling, checking e-mail or attending meetings. Finding ways to cut down on the time reps spend on non-sales tasks can make your process more efficient. Consider delegating some of these non-sales tasks to other employees.

Sales teams always want to generate more sales; however, your sales revenues will go up if you can teach your team to not only generate lots of sales but to generate those sales efficiently. These seven tips can help you improve your sales efficiency.