And the results speak for themselves: in just a few months, we managed to save our sales representatives 50% of their working time! They now dedicate this time exclusively to selling, finally freed from the less interesting tasks. This provides a triple benefit for the company: optimizing salary costs, increasing sales, and improving the motivation of sales representatives. Would you also like to optimize your sales representatives' working time?
Here are 3 key steps on how to save them valuable time, for both them and you.
STEP 1: Specify your objectives
First and foremost, it's important to specify the objective you wish to achieve by optimizing your sales team's working time. This will directly impact the choice of levers to activate subsequently: the stage of the sales cycle concerned, the nature of the tasks to be "lightened", the new processing method adopted for these tasks, etc.
Generally, optimizing the working time of sales representatives falls under one of these 3 objectives:
« DO AS MUCH WITH LESS »:
Are you, for example, forced to manage a constant workload with fewer salespeople, following the unexpected departure of a member of your sales team.
The other team members must then divide the absent salesperson's client portfolio and the corresponding workload among themselves. To prevent them from putting these new accounts on the back burner or neglecting their current clients due to lack of time, it is necessary to relieve them of some of their daily tasks.
« DO MORE WITH AS MUCH »:
Do you want your sales representatives to be able to dedicate time to a new strategic priority, alongside their usual activities?
For example, your company is launching a brand new offer that you are betting heavily on. You want your sales representatives to "go all out" on this offer, and on the targets it addresses. Since their other activities have not disappeared, they will have to find a way to free up time in their usual schedule…
« DO BETTER WITH AS MUCH »:
Have you identified that you regularly lose opportunities due to the disorganization of your sales representatives, and you want them to remain as focused as possible on their core business and your customers.
Have you noticed, for example, that your salespeople spend up to 50% of their time on tasks other than selling (searching for data to enrich their contact files, following up with 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 they don't spend selling), but this time is also costly for you, even though many of these tasks don't require the skills of a salesperson!
Once your main objective is clarified, it's time to move on to step two and identify the priority areas for optimization that will allow you to achieve it.
STEP 2: Identify areas for optimization
To identify the levers for optimizing your salespeople's working time with the greatest impact, a preliminary inventory of their daily tasks is essential.
Several methods can be used to carry out this inventory:
- Start from a typical day in the life of a salesperson and note one by one all the tasks performed during the day.
- Start from the key stages of the sales cycle (lead generation, prospecting, discovery, closing...) and list all the operations attached to them.
Once your list (as exhaustive as possible) is established, you can assess the potential for optimization of each activity.
This evaluation is based on 4 criteria:
- The average task duration (short / medium / high)
- Usual frequency (daily / weekly / monthly)
- Estimated complexity (low / medium / high)
- The sales representative's "added value" in their performance (low / medium / high)
For example, you could assign a degree of "potential for optimization" from 1 to 3 to the task, based on each of these criteria, to then obtain an overall score, as in the example shown below:
The longer and more frequent it is, the more beneficial it is to optimize the time spent on a task, as the impact of this optimization on the overall working time of your sales representatives will be greater.
But don't stop at these two criteria alone: the degree of complexity of a task and the added value brought by the salesperson in its realization are also to be taken into account. The higher these two values are, in fact, the more difficult the task will be to delegate or automate. And therefore, the less you should consider it as a priority in your optimization process.
In our example, three tasks stand out as having a high potential for optimization: qualifying the prospect file, making an appointment with a prospect after a missed first appointment, and sending follow-up emails after an appointment.
Once your priority areas for optimization are defined, all that remains is to define how you can reduce the time spent by sales representatives on each of these tasks. This is the purpose of step 3.
STEP 3: Optimize the sales process
Regardless of the areas for improvement identified, you generally have several options available to optimize the time your sales representatives spend on these tasks.
They mainly fall into 3 categories:
INTERNAL REORGANIZATION:
It involves redistributing certain tasks internally – usually according to a logic of "specialization" – to maximize efficiency.
A purely administrative task, such as entering sales representatives' travel expenses, for example, can be reassigned to the administrative team. Or, entering customer information into the CRM can be entrusted to the sales administration team.
OUTSOURCING:
You can also choose to outsource certain tasks (preferably the most time-consuming ones and those for which salespeople bring the least added value).
This is the case with qualifying contact files, for example. Indeed, many companies specialize in collecting and enriching qualified data to populate prospecting files.
AUTOMATION:
Finally, we can also automate certain tasks, or even certain stages of the sales process. When possible, this option is often the most effective and the least expensive, since it no longer requires any human resources once it is set up.
Various tools can be used for this purpose, depending on the task to be automated: tools linked to the sales representatives' calendars to facilitate appointment scheduling, to their mailbox to set up automated workflows, to their accounts on social networks to automate the publication of posts on LinkedIn / Facebook or Twitter, for example.
However, CRM remains the leader in this area, as it generally combines all these possibilities and options into a single tool, allowing for centralized monitoring of these different actions.
In our case, it is a mix of these three options (depending on the tasks to be optimized) that has allowed us to achieve the enviable result of 50% of our sales representatives' working time being re-allocated to sales!
You will find more details on our internal optimization approach in the article "Optimize your sales process: stop paying your sales representatives not to sell!" published previously on this blog. You can draw inspiration from it to save your sales representatives time and optimize your sales efficiency. So, when are you going to start?
Is optimization your watchword? Then discover in this webinar how to maximize the performance of your sales representatives by saving them 50% of their time:
