And the results speak for themselves: in the space of just a few months, we've managed to save our sales staff 50% of their working time! Time they can now devote solely to selling, freed at last from less interesting tasks. The benefits for the company are threefold: optimized payroll costs, increased sales and improved sales motivation. Would you also like to optimize your sales force's working time?
Here are 3 key steps to help you and your customers save precious time.
STEP 1: Define your objectives
First and foremost, it's important to define the objective you want to achieve by optimizing your sales force's working time. This will have a direct impact on the choice of levers to activate: stage of the sales cycle concerned, nature of the tasks to be "lightened", new processing mode adopted for these tasks...
Generally speaking, optimizing salespeople's working hours is one of 3 objectives:
"DOING AS MUCH WITH LESS":
For example, you find yourself having to manage a constant workload with fewer sales people, following the unexpected departure of a member of your sales team.
The other members of the team then have to divide up the absent salesperson's customer portfolio among themselves, and the corresponding workload. To prevent them from pushing these new accounts into the background, or neglecting their existing customers for lack of time, it is necessary to relieve them of some of their daily tasks.
"DOING MORE WITH LESS:
You want your sales people to be able to devote time to a new strategic priority, alongside their usual activities.
For example, your company is launching a brand new offer on which you are betting 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'll have to find a way of freeing up time on their usual schedule...
"DO BETTER WITH LESS:
You've identified that you're regularly losing opportunities because your sales people are spread too thin, and you want them to stay as focused as possible on their core business and your customers.
You may have realized, for example, that your sales reps were spending up to 50% of their time on non-sales tasks (searching for data to enrich their contact file, following up on missed appointments, sending follow-up emails, updating the CRM...).
Not only do these tasks take up a lot of their time (time they don't spend selling), but they also cost you a lot of time, even though many of these tasks don't require the skills of a salesperson!
Once you've clarified your main objective, it's time to move on to step two and identify the priority optimization points that will enable you to achieve it.
STEP 2: Identify areas for optimization
To identify the most effective ways of optimizing your sales staff's working time , it's essential to take stock of their daily tasks.
There are several possible methods for carrying out this census:
- Start with a typical salesperson's working day and write down each task performed during the day.
- Start from the key stages of the sales cycle (lead generation, prospecting, discovery, closing...) and list all the operations linked to them.
Once you've drawn up your list (as exhaustive as possible), you can evaluate the optimization potential of each activity.
This evaluation is based on 4 criteria:
- Average task duration (short / medium / long)
- Its usual frequency (daily / weekly / monthly)
- Estimated complexity (low / medium / high)
- The salesperson's "added value" in its realization (low/medium/high)
For example, the task can be assigned an "optimization potential" rating of 1 to 3 for each of these criteria, to obtain an overall score, as in the example below:
The greater the duration and frequency of a task, the greater your interest in optimizing the time spent on it, as this will have a greater impact on your sales force's overall working time.
But don't stop at just these two criteria: the degree of complexity of a task and the added value provided by the sales person 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. As a result, it will be less of a priority in your optimization process.
In our example, three tasks stand out as having strong potential for optimization: prospect file qualification, making an appointment with a prospect following a missed first appointment, and sending follow-up emails after an appointment.
With your priority areas for optimization defined, all that's left to do is "define" how you can reduce the time spent by sales reps on each of these tasks. This is the subject of step 3.
STEP 3: Optimize the sales process
Regardless of the areas for optimization identified, there are generally several ways in which you can optimize the time spent by your sales force on these tasks.
They essentially fall into 3 categories:
INTERNAL REORGANIZATION :
In this case, it's a matter of distributing certain tasks differently internally - most often following a logic of "specialization" - 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 system can be entrusted to the sales team.
OUTSOURCING :
You can also choose tooutsource certain tasks (preferably the most time-consuming 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 specializing in the collection and enrichment of qualified data for prospecting files.
AUTOMATION :
Finally, you can also automate certain tasks, or even certain stages in the sales process. Where possible, this is often the most efficient and least costly option, since it requires no human resources once implemented.
Various tools can be used for this purpose, depending on the task to be automated: tools linked to salespeople's diaries to facilitate appointment scheduling, to their mailboxes to set up automated workflows, to their social networking accounts to automate the publication of posts on Linkedin / Facebook or Twitter, for example.
But CRM remains the king in this respect, as it generally combines all these possibilities and options in a single tool, and also enables centralized monitoring of these different actions.
In our case, it was a mix of these three options (depending on the tasks to be optimized) that enabled us to achieve the enviable result of 50% of our sales staff's working time being reallocated to sales!
You can read more about our internal optimization process in the article "Optimizing your sales process: stop paying your sales reps not to sell!" previously published on this blog. You can use it as inspiration to save your sales reps time and optimize your sales efficiency. So, when do you start?
Is optimization your watchword? Then find out in this webinar how to maximize your sales force's performance by saving them 50% of their time:
