Why You Need a Sales Activity Tracker

Do you hear the term sales activity tracker and automatically think it means micromanaging your field sales reps?

In a way, using a sales activity tracker is micromanaging. But instead of monitoring every move a rep makes outside the office, you’re tracking (and acting on) their sales data instead.  

The result? Your business gets the figures it needs to improve your sales process.

The problem is, most sales teams aren’t measuring the metrics they have control over. A study by Harvard Business Review found 83% of metrics like results and sales objectives are unmanageable because they’re in the past. It’s too late to act on them. 

But the remaining 17% of sales activities can be tracked and influenced in real-time to make a change to your business—and its bottom line.

In this post, we’re going to look at:

The Importance of Tracking Sales Activities
Which Sales Activities Should Be Tracked?
8 Reasons to Invest in a Sales Activity Tracker
How to Track Sales Activities in 5 Steps

Let’s get tracking. 

The Importance of Tracking Sales Activities 

Tracking and acting on sales activity data is one of the few ways sales teams can control their outcomes. 

Even though a lot of sales teams know this, it’s surprising how many aren’t taking control of their sales data. A recent HubSpot survey found some sales teams are failing to track crucial KPIs like conversion rates and customer retention that influence sales activities.  

Without tracking, teams are left in the dark about why they’re losing leads and customers are churning. Of course, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. It’s impossible to know why all this is happening unless you’re actively tracking your sales efforts.  

Tracking sales activities isn’t only crucial for the leads and prospects you have in your sales funnel right now. It’s essential to predict how well your sales team might do in the next quarter or year, and what you need to change to influence the future.  

Once you have data that shows where a rep is losing leads or how unproductive your team is,  you can start to look at your sales strategy as a whole. 

Is it bringing in the revenue you forecasted? If not, which parts of the strategy require damage control?

Which Sales Activities Should Be Tracked?

There are two main types of activities you should be tracking: quantitative and qualitative. 

It’s a chicken and egg scenario; you need to be tracking qualitative activities to make sense of your quantitative goals. If you’re only tracking one or the other, it’s mostly useless.  

Qualitative 

Qualitative activities paint a bigger picture of how customers view your company. 

It explains the “why” and the “how” of how your company is doing. Qualitative results are determined by sentiment, rather than cold, hard data (that’s where the quantitative analysis comes in). Instead, qualitative activities are measured on satisfaction instead.  

Examples of qualitative activities you can track are:

– Customer objections
– Brand awareness 
– Company promotion
– Overall customer satisfaction
– Credibility
– Trust
– Productivity
– Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

However, just because a number can’t measure these goals doesn’t mean they aren’t important. If you can track them and highlight progression, they can be a massive motivator for your sales reps. 

Quantitative

Quantitative data is where your goals are tied figures like new contacts, opportunities, revenues, profits or customer retention.  

You can use quantitative data to create clear sales goals like increasing your lead generation by a certain percentage over the next quarter. After the quarter is up, you’ll have some data on what part of your sales funnel is generating the most leads, and what parts need work.  

That data might lead you to ask questions like, are your reps performing in the field? Or is there an issue with the company’s credibility that is causing slow lead generation?  

See, chicken and egg. Quantitative data doesn’t mean much without qualitative backup.      

A few examples of quantitative data are:

– Number of new contacts
– Lead time
– Sales by territory
– Churn rate / retention
– Win rate
– Lead generation source
– Sales cycle length
– Quotas
– Monthly revenue
– Annual revenue

Quantitative data is important because it’s raw, and it’s not subjective. If you’re tracking your lead generation source, quantitative data takes away the “how” and “why” and only serves up the “what”. Here are “what” channels are working for lead generation (and what ones aren’t.)  

Similar, managers can understand which reps are selling more, which territories are most profitable, and how long it takes on average to go from lead to sale.

Take a look at this sales activity dashboard inside Salesforce. It’s tracking a company’s lead funnel by campaigns, new leads, unqualified leads, and expected revenue:

Already we can see that leads are coming in from a bunch of different avenues, and some are more qualified than others. What we can also see is that one of the sales reps, Vince West, is struggling to fill his lead pipeline. 

The result of this data?

The company could redistribute some of its marketing budget into the campaigns that are bringing in more qualified leads, like Google Ads. A sales manager could also talk to the rep that’s struggling to generate leads and see how they can help.

8 Reasons to Invest in a Sales Activity Tracker

1. A sales activity tracker will provide a real-time view of the pipeline

When it comes to finding (and fixing) problems in your pipeline, it’s better to do it sooner rather than later.

A sales activity tracker gives sales reps a complete view of their company’s pipeline, and it’s updated in real-time:   

Image: An example of a sales pipeline in SPOTIO. Prospects, qualified leads, and closed deals are all easily tracked in the same screen. 

How does this help your sales figures?  

Well, if all of your reps are getting a ton of leads to the quoting stage, and then the leads are turning cold, it could signal a problem with your company’s pricing structure. Or if the pipeline shows an individual sales rep is failing to qualify leads, you can look into their sales process and find out where they’re going wrong:

 Image: SPOTIO dashboard – using a sales activity tracker, reps can log their lost leads and the reason why, so it’s easier to spot patterns (and fix them).

2. A sales activity tracker will highlight the best performing territories 

Outside sales reps spend a lot of their time planning out what areas to target next. 

With a sales activity tracker, reps can map territories by zip code, specified streets, certain addresses, or a general neighborhood and then develop an action plan. Having a plan in place gives reps a clear direction of where to focus on selling, and more importantly, which territories they’ve already hit. 

Image: SPOTIO Territory Manager being used to map sales territories and assign to different reps. 

A sales tracker can break down territories into prospecting, contacting, qualified leads and quotes. Plus, sales reps can save information about a prospect inside a sales activity tracker. Next time the rep follows up with a lead, they’ll be able to look back on their notes and see what stage the deal is at from their last visit. 

3. A sales activity tracker will highlight top-performing reps

Are all your sales reps bringing in the same amount of leads and revenue? 

Without tracking their activities, it’s nearly impossible to know. 

By tracking the performance of individual reps, you create accountability and uncover your top performing reps. On the flip side, you can also figure out which reps are failing to bring in enough revenue. 

Tracking performances can also encourage reps to up their selling game.  Using a sales activity tracker, you can set up a sales leaderboard for your team. There’s nothing that will encourage your reps to sell more like a bit of healthy competition:
Image: SPOTIO’s sales leaderboard shows real-time insights into pipeline activity, as well as rep and territory sales performance. 

4. A sales activity tracker will show where the team is spending time

Did you know that lost sales productivity and wasted marketing budgets cost companies at least $1 trillion a year?

And a big part of lost productivity for outside sales reps is how they manage their time. If your sales reps are spending most of their time planning their day and mapping out their routes, it’s easy to see how their time is being swallowed up by admin work. A study by Salesforce found most reps spend 64% of their time on admin and service tasks, and only a third of it actually selling:

According to Forbes, the average field sales rep pockets $105,482 a year. So each year, companies are paying their outside sales reps about $68k to do… admin tasks. 

So, how can sales teams cut out the admin and get their reps selling more? The reality is, it takes a lot of time and effort to plan a route effectively. But using a system that’s built for sales reps can do this automatically. 

Salient Medical had this exact problem; their reps weren’t as productive as they should’ve been, and it cost the company money. VP of Sales Darrell Simpson said that the company started using a sales activity tracker to try and solve the problem. 

“For managerial observation of staff, it has completely changed the way we are able to see what each field rep is doing on a day-to-day basis,” he said.

“We now have knowledge of how many clients our reps are seeing per day.” 

5. A sales activity tracker will surface top priorities for reps

When your reps are on the road, they’re juggling their time between scheduling what territories to target and the best routes to get there. 

A sales activity tracker houses all your leads under one roof. That means their address and pipeline stage are synced up in a field reps sales planner. A sales tracker can automatically map out the best route based on this information, and sales reps can book more appointments as a result. 

Image: An example of an automatically planned sales route on SPOTIO

While they wrap up an appointment and jump back in their car, they can easily see their next meeting, sort through new leads in their territory, and track mileage along the way. 

Pro-tip: If your sales reps are on the road and you want to stay in the loop, a sales activity tracker like SPOTIO automatically updates a pipeline whenever your rep enters new information. 

So, if they’re on the road and they progress a deal from qualified to quote, it will show up in real-time on your screen as well.

6. A sales activity tracker will pinpoint bottlenecks

What part of your sales process is the weakest? Is there a point where your sales reps are underperforming?  

If you can’t pinpoint your sales bottlenecks using quantitative and qualitative data, you’re essentially flying blind.  A bottleneck in your sales process could be:

– X amount of cold calls but none of them get returned 
– X amount of introductions but no follow-up appointments 
– X amount of sales appointments, but a lack of quotes 
– X amount of quotes but only a few sales 
– X amount of closed sales, but high customer churn 

If you can’t look at your sales pipeline, pinpoint a spot and say “that’s where we are losing our leads”, you have no chance of fixing your problem. 

Let’s say your data shows that your team is closing a ton of sales, only for the customers to churn the next quarter. Your bottleneck might be the way your reps are nurturing their customer’s in the post-sale phase.  

Using a sales activity tracker stops customers falling through the cracks. Reps can set reminders to follow up with new customers, so they’re able to iron out any problems before a customer jumps ship:

Image: An example of a 3-month check in on a sales rep’s pipeline using SPOTIO

7. A sales activity tracker will help streamline processes

Are you organizing deals and tracking meetings in a spreadsheet, or worse, using pen and paper? 

If the answer is yes, it’s no wonder your time is being chewed up with admin work and old-school organization. 

A sales activity tracker can act as a personal assistant to sales reps. It helps plan and track meetings, calls, demos, lunches and emails for every deal, contact, and company.  

Once a rep plans out their day on a sales activity tracker, it’s automatically pushed to their Google or Outlook Calendar. They don’t have to worry about their schedule when they’re out in the field selling⁠—it’s already organized:

8. A sales activity tracker delivers more revenue

Without a sales activity tracker, even the best reps can miss out on crucial sales opportunities.

By actively managing activities and pipelines, a sales team has a better grasp on what stage a customer is at in their sales funnel, and when they should push to close a deal. 

They’ll also have a better idea of when they should ask an existing customer for a referral. 

For field reps, landing a referral from a happy customer means less door knocking and better-qualified leads. A survey by HubSpot found 83% of customers are willing to make a referral after a positive experience. But what’s even more important is that the overall LTV of a referred customer is 16% higher than non-referred customers. So, it pays to ask for referrals. 

The key to securing more revenue is all down to timing. If you approach an upsell or ask for a referral at the right time, it can make all the difference. Using a sales activity takes away the guesswork so that you can ask at the right time, every time.  

How to Track Sales Activities (5 Steps)

Step 1. Identify your overarching sales goals

The first step to tracking sales activities is setting goals.

What does your company want to achieve, and when does it want to achieve it by? 

Using the SMART method is the easiest way to spitball ideas and narrow in on what goals you want to achieve (and what goals are realistic):

Image Source

Write out what your goals are going to look like:

Are they specific?
Don’t have a goal to increase your leads. Set a specific goal to bring in 5 more leads a week. 

Are they measurable?
If you want to increase your revenue, attach a percentage on it. “We want to increase our revenue by 5% next quarter.” 

Are they attainable?
There’s nothing worse for sales reps than setting unrealistic sales goals. Plan out goals that your reps can achieve. 

Are they relevant?
If it doesn’t fit with the mission of the company as a whole, don’t set it as a goal.

Are they timely?
There needs to be a deadline for every goal. Don’t say “in the future, we wish to achieve…”. That’s not helpful. Say “by December 31st, we want to increase door knocks by ten a day.” 

Step 2. Decide which activities will help you realize that goal

Next, you need to build an action plan so your goals become actionable.  

Let’s say you want to increase the number of leads your pipeline by five each week. Sounds achievable right? It is, with an action plan.  

If you look at your historical data and find your reps are landing two leads for every ten emails they send. But for every ten cold calls they make, they’re only landing a single lead. Using the data, implement an action item, so your reps prioritize email over calling. Your goal will be to increase the number of leads in their funnel by sending out 25 more emails each week.   

Use the same data and strategy to map out all of the steps and people involved for each goal until you have an actionable plan. You’ll end up with something like this:

Step 3. Assign KPIs to these sales activities 

What KPIs you assign will depend on what the sales activity is. For outside sales reps, KPIs typically fall into five groups:

– Attempts
– Contacts
– Qualified
– Leads
– Sales

Let’s go back to our earlier goal of getting five more leads a week into a rep’s pipeline.  To achieve this, they will have to make 25 extra email attempts a week. If they were previously getting five leads into their funnel by sending out 25 emails, and they need five more leads, then they need to double their email output. So, the KPI for this goal should be set at 50 email attempts. 

Easy!

Step 4. Decide how you will track KPIs at the team and rep level

Aligning the right KPIs to a project or goal is a crucial part of making the whole effort successful. 

And it’s impossible to get it right if sales reps aren’t involved in the process. Remember how we talked about setting unrealistic goals? This step will give your reps the chance to speak up if they don’t think a goal is achievable. 

Deciding how to track your KPIs at a team level will depend on:

– How your team inputs and analyses the data around each KPI 
– How your team uses data to evaluate developed KPIs
– What results your KPIs have achieved and if you need to revisit them

Pro-tip: Using SPOTIO, a sales manager can assign KPIs to each activity. Once a rep has completed the task, they tick it off as completed. Simple.  

Step 5. Share your sales tracker with the entire sales team

Lastly, keep everyone in the loop.

Once you’ve set up your goals, share them with the entire team so they can agree that they’re accurate and achievable. Making sure your entire team is on the same page from day one will ensure everyone is working towards the same goals.

Ready to track your sales?

Tracking sales isn’t about micromanaging your outside sales reps. It’s about building a smarter sales funnel and cutting out their admin work in the process. 

Without a sales activity tracker, businesses are throwing away thousands of dollars a year for field reps to do admin work and plan out sales territories. They’re getting paid to do something that can be automated.  

That’s why having a system where you can pinpoint your most profitable territories (or find out which reps that are struggling to close deals), makes total sense for modern sales teams. Remember, most of the metrics that move the needle for outside sales teams are trackable; you just need the right toolkit. 

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SPOTIO is the #1 field sales acceleration and performance management software that will increase revenue, maximize profitability, and boost sales productivity. 

There’s not a more nerve-racking feeling than the rush of needing to find quality sales talent, and needing that talent now. There’s a variety of reasons for this, but it seems like the door to door sales industry, more so than any other, is in constant need of new salespeople. 

The 3 Most Common Reasons For Rapid Expansion

#1  The seasonality of door to door sales
#2  Fast growing companies
#3  The incredibly large amount of turnover

With the seasonality of door to door sales organizations comes the expansion and contraction of teams every six months or so. Some people are retained, others aren’t, but regardless of who is and who isn’t, you’re bound to hire by the masses soon enough.

If you’re a company that’s on the “up & up,” you already have your own set of challenges outside of recruiting. This is definitely the best reason you would need to double the size of your team in a hurry, but it comes with the same challenges nonetheless.

For whatever reason, it almost seems as if companies like to have that revolving door of salespeople on at full speed. Whether it’s not having the systems in place to hire, train and make a new rep successful, or not properly incentivizing and rewarding your current sales team, there’s an awful lot of talent walking out of companies these days.

8 Essentials Recruiting Strategies To Double The Size Of Your Team

#1   | Always Be Sourcing

The biggest bottleneck in hiring volume, speed and scale is sourcing. This is your proactive search for quality sales reps for the positions you have available. The goal of sourcing is to collect relevant data about qualified candidates, such as names, titles and job responsibilities.

Sourcing helps to identify potential candidates regardless of whether they’re actively looking for a new position or not. Sourcing is how you fill up your pipeline with potential candidates that appear to be a good fit for your company.

5 Sourcing Tactics

1. Social Media
2. Referrals
3. Data.com
4. About.me
5. Boolean Searching On Google

#2   | Get “Millennial-ized”

I know… this sounds weird. While there’s no one who loves to rip on their own generation more than me, it’s officially time to make your company ”millennial friendly.” If you’re not aggressively working to attract millennials to your company, your recruiting strategy is going nowhere in a hurry. In just a few short years, millennials we total almost half of the workforce, with the generation accounting for 75% of it by 2030.

There are 4 things that this “participation trophy” generation cares about:

i. They want to grow – even if it’s not with your company
ii. They want a coach – not a boss
iii. They don’t want to waste their time on the little things
iv. They want balance & democracy… and another participation trophy while you’re at it

There’s obviously more than this, but these provide a fairly accurate portrayal. So how can you use it to your advantage to accelerate your recruiting efforts?

Embrace a coaching culture, then brag about it.

This generation has overwhelmingly demonstrated that what they’re really after is opportunity. They’re not looking for an average job where they can spend 20 years and brag to their kids about the “good ‘ole days.” If it doesn’t keep their interest and provide growth potential where they can learn, they’re not sticking around.

78% of sales professionals said they would accept less money to sell something compelling
60% of millennials consider the most attractive perk to be growth opportunities
46% of millennials left their last job due to a lack of career growth [Glassdoor]

Help them learn and grow, and you’ll attract and keep them.

If you have a cool office, brag about that too.
We’ve experienced some massive shifts in cultural norms over the last couple decades, as the once powerful suit and tie no longer represents the people with a “serious job” like it once did. Instead, they’re more of a stodginess in many industries.

Of all the things millennials have denounced, there may not be a more hated work convention than cubicles. Thanks to the help of Office Space, these ratchet things now stand as a symbol of where creativity goes to die.

While I was born in the wrong time period, my fellow “Gen Y’s” will flock to companies with a cool office like yours. Use this as a tool to your advantage in your recruiting efforts while making it known that it’s a place for millennials.

Make your company culture well-known that it’s geared toward millennials.

The best companies are honest about their culture. If you’re not trying to hire millennials, hey – more power to ya. However, there’s been a large shift of companies centering their culture around these individuals.

By broadcasting that you have a winning culture with a no complaining attitude, you’ll naturally attract millennials if that’s your focus. If it’s not, you’ll likely avoid them in many regards because most job seekers don’t want to work for a company where they don’t believe they’ll fit in.

Part of hiring the best has to take into account the best cultural fit, and by simply stating where you stand, you’ll see more applicants submit their information just based on the fact they think they’ll be a good match.

#3   | Supercharge Your Job Ads

Have you ever posted a job ad similar to this one? Not only does that just rock me right to sleep, but it’s highly doubtful you’ll attract the right type of applicants with something that bad. With no mention of the type of sale, volume, price point, etc., how is a job seeker supposed to know if it’s the best door to door sales job for them?

There’s simply nothing being communicated that would be viewed as a benefit. It’s a commission only position with no draw or opportunity to earn money quickly. You’re going to be hard pressed to find talent with an ad like that.

Surely you already understand the importance of tracking your team’s sales activities by now. This will play a critical role in your ability to scale your team quickly because these same metrics and analytics are now your strength in recruiting as well. Use the information from your dashboard to calculate metrics like your team’s dollars per door rate (DPD) rate.

Now you can get laser focused and detailed in your job ads and have data-driven proof with your claims, like in this example.

#4   | Offer More Than Just Commission

If you go look at any of the larger d2d or outside sales companies, you can guarantee they’re offering some type of incentive on top of just paying commission when a deal is closed. This is one of the ways they’re able to entice the professionals looking for a sales career vs a sales job that they’re the right fit.

How companies can afford to pay anything else other than commission is probably what you’re thinking to yourself, I’m sure. For starters, they know that the top talent in the industry wants to work for companies that invest in their success, and that includes financially when they perform.

1… Consider ramping new sales hires with a draw

Paying your new sales reps is not a requirement and you can still get your hires, but by offering a small ramp up stipend you will be able to pick from a larger pool of sales candidates and increase quality of applicants. If you would like to see more traffic with stronger candidates, then consider offering a recoverable or non-recoverable draw.

2… Provide a career path  

As long as your sales process is real and the business is growing, then your 100% commission sales reps are proving their ability and closing deals. Have a growth plan in place to promote your top performers. It’s important to have growth opportunities and a career path for top reps. Retain top performers and continue to reward their performance. 

Hiring salespeople who have the experience, passion, and drive to succeed is no easy feat. Understand that there will be challenges. Get serious about paying your sales reps based on performance.

#5   | Treat Great Applicants Like Great Customers

It’s not every day that a high quality candidate applies for your position. Treat them like you do high quality leads that come through your marketing and sales funnels. You wouldn’t wait three days to call a high velocity lead, would you? If you wouldn’t do it to a good lead, don’t do it to a good candidate.

You should be moving heaven and earth to accommodate these types of candidates. Focus on impressing them and treat them to the best hiring experience they’ve ever gone through. Recruiting is essential to achieving growth, making hiring top talent as important as acquiring customers. 

#6   | Don’t Ignore Passive Candidates

Passive candidates are applicants who aren’t currently looking for a new role, but would be open to the possibility if an opportunity presented itself. These individuals aren’t on Indeed or Monster looking for your company, but they’ll hear you out if you they’re contacted.

Approximately 75% of the candidate pool is described as passive. Social media will become one of your best friends to find these applicants. Just because they’re not looking for you, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be looking for them.

#7   | Oh, Referrals

Your best source to not just find new employees, but find the people with talent is to look within your existing team. Think back to your sales process… customer referrals are your highest converting, cheapest lead source.

The same is true for recruiting referrals. If you’ve built a good team like you were supposed to, this becomes a network effect. When you create a culture of happy employees that are motivated in their work, they’re more inclined to refer their friends and colleagues to join the team.

#8   | Nurture Talent

Timing is everything, especially when it comes to recruiting. Whether it’s candidates who were referred by your current employees or people you’ve found through your own efforts, there’s always going to be applicants who aren’t ready to be a part of your team for one reason or another.

Put anyone you don’t hire into a nurturing campaign that sends a drip email 3 – 4 times per year. The emails can be extremely simple, but the goal is to remind people who you are and your company are. Check in with them to see how things have been going while making it easy for them to check out your career pages and connect with your company on social media for more info. 

One Final Thing 

Doubling the size of your sales team isn’t easy. It’s going to require a combination of recruiting new talent and keeping the talent that already exists in your organization. The approach you take needs to be exceptionally well-rounded because it’s going to take a considerable number of skills to grow this quickly.

To grow a team of any size requires a fairly large amount of time, effort and energy. If you’re not putting forth the level needed, you’re going to miss on the highest quality candidates. More importantly, your effort needs to be greater than before because what you don’t do, your competitors will.

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SPOTIO is the #1 field sales acceleration platform designed specifically for outside sales managers and reps to squeeze every drop out of their field sales efforts.

To improve your sales process, there are tools and techniques you can implement to make these changes easier for your company. If your salespeople aren’t equipped with the resources they need to succeed, your organization will suffer from employee turnover, trouble with quota attainment, and low sales morale.

As a sales leader you need to focus on helping your staff do what you hired them to do – close more deals. In this article, we’ll explore three key strategies that you and your sales team can implement to improve your sales process and boost your company’s bottom line.

3 Key Strategies That Will Improve Your Sales Process

1. Training, Training, and More Training 

The first and most important thing you can do to improve your sales process is to train your team on a regular basis. This is not something that you do just once.

Yes, your initial training lays the groundwork for most of the conversations that your reps will have and it gives them the tools they need to tackle client questions and concerns that regularly manifest during a sales pitch.

Beyond that, you also need to offer training every week. You need to be available to work with your individuals for just a few minutes at a time, once a week. Then offer group training every two weeks where you focus on a different small group of sales representatives each time.

Staggering your training like this allows you to give reps the tools they need to improve their sales process without taking them all off the phone at crucial times throughout the day.

That said, what should your focus be during these training sessions? 

A good way to make sure you’re providing the most impact is to look at specific KPI’s that your reps are measured on and use training as a way to improve these metrics.

For example, if your reps are struggling to set appointments, work on prospecting. Or, if they’re unable to get verbal commits on prospects, focus on framing your solution and building value in the prospect’s eyes. If they have trouble with contract negotiations, work on closing skills.

By breaking down your sales process, finding out where your team needs the most help, and helping them cover any gaps, you’ll be well on your way to improving your team’s numbers.

Uncovering Problems 

Realistically, potential leads want to be told what they said in a slightly different way. Leads that are calling you are doing so for a singular purpose. They want an answer or a solution to their problem and they need to hear what that problem is and how your company is going to solve it. As such, your sales team needs to be focused on nothing more than uncovering these problems and offering solutions.

Teach them to use phrases like: 

– I just want to make sure I heard you correctly…
– It sounds to me like your biggest issue is…
– So, you’re having problems with…

Effectively your staff needs to reinforce that these are real problems. They can do so by repeating their problem back to them to solidify in the mind of the client that your company has a solution.

Building a Relationship 

Your training also has to focus on building relationships. A sales process needs to function at every step of the sales funnel and it can only do that if from the get-go trust is built with the potential leads. Most people won’t make a decision the first time they talk to one of your representatives but that doesn’t mean that your representative shouldn’t continue to focus on that potential client.

However, they have to continue in the right way. Reps must accurately represent your company and pay attention to the sales funnel. They also need to focus more on cultivating a long-term relationship with a client rather than focusing on the sale and scaring them off early on.

Teaching reps to do this improves your sales process by shifting the goal from a money-focused close to an education-focused relationship.

2. Persistence is Important

But why does this type of long-term thinking matter? Because persistence closes more deals, and here’s the proof:

– 2% of sales are closed with the 1st contact
– 3% of sales are closed with the 2nd contact
– 5% of sales are closed with the 3rd contact
– 10% of sales are closed with the 4th contact
– 80% of sales are closed with the 5th contact or more

This means that reps should think of every new lead as someone they have to follow up with at least five times before a sale happens. It takes persistence to improve the sales process at every step and companies have to teach their representatives to focus on building client relationships so that they can stay motivated during the third, fourth, and even perhaps the fifth point of contact.

Consider that 27% of sales calls are never actually followed up on. That means 27% of calls leak out of your sales funnel which indicates a terrible sales process. Another 80% of sales representatives never reach out more than four times which is incredibly shocking when you consider that 80% of sales are closed at the fifth point of contact. That means the 80% of sales representatives who don’t reach out for a fifth time could theoretically make 80% more sales if they were willing to put in the effort for simply one more phone call.

Teaching this to your staff will improve your sales process across the board.

3. Educate Clients

At each stage of the sales process, your staff needs to focus on education. Every lead needs to be educated. Cold calls, somewhat warm calls, even hot calls that are inbound still require education. Callers want in-depth explanations. Potential leads that your reps meet should receive solution explanations that are good enough to convince them to make a purchase. A brief two minutes phone call, a single email, or one meeting won’t suffice.

So what do you do?

You can create educational resources that can be provided to your leads, including things like:

– Case studies 
– Sales letters 
– Data sets 
– White papers 
– Live demonstrations 

Most of the time something as simple as this can make or break a deal. But don’t let your sales representatives simply text or email a potential lead telling them that resources were emailed and the lead should call once they have read through the data. This type of outreach at any point in your sales process is incredibly disengaging and passive.

So give reps the tools they need to engage so that they share that information in person or through a live virtual format so that they can go over it. They should make sure the potential leads understand it and address any questions they have, and educate them.

Doing this will help provide the opportunity to answer a lead’s questions and demonstrate the value of your company. It will allow your representatives the opportunity to handle any objectives, show their company expertise, and ultimately establish trust. This does make the process for each sale in your sales pipeline longer but it gives more control and closes more deals in the long term.

Conclusion

Overall, you can improve your sales process if you focus on careful planning, preparation, and give your sales staff the data and the tools they need the focus long term on successes for your company.

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