Productivity is one of the leading indicators of profit for an organization, especially in the world of sales. So ask yourself, how much time is your team spending actually selling?
The answer may surprise you. Although managers would like to think their team members are spending 100% of their time closing deals, it’s more like 40% according to the LinkedIn State of Sales Report. 40% of their days adds up to just over 3 hours each day, leaving another 5 left unaccounted for.
You may be thinking, with those numbers you’ll have to increase the size of your team to have any chance of reaching the level of productivity you’re looking for. Instead, try boosting the productivity of your current team. If you have a team of ten, boosting activity by only 10% would result in the addition of a full person’s work operating at 100%. Use the methods below to boost your team’s productivity without increasing headcount.
1. Reduce onboarding time and solidify training practices
It takes an average of six months to onboard a new salesperson and getting them ready to sell and then another nine months to become an expert. This is precious time that can be used if only you could onboard faster and more efficiently. The good news? You can! Using LevelEleven, organizations such as Paycor have reduced their onboarding time by up to 50%!
Having a solid onboarding procedure established prior to hiring a new team member is crucial. Using LevelEleven Coaching, managers are able to create 30, 60, 90-day plans to make sure their new rep is staying on track. Performance Scorecards are also useful for onboarding as you can set goals for your new team members so both you as a manager and your rep know exactly what progress is being made and what is left to be done. Solid onboarding plans with LevelEleven are great for boosting activity without increasing headcount.
2. Use scorecards to create visibility into daily activities
If your team is only spending 40% of their time selling, what are they doing with the rest of their day? Using LevelEleven Performance Scorecards, managers can see in real-time their sales team’s activities. Stop relying on reports and Salesforce dashboards that tell you what happened in the past, and start monitoring performance in real-time.
Aside from managers, Performance Scorecard also allows individual contributors to get insights into what activities and behaviors they should be doing to reach their goals. The built-in pacing algorithm allows reps to see if they’re on pace, and exactly what they should be doing if they’re behind.
3. Create contests to spark engagement
The top two ways to motivate people beyond compensation is competition and recognition. Channel11, LevelEleven’s TV broadcast solution, promotes both through sales contests and leaderboards. Managers can spin up an automated contest to easily motivate any behavior, KPI, or metric tracked in Salesforce. This helps to employ healthy competition to boost sales productivity and improve team performance.
4. Reward the right behaviors
Now that you’ve boosted productivity, it’s important to encourage and reward those behaviors so they are continued. Reward boosted productivity with office-wide recognition via Channel11 where users can program personalized achievement alerts to splash when they reach goals. Getting publicly recognized in the office is often more effective than compensation for most employees and, therefore, they will be more productive in an effort to gain that recognition.
5. Coach your team into the right behaviors
LevelEleven’s sales coaching software empowers sales and customer leaders with a structured approach to coaching that includes a mix of objective and subjective feedback to develop the right behaviors in their teams.
Looking for more? LevelEleven goes beyond coaching with action items. So you just had a great conversation with your manager/rep. Now what? Create action items that you will complete by the next meeting. LevelEleven makes it easy to create these as tasks in Salesforce and follow up in the future, therefore boosting activity without increasing headcount.
There are many ways that LevelEleven can help organizations boost activity without increasing headcount, helping your team succeed is our top priority. Contact us for a free, personalized demo to see how you can boost activity without increasing headcount!
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