And the results speak for themselves: within a few months, we managed to save 50% of our sales staff's working time! Time that they can now devote solely to selling, finally freeing them from the less interesting tasks. This has three benefits for the company: optimising salary costs, increasing sales and improving the motivation of sales staff. Would you also like to optimise the working time of your sales staff?

Here are 3 key steps to save them and you valuable time.

STEP 1: Define your objectives

First of all, it is important to specify the objective you wish to achieve by optimising the working time of your salespeople. This will have a direct impact on the choice of levers to be activated thereafter: stage of the sales cycle concerned, nature of the tasks to be "lightened", new processing method adopted for these tasks, etc.

In general, the optimisation of the working time of sales staff falls under one of these three objectives:

"DOING AS MUCH WITH LESS":

For example, you find yourself having to manage a constant workload with fewer salespeople, following the unexpected departure of a member of your sales team.

The other team members then have to divide the absent salesperson's customer portfolio and the corresponding workload among themselves. To prevent them from pushing these new accounts to the back burner or neglecting their existing customers due to lack of time, it is necessary to relieve them of some of their daily tasks.

"DOING MORE WITH AS MUCH":

You want your sales people to be able to spend time on a new strategic priority, in parallel with their usual activities.

For example, your company is launching a brand new offer on which you are banking heavily. You want your sales people to "pull out all the stops" on this offer, and on the targets it is aimed at. However, their other activities have not disappeared, so they will have to find a way to free up time in their usual schedule...

"DOING BETTER WITH AS MUCH:

You have identified that you are regularly losing opportunities due to your sales force being spread too thinly and you want to keep them as focusedas possible on their core business and on your customers.

You may have noticed, for example, that your salespeople were spending up to 50% of their time on non-sales tasks (searching for data to enrich their contact file, chasing up prospects after a missed appointment, sending follow-up emails, updating the CRM, etc.).

Not only do these tasks take up a lot of their time (time that they don't spend selling), but this time is also costing you money, even though many of these tasks do not require the skills of a salesperson!

Once you have clarified your main objective, it is time to move on to step two and identify the priority optimisation points that will enable you to achieve it. 

STEP 2: Identify areas for optimisation

To identify the levers for optimising the working time of your sales staff with the greatest impact, a prior inventory of their daily tasks is essential.

There are several possible methods for conducting this census:

• Start with a typical day's work for a salesperson and write down all the tasks carried out during the day one by one.
• Start with the key stages of the sales cycle (lead generation, prospecting, discovery, closing, etc.) and list all the operations linked to them.

Once you have made your list (as comprehensive as possible), you can assess the potential for optimisation of each activity.

This evaluation is based on 4 criteria:

•   The averageduration of the task (short / medium / high)
•   Its usual frequency (daily / weekly / monthly)
•   Its estimated complexity (low / medium / high)
•   The "added value" of the salesperson in its implementation (low / medium / high)

For example, the task can be given a degree of "optimisation potential" from 1 to 3 on each of these criteria, and then an overall score can be obtained, as in the example below: 

The longer and more frequent it is, the more you should optimise the time spent on a task, because the greater the impact of this optimisation on the overall working time of your sales staff.

But don't stop at these two criteria alone: the degree of complexity of a task and the added value of the salesperson in carrying it out should also be taken into account. The higher these two values are, the more difficult the task will be to delegate or automate. The higher these two values are, the more difficult it will be to delegate or automate the task, and therefore the lower the priorityyou will have to give it in your optimisation process.

In our example, three tasks stand out as having a high potential for optimisation: qualifying the prospect file, making an appointment with a prospect following a missed first appointment, and sending follow-up emails after an appointment.

With your priority areas for optimisation defined, all that remains is to define how you can reduce the time spent by sales staff on each of these tasks. This is the subject of step 3.

STEP 3: Optimise the sales process

Regardless of the areas of optimisation identified, there are usually several options for optimising the time spent by your sales staff on these tasks.

They are essentially of three kinds:

INTERNAL REORGANISATION :

It is then a question of distributing certain tasks differently internally - most often following a logic of "specialisation" - to aim for maximum efficiency.

A purely administrative task, such as entering salespeople's travel expenses, for example, can be reassigned to the administrative team. Or the entry of customer information in the CRM can be reassigned to the sales team.

OUTSOURCING :

It is also possible tooutsource certain tasks (preferably the most time-consuming ones and those for which salespeople add the least value).

This is the case for the qualification of contact files, for example. There are many companies specialising in the collection and enrichment of qualified data to supply prospecting files.

AUTOMATION :

Finally, it is also possible to automate certain tasks or even certain stages of the sales process. Where possible, this is often the most efficient and least expensive option, as it does not require any human resources once implemented.

Different tools can be used for this purpose, depending on the task to be automated: tools linked to the salespeople's diary to facilitate the making of appointments, to their mailboxes to set up automated workflows, to their social network accounts to automate the publication of posts on Linkedin / Facebook or Twitter, for example.

However, CRM is still the king in this respect, as it generally combines all these possibilities and options in a single tool, which also allows for the centralised monitoring of these different actions.

In our case, it was a mix of these three options (depending on the tasks to be optimised) that enabled us to achieve the enviable result of 50% of our sales staff's working time being reallocated to sales!

You will find more details on our internal optimisation process in the article "Optimising your sales process: stop paying your salespeople not to sell! » published previously on this blog. You can use it as inspiration to save your salespeople time and optimise your sales efficiency. So, when do you start?

Is optimisation your watchword? Then find out in this webinar how to maximise the performance of your sales staff by saving them 50% of their time: