Sales Performance

How to Get Your Field Sales Team Back to Work Post COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has completely changed the way we live, work, and interact with each other. The last couple of months have been extremely difficult for many people. If you work in field sales, you know this first hand.

Some outside sellers have been able to adapt by shifting their focus to virtual field sales. Others decided it was better to close up shop and cease operations until the storm passed.

Now that the worst of the virus is behind us, it’s time to think about getting your field sales team back to work. The landscape is different now. Many experts expect a recession. The good news is, growth and increased profitability is still. Don’t believe us? Just ask the 14% of companies who’ve excelled during the last four economic downturns.

At Spotio, we’re in a unique position because of our relationship with hundreds of companies in dozens of industries around the world. This has allowed us to gain valuable insights about how best-of-breed businesses are acting and reacting post COVID-19.

Using these insights, we’ve created a checklist to help you get your sales team back on track.

Get Your Sales Team Back on Track

What can your outside sales team do to get back on track post COVID-19? Follow the checklist below. The nine tips and tricks we mention will help you make up for lost time, regain productivity, and hit new revenue numbers.

Let’s dive in…

1. Make Safety a Priority

No matter what you do, make sure safety is a top priority — both for your field sales team and the prospects they book meetings with. Here are a few tips:

Follow Local Guidelines: What has the government in your area deemed acceptable behavior? These guidelines have been put in place for a reason. Please follow them! That may mean wearing a mask in public places, staying six feet away from others at all times, wearing gloves… Learn the guidelines in your region.

Consider Prospect Comfort: Just because local authorities say it’s okay to meet in public again, doesn’t mean all of your leads are ready to take this step. Respect your prospects’ wishes. If they would rather reschedule a meeting, reschedule it. If they ask you to wear a mask or gloves while in their office, honor the request.

Wash Your Hands: One of the best ways to prevent further spread of the virus is to frequently wash your hands. Any time you meet with a prospect, take the time to clean yourself properly. This is a simple step that any field sales professional can complete.

2. Understand the Market

As mentioned, the COVID-19 pandemic has been extremely difficult for many people and their businesses. Not every company has the funds to purchase your product and/or service right now. That’s why it’s important to understand your market and focus your sales efforts on the organizations that are currently thriving.

You can tell which businesses are most likely to purchase your products by researching the industry, whether or not the company in question is hiring and/or active on social media, and by the amount of content it’s producing.

3. Evaluate Your Business Plan

In all likelihood, your business had to pivot during the COVID-19 outbreak and forced quarantine period. The question now is, should you stay pivoted, go back to your pre-virus business plan, or create a hybrid approach?

Think about the new marketing channels you’ve been using, products and/or services you’ve begun offering, and the sales methods you’ve adopted over the past few months. How many of them are still relevant in a post COVID-19 world? Your answer will tell you which business plan (pivot, pre-virus, or hybrid) to use going forward.

We should mention that the virtual sales tactics you’ve been using lately will almost certainly be useful to you in the future. The ability to reach prospects in far away places and demo products for them via video software is quite valuable.

4. Retrain Your Staff

If you’re changing your business plan to adapt to the post COVID-19 environment, you may need to retrain your staff. How else will they become accustomed to the new processes and workflows you’ve developed?

Make training a priority! If your employees don’t understand how to do their jobs productivity will suffer, team morale will plummet, and company turnover will increase. Since turnover expenses can range from 16% to 213%, depending on the position being vacated, we suggest you invest in staff training to help avoid the high cost of worker replacement.

5. Use a Multi Channel Sales Approach

Multichannel sales is the practice of contacting and engaging prospects in a variety of ways. For example, a seller can visit a prospect in person, call or text them on the phone, or send them an email. Each of these channels can be effective sales tools when used correctly.

Roughly 80% of the businesses we’ve talked to say they plan to continue using a multichannel sales approach because of the benefits, which include:

Greater Customer Satisfaction: Not every prospect appreciates in-person meetings. By contacting them in a variety of ways, you can ensure each potential customer can communicate with you in the way they want, which will increase satisfaction and loyalty.

Higher Revenue Numbers: Greater customer satisfaction generally leads to higher revenue numbers because people are more comfortable buying from companies they know, like, and trust. Communicate with your audience via their preferred channel and enjoy more sales and higher revenue numbers.

Better Team Productivity: Lastly, multichannel sales often leads to greater productivity. It takes a lot of time and effort to meet a prospect in person. If you can reduce your face-to-face meetings and replace them with quick phone calls, emails, and texts — while maintaining an acceptable conversion rate — you’ll be more productive.

The pandemic forced many field sales representatives to adopt remote selling strategies and develop a multichannel sales approach. After all, you weren’t able to visit prospects in person, so you needed to call, text, and/or email them instead.

If at all possible, continue to use multiple channels to reach your audience. That way you can experience the benefits listed above.

6. Discover New Prospecting Opportunities

The worst of COVID-19 seems to be behind us. But it may be some time before you and the rest of your outside sales team are back in the field meeting with potential customers full-time. This means that you need to discover new prospecting opportunities.

Fortunately, technology makes it easy to find contact information online for almost anyone — including the folks in your industry who’re ready to buy your products.

Here are a couple of resources you can use:

LinkedIn Sales Navigator: LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great prospecting tool that helps users target specific buyer personas, discover and understand key details, and engage leads with personalized messages. Since LinkedIn has over 575 million users, there’s a lot of people on the network that you can send sales pitches to.

Google My Business: With Google My Business, you can quickly create a great Google listing for your business that’s easily found on Google.com and included in Google Maps. The tool is completely free and will give you access to millions of potential customers.

The WhitePages App: Whitepages is the largest and most trusted online directory in the world. You can use it to pinpoint the contact information of your prospects by typing in their personal or business names, addresses, phone numbers, and more.

Lead Machine: Lead Machine is a SPOTIO product that allows field sales teams to generate quality leads in seconds. All our users have to do is draw their target territory on the in-app map, build an ideal customer profile using 50 potential data points, and then import the leads that SPOTIO generates. 

7. Analyze Past Data

As a sales person, you probably have a list of “not yet ready” leads. You know, the folks who expressed interest in what you sell, but weren’t quite ready to pull the trigger and make a purchase when you last talked to them.

Now is a great time to analyze past data and re-engage these prospects with sales messages. Who knows? Maybe they’ve suddenly realized they can’t go another day without your company’s offerings, or now have the funds to make a purchase.

We suggest contacting the people who seemed closest to a sale first. Then work backwards, ending at the businesses or homeowners in closest proximity to your existing customers.

8. Invest in New Technology

In-person meetings were out during the COVID-19 shutdown, so proactive field sales reps adapted to their circumstances by investing in new technology. For many sales teams, online video and social selling became a part of their daily workflow for the very first time. Others invested heavily in email marketing and cold calling campaigns to make sales.

 

We may be able to meet with prospects face-to-face now, but digital communication strategies aren’t going anywhere. You should consider investing in new technologies, if you haven’t already, that allow you to better communicate with your customers and boost productivity.

9. Be Active

Finally, it’s important that you’re extremely active post COVID-19! Now isn’t the time to sit back and relax. We need to roll up our sleeves, climb back into the trenches, and work hard to make sales. If we don’t, we’ll have a hard time closing deals.

Your prospects are aching for life to get back to normal. But that doesn’t mean they have the funds to invest in your products. Depending on your industry, you might have to work extra hard to meet sales quotas as companies shrink budgets to help them recover from the financial impact of COVID-19. Don’t let this discourage you!

Organizational spending will eventually return to normal. Even if you don’t make as many sales right now, you can plant seeds and build relationships that will help you make more sales in the future.

Own the “New Normal”

There’s no doubt about it, the world looks different now than it did six months ago. As you and your company adjust to the “new normal, keep the above checklist in mind. It will help your field sales team make up for lost time, regain productivity, and hit new revenue goals.

Good luck!

How to Choose the Best Sales Reporting Software For Your Business

What is the best sales reporting tool for your business? The short answer: it depends.

Modern business is dominated by data. It makes sense. Without a sufficient knowledge of statistics, KPIs, and other analytics, it’s difficult to make accurate decisions and improve company performance. This is especially true for sales teams.

If you don’t know where your best customers come from; the optimal times to reach them with a call, text, or email; and where the leaks are in your sales funnel, you’ll have a hard time reaching your sales quotas on a regular basis.

Fortunately, sales reporting software exists to get you the data you need! You just have to determine which tool fits your company best. This isn’t always easy to do…

There are A LOT of sales reporting tools on the market. Some are designed for enterprise companies, others for one-man selling operations. Plus, inside and outside sales teams have vastly different needs, as do the management professionals who oversee them.

Suffice to say, there are a lot of variables at play and it can be difficult to choose a solution that suits everyone’s needs and ensures company-wide adoption. To select the right reporting solution, you first need to know exactly what to look for.

In this article, we’ll explore what sales reporting software is, and the 13 questions you must ask in order to choose the right tool for your team.

Let’s dive in!

What is Sales Reporting Software?

Sales reporting software is exactly what it sounds like: a tool that helps sellers track (i.e. report on) their sales. When you’re able to see the data generated by your sales efforts, you can analyze the numbers and optimize your selling processes.

Sales reporting software helps teams:

– Organize data and monitor key metrics
– Present relevant data to key stakeholders – reps, managers and executive
– Identify bottlenecks across the entire sales pipeline
– Measure how specific sales activities are moving sales targets
– Hit sales quotas more consistently
– Oversee team goals and individual contributions
– Deliver more accurate sales forecasting

While a sales reporting tool will undoubtedly benefit your organization, choosing the right platform for your company’s unique needs is tricky. To make the right decision, salespeople need to ask the right questions.

What’s the Best Sales Reporting Software? 13 Questions to Ask.

This is actually the wrong question. Instead, ask yourself, “What’s the best sales report software for my company?” What works well for sellers at Company ABC might not work as well for your team, and vice versa.

Fortunately, by asking yourself the following 13 questions, you’ll be able to better determine which sales reporting tool is the right fit for your organization.

1. Is it For Inside or Outside Sales Reporting?

The first question you need to ask yourself when choosing a sales reporting tool is who is the specific application designed for?

Inside and outside sales teams need different levels of insight to meet their sales quotas. Which kind of team are you a part of? If you’re involved in field sales, you’ll likely want to track activities and performance at the territory level.

By answering this question first, you’ll eliminate a lot of poor-fit solutions from your list almost immediately.

Your company can use a tool like SPOTIO to integrate field sales and reporting capabilities into your existing CRM. This will allow you to get the data you need, while still using the tools you already know and enjoy using.

2. What Type of Sales Data do You Need to Report On?

Next up, ask yourself what kind of sales data you need to report on. Not all solutions will give you access to the same data points, so knowing what you need is paramount.

Field teams generally need to analyze and break down revenue numbers by territory. But does your team also need access to rep and team-level activity insights? What about management? Do they need a specific kind of report to properly evaluate performance and measure progress against sales targets?

Make a list of all the data points you need a sales reporting software to generate and keep the document handy as you vet various solutions.

3. Are You Able to Track Multi-Channel Sales Activity?

In the old days, there were very few ways to reach a prospect directly with your sales message. You could visit them face to face, call them on the phone, or send them direct mail. Today, there are dozens of communication channels available to you.

The sales reporting software you choose should be able to track all of the channels you use — both online and off.

Before settling on a specific solution, make sure the tool will allow you to easily capture and input data. If it doesn’t, the reports you generate won’t be accurate and your sales processes will suffer as a result.

4. Is it Easy to Build Reports?

Speaking of reports, does the tool you’re considering make it easy to create them? You should be able to segment and visualize your data in different ways. That way sales reps, managers, and executives can each get an accurate view of daily activities and the ways in which they affect both the sales pipeline and company revenue.

As you can see in the example below, SPOTIO allows stakeholders to slice data in a variety of ways and gain the exact insights they need:

5. What Level of Customization is Available?

Every company is different and your sales team has a specific way of doing things. If the sales reporting tool you choose doesn’t allow for customized reports, you’ll have a hard time visualizing the data in a meaningful way for stakeholders.

Choose a sales tracking tool that’s malleable to your team’s needs — both in regards to the data points it lets you track and the ways in which it enables you to visualize said data.

Just don’t get too carried away with this idea and choose a solution with every possible bell and whistle. Customization is great, but so is simplicity. Try to find a tool that’s both flexible and doesn’t require a degree in rocket science to operate correctly.

For example, SPOTIO gives users access to Custom Statuses, which will allow you to incorporate unique sales processes into the tool. Simply determine what you want to track, then let SPOTIO automatically fill in these details while you prospect.

6. Does it Provide Activity-Level Reporting?

Annual goals are achieved through daily actions. If your sales reporting tool of choice doesn’t allow you to track daily activity, you might not realize you have a faulty process until it’s too late.

Make sure the reporting solution you use shows how daily efforts translate into leads, prospects, and customers on a weekly and monthly basis — or not. That way you can take this information and either adjust your selling approach or double down on winning tactics.

For example, you’ll likely want to track the number of emails sent, calls made, social media conversations generated, booked meetings, etc.

7. Can it be Used in the Field?

If you’re part of an outside sales team, you’ll definitely want to choose a sales reporting tool that can be used in the field, i.e. can be accessed via an app on a mobile device.

Think about it: you could jot down information about the prospects you meet in the field on a yellow legal pad or in some kind of journal, then transfer those details to your tracking software once you make it back to the office. But is this really the best use of your time?

Instead, eliminate tedious data entry work and boost productivity by selecting a solution that you can easily take on the go with you.

8. Does it Provide Automated Notifications?

Speed is important in sales. The faster you can close deals, the less time it will give your prospects to get cold feet and your competition to swoop in and steal the sale.

That’s why we recommend choosing a sales report software that features automated email notifications, which can be triggered by specific events. Wouldn’t it be nice to know, for example, when a prospect downloads a white paper from your website? You can easily use this information to gauge prospect interest and move them farther down your pipeline.

Your reporting tool should give you access to key data points and enable you to act on them quicker than ever before.

9. Does it Integrate With Other Data Sources?

Here’s the thing: just about every business uses multiple pieces of software to run operations. Why? Because no application does everything a modern company needs it to. This fact makes integration capabilities a real concern.

Investigate whether or not your current technology stack will connect with the sales reporting tools you’re considering — and whether the integration is seamless or not.

10. How is Data Secured?

Sata security is always a top concern. Many big-name brands have gotten themselves into hot water by not protecting their customers’ private details. Don’t be like these companies! Find a sales reporting tool that’s committed to data security.

While this isn’t the most exciting feature to look for, it’s incredibly important and will ensure the safety of your customer and business data.

11. How Does Pricing Scale?

Budget is an ever-present concern for most businesses. You need to make sure that you can afford the sales reporting tool you’re interested in. But you also need to check to see how pricing scales for the solution, too.

The last thing you want to do is onboard a new reporting solution, only to realize that prices skyrocket as your team and/or sales activity increases. Take the time to understand how pricing will change as your team and operations scale.

Cost is often the deciding factor between similar solutions and can make choosing between two options much easier.

12. Have You Checked Customer Reviews?

At this point, you’ve probably narrowed down your search to just a few sales report software options. Now you need to look at what past and current users say about these tools.

This is so important! A certain solution might have every feature you need and be well within budget. But if a large portion of its user base claims the tool is difficult to use or buggy, you should seriously consider investing in something different.

So read as many reviews as you can on sites like Capterra and G2. Better yet, speak with current users about their experiences if you’re able!

13. What Level of Customer Support is Provided?

Finally, take customer support into account when deciding which sales reporting tool to use for your company. A rude help team will be unpleasant to work with.

How do you tell which solutions offer quality support? You should be able to get a good idea by reading product reviews, your interactions with the tool’s sales team, and the quality of help you receive during a free trial.

Speaking of free trials…

Take Your Shortlist For a Test Drive

Once you’ve answered the 13 questions above, you can trim down your list of potential sales report software to the select few that meet your company’s specific needs. All that’s left to do at this point is sign up for a free trial and/or demo and take your shortlist for a test drive!

Dig into each piece of software and assess its usability, whether or not you enjoy working with the tool, and if the product’s features help you better accomplish your sales goals.

This is the final step and should help you determine the best sales reporting software for your company. When you know the answer, invest in your chosen solution and watch your sales team’s productivity and success rates improve.

SPOTIO is Best for Field Sales Reporting

SPOTIO is the perfect sales engagement and reporting tool for outside sales teams.

Here are a few of SPOTIO’s top reporting features:

– Track sales activities at the rep, team and organizational levels.-
View pipeline activity inside sales territories.
– Create custom metrics and build KPI dashboards.
– Create rep accountability with GPS location tracking.
– Motivate reps with team leaderboards.
– Build pipeline benchmarks and accurate sales forecasts.

 

If you think SPOTIO might be a good fit for your company, request a demo today. Our knowledgeable team will walk you through our solution’s features and help you determine if SPOTIO is the right sales reporting software for your company.

5 Critical Sales Tasks for any Field Sales Team

Technology has completely revolutionized the way businesses communicate with customers and prospects. Modern sales reps depend on a number of tools everyday to execute their tasks. Consequently, traditional in-person sales meetings have become far less common than they once were.

But, even as the sales process becomes increasingly technology-driven, face-to-face meetings still dispense certain benefits that nothing else can replicate. This is where outside sales, commonly referred to as ‘field sales’, comes into the picture.

The fact that close to 52.8% of sales professionals in the US today are engaged in outside sales easily justifies why this particular approach is vital if a business wants to accelerate its growth.

That being said, there are several critical tasks every outside sales team needs to execute in order to stay ahead of the competition and achieve promised results. In this piece, we’ll be looking at a few.

1) Establishing Rapport with Prospects

A purchase decision isn’t just about the product or service being pitched— buyers want to buy from businesses they know and trust. Recent sales statistics show that 19% of buyers want to connect with a salesperson during the awareness stage of their buying process, when they’re first learning about the product; 60% want to connect with sales during the consideration stage, after they’ve researched the options and come up with a short list; and 20% want to talk during the decision stage, once they’re decided which product to buy.

Field sales teams understand the value of personal interactions, as they spend most of their workdays on the road meeting with leads and customers. Field sales reps have honed a different skill set as compared to their inside sales counterparts, performing hands-on tasks to drive deals forward and  playing a more informative role in the buying process by developing good rapport with prospects.

With the Coronavirus pandemic creating havoc across the world, a majority of businesses are functioning remotely. Since face-to-face meetings are going to be discouraged for some time now, field reps are leveraging virtual communication platforms to interact with prospects. 

These virtual meetings need to be focused on the prospects’ needs and how your product or service can help them rather than just talking about your business offerings. The platform of interaction doesn’t matter. Once the prospects start seeing value in the meeting, they’ll leave the meeting feeling like they got to know you and your company in person. 

Hence, establishing a connection with the lead is one of the most critical sales tasks every field sales team needs to prioritize upon.

2) Identifying Customer Needs and Tailoring the Pitch Accordingly

The ground rule for building a successful sales strategy is – the main focus of the sales pitch should always be the client. Field sales are no different. 

A seller who adopts the buyer’s perspective in their approach to a customer meeting ends up engaging the buyer more constructively. This happens because they view things in the same light as the buyer, inhabiting their world and speaking to the challenges, pains and fears. 

One advantage with field sales is that you have the potential client right in front of you. Therefore, identifying needs and tailoring the pitch accordingly to close the deal becomes much easier. 

Comparison charts are something field reps often use to justify why their offering is the best option in the market right now and why the prospect should be choosing them over their counterparts. On seeing the comparison chart, if the potential customer says something like – “But the other company is offering this feature, and it is exactly what I’m looking for”, the field rep can then tailor the offering a bit and say, “How about you try our service/product free of cost for a month and then decide?”

When you see the buying signs from a potential customer, you need your sales pitch at the ready. A strong sales pitch could be the difference-maker that ensures the answer to that question is ‘you’.

Therefore, identifying customer needs and pain points and tailoring pitch accordingly thereafter is something every field sales team should be well-versed with. The responsibility of executing this critical task and getting results squarely lies on the shoulders of the field sales team.

3) Presenting High-Level Insights into the Offering 

A lot has been said about the need to get insights to the table when you’re having meetings with both – your potential or existing customers. In today’s world, where buyers are more informed than they’ve ever been, it is comprehensible that you need to do more than just communicate the capabilities of your company’s offering. Field sales teams constantly struggle to decide where to start, and some even flounder when trying to develop an ‘insight machine’ that scales.

According to Forrester Research, 64% of senior executives believe that salespeople do not know enough about their buyer’s business to bring any worth to an interaction. In fact, only 25% of them are prepared to take a second meeting. If you give this a sincere thought, you’ll be able to comprehend that three out of every four sales meetings are both a waste of money and time— for the seller as well as for the buyer.

Field sales teams that leverage insights as a core feature of the sales engagement strategy are said to deliver more successful sales pitches. One recent research from SiriusDecisions also indicates that providing business and industry expertise is four times more valuable than developing good relationships and having product knowledge. That’s the real value of a well-fabricated insight.

Insights are completely different from traditional marketing techniques since the former help your customers discover problems (or opportunities) that they didn’t even know existed in the first place. On the contrary, traditional marketing approaches sell to a buyer’s identified needs. 

You want to deploy the insights in a way that they lead to your offering’s capabilities mapped to the customer’s unknown or known needs, rather than use traditional marketing approaches that stress on leading the pitch with the offering instead. For this very reason, presenting high level insights into the company’s offering is one of the most critical tasks a field sales team must execute. 

4) Streamlining Longer and Complex Processes to Close Deals Faster

When it comes to turning an interested lead into a client for your business by leveraging the outside sales approach, the process of selling can be a long and intricate one. At times, it can take upwards of weeks or even months to convert an interested prospect to a new client. 

The process is way different than acquiring a customer through inside sales since everything happens digitally there – right from the responses being far more quicker to saving up on all that additional time spent traveling to prospect. 

There are many steps and details to remember when it comes to managing a field sales team, and it can be overwhelming to keep track of all these moving pieces when you’re juggling multiple deals while trying to pitch leads in person. A territory management software can be of great help here since it drives sales performances by modeling your sales territories to your business.

An outside sales team is often expected to create and map out a process that can be used by the entire team to track each deal. The idea is to have a documented process that everyone can follow so everyone’s on the same page and knows where each deal is, how many are on the go, and what needs to be done next.

In order to streamline longer and complex processes to close deals faster while each team member is on the go, an outside sales team usually:

  • Maps out all the steps in the potential client’s journey;
  • Defines major stages of the sales process right from enquiring about a prospect’s pain points to qualifying their offering as a potential solution, quoting as well as negotiating so that the deal gets closed to actually closing it;
  • Tracks and optimizes the sales process;
  • Tries to figure out which stages take a longer time to get completed within the process and looks for ways to speed those up.

By creating and sticking to a streamlined process, the sales team ends up improved efficiency, saves time and eventually closes more deals faster. This also acts as a great training process when getting new hires onboard.

5) Managing Flexible and Varied Schedules Effectively

According to one finding by The Brevet Group, it takes 10 or more months for a new sales rep to be fully productive. That being said, getting maximum productivity in sales activities is not just a new sales rep’s problem, it rather is every sales rep’s problem, more so if you’re into field sales.

All employees are bound to experience a productivity slump at some point in their career, and it can be hard to get over it once fallen into. Better time management can be the solution to this ever persisting problem— however, field sales teams also have their own unique challenges due to highly irregular schedules and flexible work days.

Most salespeople have certain goals when it comes to building relationships and prospecting with customers. The most productive field reps, however, keep track of their activities in order to observe if they are getting near their goals and to help properly analyze their next actions. 

To start, they set a specific number of people to prospect each day, and check results at the end of the day to see if they’ve successfully hit that number. Tracking their activities also allows them to figure out the next step and helps them test their capability in a given time frame—then maximize it.

One of the keys to effective time management is setting a schedule—and sticking to it. All you need is discipline! A field sales enablement software like Spotio can also be helpful to drive next level productivity.

About the Author

Ali Mirza
Founder & President
Rose Garden Consulting

 


Ali Mirza is the Founder and President of Rose Garden Consulting and has helped his clients reach the Inc 500 list and triple their revenue in less than a year.  As a leading sales expert, he has closed over $200 Million dollars in sales using his conversation methodology. He is also the host on the For The Close Podcast and is currently writing his first book, Predictable Closing due out in 2020.

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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.

How to Win Bigger Sales Deals 

Every sales rep and manager wants to land bigger deals. With all of the effort, decision-making, skill, and energy that goes into winning a deal – why not win a big one? Working a complex deal can be a daunting task. But, with the right tools, roadmap, and persistence, you can start closing bigger deals.

What it takes to win bigger deals

There are a different set of nuances, strategy, and a higher level of patience that goes into winning a big deal. Typically, the larger the deal size, the longer it will take to close. Also, bigger deals mean that your prospect will have to make a bigger decision for his or her company. Most likely they will need to bring in others on the deal and/or get approval from different departments.

You’ll have to do additional discovery and fact-finding, analyzing customer pain points, and proving the value of your solution to multiple stakeholders in your prospect’s company. This can lead to several perceived problems, slowdowns, or setbacks along the way that you’ll need to address before you win the deal.

The strategies that will lead to larger customers

If you don’t build a solid foundation from the beginning, large deals will slip through your fingers. You have to make sure that you’re targeting the right accounts and speaking to quality prospects. 

Big deals don’t always start with large contract values. You must also understand how to grow a deal once you’ve penetrated an account. Lastly, you’ll want to understand the value that you and your company can bring to the table and how to show that value to your prospect.

Are You Targeting the Right Customer?

There are so many different types of customers, and anyone who has created customer profiles knows this to be true. So how do you know if you are targeting the right customer? What makes the “right” customer?

Loyal customers spend 67% more, on average than new customers. Why does this matter? It indicates that the “right” customer, the one you should be targeting with your marketing strategy, is the loyal customer. 

New customers are important to your business, sure, but if you are focusing too heavily on acquiring new customers you will miss out on quality customers who can bring your company more profits. 

Customer quality is vitally important

Now, that doesn’t mean you should only focus on the loyal customers you already have. You still have to acquire new customers but the key is to acquire better quality customers who will become loyal.

What is a quality prospect? 

First, you need to figure out what a quality prospect is. Think about a current customer that brings your company value. Consider what it is about that customer that makes them valuable to your business, whether it’s the demographic information or other characteristics that enhance their appeal.

Quality is going to be defined as something different to each business which is why it’s important that you consider the unique nuances of your business when building this profile.

Having a quality target customer in mind will help you allocate resources to that type of customer and create messaging that caters to their needs. Remember that what counts is loyalty so in the end the quality prospect that you are appealing to should be one that remains loyal and one that comes back time and time again spending more money than their counterparts.

These loyal customers expect to be rewarded with the same level of service every time they return but they also expect to be rewarded for simply returning in the first place and that can mean loyalty points, loyalty programs, discounts on products, punch cards that give them something free after every 10 purchases, or other extras.

How to find them

So how do you find them now that you know what they look like? Market research and in-depth quantitative information can go a long way. You can do things as quickly and as easily as sending surveys to existing customers, looking at US Census Bureau information about your target audience, or researching data from third-party firms.

Your market research might require interviews with current customers and perhaps qualitative studies on how your quality customers in that target demographic feel about your current business as well as your products and services.

Key strategies:

Referral. If you can get a referral, it will tremendously increase your chances of a meeting

Research. Due your diligence researching about the prospect before you make your initial contact.

Introduction. Try to get introduced before you make a business approach.

Connect. Once the initial contact has been made, leverage a social platform such as LinkedIn or Twitter to establish a deeper connection.

During all this, you might find that certain products or services appeal to one group and not another. This is why it’s important to segment your market based on things like buying habits, ethnographic, psychographics, and demographics.

How to Boost Deal Size 

With the right customers in mind, it’s time to start selling. After making eight or more touches to get an initial meeting, and several more touch-points to create a qualified opportunity, sellers may get impatient once they get to the proposal phase.

However, during the proposal phase sales reps need to take their time especially when it comes to bigger contracts.

Offer Something Unique

If you want to boost your deal size, you need to focus on creating obvious upsells. You didn’t go through all that work to figure out your quality target customer and use market research to better understand what it is they love for nothing. This is the point at which you use that information to introduce a product that you know they’ll love, add some sort of complimentary service that you know will offer value.

Remember that you need to be flexible here. Offer your client something that’s customized for what they will find most appealing and most rewarding because there is no single product that’s going to work as the perfect upsell for everyone. You might need to offer a full-service solution, an extra product, or premium (exclusive) content.

Move Beyond Low Priced Packages 

In many cases, smart customers will try to hedge their bets by investing in your lowest tier product. This reduces any risk if they aren’t satisfied or they don’t end up using your solution. They can explore how your products or services work without committing to a large contract.

This logic can cause a problem if your solution provides higher value through a network effect or if the customer would benefit from economies of scale.

Consider a scenario in the telecommunications industry. If your reps are trying to sell to a company and one person says they’ll consider licensing the lowest tier products, right out of the gate this could negatively impact the results they see because your communications tool might work better if everyone in the organization is using it and not just a few people.

In situations like these, team plans or higher tier plans will give the customer better opportunities to gain more value from your product. This is what you want to emphasize and explain during the proposal stage.

You also want to explain that as time moves on prices will most likely increase but if customers want a long-term commitment now, maybe something for 2 years or longer, they can get preferred rates and protection against future price hikes. You might even make this slightly more appealing by giving them one or two months for free if they agree to a long term commitment.

Give Extras

Don’t forget defined areas where you can add values in the form of strategic discounts. Throwing in something like a free subscription to a webinar service or premium training courses that help them use your platform or even offering an extended warranty can be the icing on your customer’s cake.

Try to avoid slashing your prices when closing the sale and instead offering extras that give value to the prospect but still close a larger sized deal.

4 Ways to Land the Big Fish

With all the tools at your disposal, quality prospects in mind, and the right steps to boosting the size of your deal – now you need a handful of ways to land that big fish. 

1. Start by emphasizing stoicism, control over emotions, and the knowledge of when to walk away from a deal. This seems counterintuitive in a sales role but it might be in your best interest in certain cases to accept a “no” from a potential client that was somewhat hesitant and walk away.

If you do this calmly and effectively, it might trigger a callback and a deal because you weren’t desperately seeking their approval and trying to give them anything and everything they wanted.

2. Remember that every customer is different so not every solution, product, extra feature, or free trial is going to fit the same people. Every company and individual will have its own framework, its own strategy, and its own needs which is why you have to be creative in combining different packages with unique values and prices.

Have several options on the table before you start pitching.

3. Large clients are not the experts in your industry. Even though they might be an authority in their field, you are the authority in your field and those companies are looking to you as someone who can quite literally diagnose their problem and give them a prescription.

They don’t want to hear you preaching about how amazing the product is or how outstanding your service is and how their company will completely fall apart if you don’t use it. They want someone who will attentively listen to their problem, diagnose their issue, and give them the solution.

Integrating the “we” more often than “you” or “I” will go a long way toward making them feel like you were in this together.

4. While it might be impossible for you to offer a product or service that’s completely different than anything else on the market that doesn’t mean your company can’t still be unique. You can differentiate your company by controlling your approach to the sales process:

Offer a sample before someone has engaged in multiple discussions with sales staff. 

Give them a month of your platform for free before they’ve even given you excuses as to why they’re hesitant. 

If you’re trying to sell to a CEO, catch a flight and meet them in person. You’d be surprised what this in-person communication can do in a world where people are accustomed to declining phone calls and ignoring emails on a daily basis.

Conclusion

In the end, winning bigger deals starts with the same level of groundwork as any other deal. You must talk with your team internally and examine current customers that add value to your business and what it is specifically about them that creates value.

From there, it’s your responsibility to find ways to add more value to your current customers while also focusing your attention targeting new prospects that share the same qualities and making an effort to engage them in a sales conversation.

As you get closer to the finish line with prospects, always look for ways that you can add even more value and incentives to build and close larger deals.

The Ultimate Guide for Tracking Sales Productivity

If sales are down, don’t work harder, throw more bodies at the challenge, or double-down on old tactics—instead, work smarter by measuring productivity with real-time data to focus sales efforts on what works.

Whether you are selling B2B products or services, there is nothing more important to success than a sales team that works efficiently to close sales quickly, effectively and with regularity.

Quite simply, the more productive your sales team members are in the time allocated, the higher your sales figures will go. It is a careful balancing act to get right.

On the one hand…

The right way to look at this is simple: a salesperson expends their time converting leads into customers and the way they spend their time will have a direct impact on the amount of revenue they will generate. It costs time and money to close sales, so the investment must be far less than the pay-off, so that the company comes out on top.

On the other hand…

A lot of successful sales people swear by their instincts and experience—two abstract concepts that are difficult to quantify, but nevertheless help people to determine how much time and effort to invest in a prospect.

This kind of insight comes from “knowing the ropes”, having gone down the same path with prospects again and again, listening for cues, and when you get them, communicating the right message to motivate the customer to move to the next stage of the buying process—or else, cutting your losses and moving on if things don’t change within a pre-determined cut-off point in time.

This is the old way of working sales, and in today’s highly volatile marketplace it can’t work, because sales people have even less time to listen for cues, and more distractions—up to 50% of sales time is wasted on unproductive prospecting. Sales teams must either gain their instincts in half the time, or leverage tools to help them make the call when they need to double-down, or need to cut and run.

Luckily, technology can help.

Since 49% of organizations have zero or limited means to measure sales productivity on their own, and still manage to invest up to 24K per sales employee on improving productivity, this article will give you a crash course on using technology to do just that. It is much smarter to measure productivity, focus on your key performance indicators (KPIs), and then link successful sales to the most efficient and fruitful activities.

Begin by measuring the sales process

57% of B2B organizations say that converting qualified leads into customers is their top funnel priority, and yet very few companies take the subjectivity out of the process and truly understand which leads have the best chance of converting.

Depending on the source and funnel stage, leads are at different qualification stages as they’re handed between sales and marketing.

Without objectively understanding the sales process, and how time is being invested in generating sales, isn’t it just like taking a shot in the dark, and hoping to hit the target?

Wouldn’t it be better to know what is achieving results? And then replicating that desired level of performance by your sales reps again and again, based on a template?

That is what working to a sales process is all about. It is almost like a scripted, step-by-step to follow so you get to sales success.

A sales process lays out a repeatable series of steps that sales people can take to turn an early stage lead into a new customer. Each step in a sales process consists of several separate selling activities.

By keeping track of the amount of time your sales team spends interacting with prospective customers at each step, and which activities they allocate their time to do, and which they skip —you can track progress and results. Best of all, you can also ensure that sales teams focus their attention on the best leads, based on the profiles of customers who have already converted.

This is owning the sales process, and taking control by understanding exactly the number of leads captured, deals closed, customer profiles, and most importantly, the time spent selling to them.

What sales activities should you focus on?

Here is a hypothetical example of the main steps in a typical B2B sales process:

Prospecting. This is the time spent on researching your competitors, and skimming your company’s knowledge base to get a deeper understanding of your customer’s pain points, and the value your product/service adds.

Qualifying. The time invested in finding out who, where, and how to reach your ideal leads—and the one’s most likely to become customers.

Needs Assessment. Understanding your customer’s options (your competition), and how to position your product/service as the best fit for them.

Demonstration of product/service. This is where great sales people really shine. It is all about demonstrating the value customers will experience if they purchase.

Proposal. This is mostly administrative, and takes more time than it should because a lot of the time is spent waiting for approvals, or feedback.

Negotiations. Answering questions and managing objections.

Closing the deal. After this, you are on to nurturing the customer, upselling related products or services, and asking for feedback.

Each of the above will break down into smaller steps, and it is important to flesh out the detail within each step in order to better understand how your sales people spend their time in each of the steps. You are looking for bottlenecks, or places that typically add a lot of hours to the sales cycle, while delivering little in terms of results.

Some steps that typically add lots of hours to the B2B sales cycle and deliver little to show for it include: manually documenting sales activities, writing and completing proposals, signing contracts, collecting payment and handoffs between departments.

It’s a fact that most of these time-consuming sales tasks are administrative. The time spent on these administrative activities is time that could have been spent talking to prospects, demonstrating, or negotiating—and the goal is to understand which activities lead to results, and to eliminate those which do not.

You can ensure your sales reps focus on the right activities to close sales quickly and effectively by defining, tracking and monitoring your sales KPIs. These will help your salespeople to understand what activities to focus on during their day-to-day, and guide them towards their sales goals because they are based on the metrics of what is working.

Next, it is important to understand what the most effective KPIs are, and this will entirely depend your company’s unique sales process, but start by asking what activities are going to meaningfully impact the sales process, and which activities will not. Pick out 3 or 4 activities that effectively move a prospect through the B2B sales pipeline—those are the best KPIs.

Perhaps, the most effective KPIs are prospecting conversions, followed by discovery calls, and then a proposal. Once you isolate the most effective KPIs, your sales team will have a template to work effectively.

But this analysis itself is time consuming to put together, and doing such a study will require resources to map it all out, as described above, for every product and service your company sells. Luckily, automation can make this a cinch.

Automated sales tracking tools

There are great sales tracking tools, like Spotio, to provide your team with fast and accurate sales activity tracking, so you maximize your sales efforts on the activities that win business. Spotio’s sales tracker provides real-time metrics for the visibility you need to quickly track all of your team’s sales activities from lead to close.

Here are some of the insights the Spotio Sales Tracker tool provides:

– View Pipeline activity inside territories
– Historical prospect, contact, and opportunity data
– Real-time insights of rep activity and performance
– Executive insights
– Performance tracking
– GPS verified location tracking
– Colorized data views
– Real-time rep visibility
– Detailed KPI report dashboards

This tool enables you to measure performance of individual sales reps, teams, or entire organizations, and has robust analytics and reporting capabilities. The leaderboards and contests that you can organize with the tool are a great way to inspire competition among your sales team.

The most important capability is the detailed activity tracking this tool provides. Real-time data-driven insights to remove bottlenecks, custom dashboard reports to track the performance of any data point gathered by the sales team, GPS verified location tracking of your sales team, and customizable pipelines to gain visibility on how leads are moving through the sales pipeline. 

Route Planning is also easy

Once you know the sales activities that get results, you can further optimize productivity with Spotio Routing, a tool that enables reps to see exactly where to go, what to do, and the most efficient way to get there. Set your meetings, update notes in real-time, and prospect new accounts in between meetings.

Whether you want to know the distance between each of your appointments, need to know the fastest path, or want to create the most streamlined route, Spotio’s sales route planning software has you covered.

Spotio Routing

Sales planning and route tracking tools are so easy to use, and so effective, it will make you wonder how you ever managed without them. Effective sales productivity tracking helps you take the right actions at the right time.

Good timing in sales is a crucial part of closing more deals, and usually takes years of time-intensive, hard-earned experience to master. Tools like the ones Spotio provides are providing the way to quickly leap-frog ahead to get the results.

About the Author


Ryan Gould
Vice President of Strategy and Marketing Services
Elevation Marketing


From legacy Fortune 100 institutions to inventive start-ups, Ryan brings extensive experience with a wide range of B2B clients. He skillfully architects and manages the delivery of integrated marketing programs, and believes strongly in strategy, not just tactics, that effectively aligns sales and marketing teams within organizations.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rygould/

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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.

Maximize Sales: 6 Tips to Help You Sell More to Your Existing Accounts

When it comes to boosting sales and revenue, most companies automatically think about lead generation campaigns and turning new prospects into paying customers. But not enough companies think about selling more products to the customers they already have. This is a shame as a company’s existing accounts are usually its quickest route to business gains.

In this article, we’ll discuss why your company should focus on its current customers and six tips you can use to sell to them more effectively. Let’s get started!

Why Focus on Your Current Customers?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to find and secure new customers, rather than simply tend to old ones? We understand your reasoning. You want to grow your company. Focusing on your current clients seems more like a holding pattern than a launch initiative.

But, as it turns out, concentrating on the customers you already have has three amazing benefits:

It Takes Less Effort

While selling to existing customers isn’t necessarily easy, you do have one distinct advantage: you’ve already developed a relationship with these folks. They trust you and they know your products will do exactly what you claim they will. This is huge!

Without this level of trust, you have a slim, 13% chance of making a sale, which means it’s much more difficult to sell to brand new customers than current ones.

It’s Less Expensive

Selling to your current customers is also much less expensive than selling to brand new prospects. For one thing, they already trust you and your company, as we mentioned above, which means your conversion rate in these selling scenarios will be much higher.

You also won’t have to spend as much capital “getting your foot in the door,” so to speak. The time and energy it takes to acquire contact information, arrange meetings, and prepare long sales presentations can be funneled towards other pursuits because of the trust and goodwill you’ve already built up with each of your current clients.

All in all, it will cost your organization 16 times more to build a long-term relationship with a new prospect than it will to simply maintain an existing customer.

You’ll Make More Money

Lastly, selling to existing accounts will result in more profits. How much more? According to Bain & Company, repeat customers will spend up to 67% more in months 31 – 60 than they do in months 0 – 6, depending on the industry you sell in.

RJMetrics confirms these findings with their own. The popular blog found that repeat customers spend 300% more than brand new buyers!

How to Sell More to Existing Accounts

Now that we know why selling to existing accounts is so valuable, let’s talk about how to do it. 

Here are six tips to help you take full advantage (in a good way!) of your current clients and boost revenue for your company to new heights:

1. Know Your Customers

The first step is to really know your customers. It doesn’t make much sense to pitch your company’s products to organizations who don’t need them. Clients who are notoriously tightfisted or hesitant to try new things probably aren’t the best fits either. 

It’s your job to determine which of your current customers are most likely to purchase additional products from you, then approach them with some kind of sales presentation.

When you know the people you’re trying to sell to, you’ll be able to think proactively and show them products that will help them achieve their goals in a timely manner. But If you don’t don’t take time to understand their objectives, you won’t be able to present the right products at the right times and your sales numbers will suffer as a result.

Action Item: Take time to get to know your current customers and the things they want to accomplish. Then present them with products that will help them do so.

2. Understand Your Entire Product Line

In order to think proactively and showcase the products that will help your current customers achieve their goals, you have to have a solid understanding of your entire product line. If you don’t know your company’s offerings like the back of your hand, how will you be able to suggest the right new products for your clients to buy? The answer is, you won’t be able to.

This is really easy to do if you only sell a handful of products. But for organizations with large product lines, it will take effort and dedication. It will be worth it, though!

Action Item: Study all of your company’s products until you know and understand them on a deep level. This is the only way that you’ll be able to pitch the right solutions to your current clients and maintain the high level of trust you currently have with them.

3. Develop an Account Growth Strategy

When you know your customers and your products, you can combine your knowledge and develop an account growth strategy, which is a fancy way of saying, “I think Product X will help Company Y accomplish Task Z.” In other words, you’ll be able to handpick specific products for specific clients and design personalized presentations for each.

This is important! You’ll experience much more success when you properly match clients to products, then present said products in a persuasive way that helps illuminate the specific benefits each individual customer will experience. Make sense?

Action Item: Always think in terms of value. Ask yourself how your company can benefit each of its current customers in new ways. Then develop a plan to make it happen.

4. Invest in the Right Tools

You could attempt to sell more products to your current customers the old fashioned way: with nothing but a good plan and a strong work ethic. But there are so many amazing technological solutions available to you. Why wouldn’t you use a few of them? Here are a few apps we’d recommend investing in to help increase your productivity and success rate:

CRM Software: A quality customer relationship management tool will give you a bird’s eye view of all of your company’s current customers. It will also allow you to “zoom in” and see when each of them became clients, what products they’ve already invested in, and the last time you spoke to them. You can then use this information to craft a sales presentation that has a high likelihood of earning a sale.

Calendar Tool: As the leader of an outside sales team, you understand the importance of a top-notch calendar tool. Without one, it’s easy to miss appointments, which almost always leads to damaged relationships and lost revenue. It’s important to keep your meetings with current clients too. That’s why we suggest investing in a calendar app that allows for easy appointment setting and seamless integration with Google or Outlook.

E-Contract App: It’s not official until your customer signs on the dotted line. Don’t let all your hard work go to waste by not getting the signature and allowing your customer to back out before they’ve actually purchased the product you’re trying to sell them. Invest in an e-contract app that enables electronic contract signing and close deals on the spot.

The Spotio Solution: You could invest in stand-alone CRM, Calendar, and E-Contract software. Or you could choose Spotio, which will give you access to all three tools (and more) for one low monthly price. The best part? Our application is specifically designed to assist outside sales teams, which means it features are tailor-made for you and your team’s exact situation. Request a demo today to see how Spotio can help you sell more — both to new prospects and existing accounts.

Action Item: While none of the software tools above are absolutely necessary, they will undoubtedly help you boost your team’s productivity and sell more to existing accounts. Investigate them further and choose an application or two (or three or four!) that fits your needs.

5. Put in the Time and Effort

To effectively sell to existing accounts, you need to craft a foolproof plan, based on your in-depth knowledge of your current customers and the various products you sell. But these things, in and of themselves, won’t automatically guarantee you more sales.

You also have to put in the time and effort to make it happen. If you don’t, one of your competitors will swoop in and do it for you. Definitely not what you want!

So do the hard work of implementing your plan. Swing by your customer’s place of business, pick up the phone and engage them in conversation, or log into your email and craft a message that informs them of the new product you’re selling and why it would be beneficial to them.

Once you find a series of actions that works for you, systemize it. That way you can do the same thing over and over again for each of your clients. You may even be able to automate certain steps of your system if you really try! Doing so will help your productivity skyrocket and allow you to boost sales faster than you ever thought possible.

Action Item: Commit to doing the work. Put your plan into action, reach out to your existing accounts with value, then turn the entire process into a repeatable system.

6. Analyze Your Successes and Failures

Last, but certainly not least, you need to analyze your attempts to sell to existing accounts and strategize ways to improve your approach. After each pitch, ask yourself questions like:

– “Do we understand what our clients are trying to achieve?”
– “Did we match the right product to the right client?”
– “Was our growth strategy on point?”

It’s important to ask these questions, and those like them, after both successes and failures. By analyzing successful deals, you’ll learn what works. Taking a closer look at failures in this department will show you what doesn’t. You can then use both inputs of information to improve the way you approach and sell to existing accounts in the future.

Action Item: Always conduct a “post-mortem” after every sales presentation. Learn what you did right and what you did wrong. Then adjust your strategy for next time.

Best Practices to Keep in Mind

You now know our top tips in regards to selling more to existing accounts. But before we let you go, we want to share two best practices to help your organization improve its ability to sell to its current client base. They are:

Train Your Frontline Employees

Your sales reps aren’t the only ones who interact with customers on a regular basis. In fact, depending on the kind of business you own and/or manage, your salespeople might have less contact with them than other team members.

For example, frontline staff such as customer service representatives engage with current customers on a daily basis. By training them to recognize when a specific client might be a good fit for a new product, and asking them to pass this information along to your sales team, you’ll ensure your top sellers always have the information they need to sell more to existing accounts.

Reward Your Existing Accounts

You should also consider rewarding your current customers in some way for their loyalty to your company. A 20% discount, for instance, given to current customers only, might entice a few existing accounts to bite the bullet and purchase another product from your business.

This strategy will boost sales now and in the future. When clients are shown preferential treatment, they tend to stick around and continue buying.

Wrapping Up

By focusing on your existing accounts, you’ll be able to save money and boost revenue — without expending nearly as much effort as you would if you were to focus solely on converting new prospects into paying customers. All you have to do to sell more to your current clients is follow the six tips we outline in this article:

1. Know Your Customers
2. Understand Your Entire Product Line
3. Develop and Account Growth Strategy
4. Invest in the Right Tools
5. Put in the Time and Effort
6. Analyze Your Successes and Failures

If you implement these six tips (and the two best practices we shared as well), you’ll see much more success when selling to your existing accounts.

Good luck!

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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.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.

How to Hold Your Sales Team Accountable… and Why It’s Important

Perhaps the only thing more difficult than working as a sales rep is handling a team of sales reps. One of the things that you can control is keeping your team accountable. Even with a team of high-performing reps, you will need a way to keep them motivated to do their best work. 

Here are some of those ways and how you can implement them in your team.

1. Choose the KPIs that matter for your organization

No matter the industry, everyone cares about KPIs like deals won, calls made, appointments set and similar. However, each company is different and your sales goals could be vastly different from everyone else out there. 

For example, your sales cycle could be extra long and your main KPI at the end of the day could be the number of calls made.

Primarily, your sales goals should be SMART – they should hold your team accountable, make them more motivated, improve their success and give them clear standards that they can follow.

For example, if you want your sales team to have more control of their goals, you can make them activity-based, such as focusing on the number of calls that a rep makes every day. While they can’t control how many of those calls turn into sales, they can control how many calls they make. 

Even better, to keep that goal SMART, you can make it more specific, such as increasing the number of calls that a rep makes by 10 every day. That way, they have a specific target that they need to hit and a goal that they can work towards.

As an example from our own team, we asked our sales team to increase the number of demos they hold every week by 10. This was their April goal and they crushed it because they knew what to do to achieve it.

If SMART goals aren’t your cup of tea, you should know that there are alternatives out there that are just as good.

For example, you can use CLEAR goals (collaborative, limited, emotional, appreciable and refinable). This method emphasizes the emotional and collaborative nature of getting tasks finished and it just might be the thing that your sales team needs for better goal setting.

Once you set these goals for your sales team, make sure to actually follow up with them and that your team has them on their minds.

2. Keep your team aligned with their goals

If you want your sales team to stay motivated and working hard, make sure to regularly update your team about what they need to do. If you set sales goals for your team, make sure to clarify them and give them some idea about how to achieve them. If training is necessary, provide the resources.

The goals you set might get readjusted every month or quarter so make sure to keep your sales team in the loop. Sending out an email may not be the best way to make this known, which is why using sales software like Spotio may be a better idea.

A sales rep with enough experience (in general and in your team) will know whether the goals you set are attainable or not. If not, make sure to give them the resources they need to make those goals into a reality. 

For example, for a sales representative who’s just starting out, getting two clients per month is a realistic goal. Getting twenty per month is far from realistic for a beginner, but it’s easy work for someone with a lengthy sales career.

You can use your favorite project management tool to create a sticky note with their most important goals for the week, month, or quarter. Out of sight – out of mind.

3. Set and Track Key Sales Activities

Besides goals like sales, you should be tracking activities too. After all, someone could be making incredible sales with moderate or poor activities – which means that there is room for improvement.

The sales activities that you should be tracking are those that your team can influence.

These include the following:

– Number of calls made
– Number of emails sent
– Number of leads created
– Number of follow-ups made
– Number of logged visits
– Number of social media connections
– Number of scheduled demos
– Number of proposals sent
– Etc. 

If you want to go the old school way, you can log all of these numbers and activities in Google Sheets or something similar. While this sounds simple, it’s actually tedious and both you and your sales team will hate it.

Instead, try using sales tracking software like Spotio which will automatically log all of the metrics that you want and keep them in one place where it’s easy to review. Similarly, using proposal software will ensure that this part of the sales process is tracked to the very minute details, such as how many proposals were opened and signed.

4. Establish rewards and consequences

If someone is doing their job well, they should be rewarded. But what does “well” mean and how is it quantified? Have a clear system of KPIs and establish rewards for reaching them. At the same time, don’t be afraid to let an employee go if they have a hard time meeting their minimal KPIs. Everyone should know where they are at all times and what they can expect from the results that they provide. 

If you want an easy way to motivate your sales team to do more, you can introduce a great commission structure. The number one deciding factor for sales reps choosing a job is the base salary.

However, if you choose an attractive commission structure, you will make it easy for any rep to significantly increase their salary. From commission only to revenue commission, you can create a rewards system where those that sell the most get paid the most.

As for the consequence for not selling enough – the worst consequence is staying at the base salary.

5. Keep your sales activities transparent

If there’s one thing that will push your sales team harder, it’s being informed about what everyone else is doing and what kind of results they are achieving. Instead of reporting to their manager at the end of the day, each sales rep should have their results shown publicly on a dashboard. That way, everyone will know what the rest of the team is doing, which will push them to work harder and be accountable for their actions.

For example, a sales leaderboard is one of the best ways to keep your sales team in a healthy, competitive spirit. At any point in time, everyone can see what the rest of the sales team is up to and which place they have on the leaderboard. Managers can step in and monitor and communicate with the best and worst performers.

If you’re getting to the end of the quarter or year, a sales contest with a leaderboard is a superb way to kick-start your sales numbers and get your team to work harder and reach their goals.

Conclusion

Accountability is all about setting the right goals, being transparent and encouraging a healthy competitive spirit. No matter what industry you’re in and what you’re selling, these tips will help you create a stronger, more versatile and successful sales team.

Perhaps the most important is to set SMART goals, let them be well known and track them using your sales software. Equip your team with the tools and resources they need just to sell while your software takes care of the rest.

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Author Bio

Adam Hempenstall is the CEO and Founder of Better Proposals, simple proposal software for creating beautiful, high-impact proposals in minutes. Having helped his customers at Better Proposals win $120,000,000+ in one year only, he’s launched the first Proposal Writing University where he shares business proposal best practices.

40 Experts Discuss What to Include in Daily, Weekly and Monthly Sales Activity Reports

What sales activities should you report on a daily, weekly or monthly basis? Here’s what the experts recommend. 

Achieving consistent sales growth for your organization is critical to long-term success. However, it can be challenging to achieve when you don’t have the right data and insights to make informed decisions. 

By tracking the right metrics, you can take the necessary steps to grow your revenue and profits. One way companies are doing this is with the use of sales reports. But not all metrics are created equal.

So we reached out to 40+ experts to identify the top metrics businesses should be monitoring on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. We extracted the most popular recommendations, which we’ll dive into below. 

Daily Sales Activity Reports
Weekly Sales Activity Reports
Monthly Sales Activity Reports
Expert Responses

Daily Sales Reports

Daily sales reports tell us how much effort reps are putting in each day to fill the top of the pipeline. Typically, these metrics will be activity-based.
For example: Number of calls made or emails sent (because we can’t get meetings without making contacts).

Here’s a quick breakdown of the metrics to monitor on a day-to-day basis. 

Number of Prospects

Sales reps should be working hard each day to hit a specific number of new sales prospects. These people meet your ideal customer profile, and should be contacted across relevant channels with the end goal of converting them into a lead. 

Field sales reps use SPOTIO’s Lead Machine to quickly search for new prospects using 50+ different data points such as income level, business type, credit capacity and age of home.

Image: SPOTIO Lead Machine. 

The number of new prospects created each day is a strong activity-based performance indicator. If reps aren’t hitting their numbers, it’s important to find out why. 

Do they need additional training? Do they not have the right technology? Are they being lazy?

Prospecting activities should be monitored and recorded in a transparent dashboard to keep reps accountable:

Image: SPOTIO Sales Leaderboard showing top-performing reps by activity count, leads won, win rate, and value of opportunities. 

Number of Contacts

Today, there are many ways sales reps can communicate with leads — call, email, or converse via social media. Monitoring the number of contacts can help sales managers determine how proactive reps are in “working” new prospects. It can also help pinpoint which specific channels have the highest conversion rates. 

Number of Visits

Prospects will not always respond to calls, emails and social media outreach. Often, reps need to put boots on the ground and attempt to visit prospects on site, in person. 

Each rep should attempt to visit unresponsive prospects in-person each day.

Each visit should be logged in your CRM. 

Number of Follow Ups

80% of sales require five follow-up calls after the meeting. Yet, 44% of sales reps give up after one follow-up.

Just because a rep has a foot in the door, doesn’t mean they will convert the lead or close the sale. Reps need to be following up with prospects multiple times after the initial meeting in order to keep the conversation moving along. After all, these are your warmest leads.

Monitor this metric to determine how many follow ups it takes to re-engage a prospect. Set that number as your baseline for all reps to hit within a specific timeframe. 

How to calculate:

Total (#) of Follow-up Attempts / Total (#) of Leads = Average (#) Follow-up Attempts Per Lead.

Number of Referral Requests

Referrals are the one of the highest-converting lead sources. Make sure reps are actively asking existing customers for new referrals as part of the daily sales process. 

You could offer customers a discount or deal in exchange for a closed referral. 

Lead Response Time

The company that responds to a lead first dramatically increases their chances of closing the deal. According to InsideSales, “50% of buyers choose the vendor that responds first.”

How long does it take your reps to follow up with a new lead?

Number of Upsells

Expansion revenue is critical for increasing Customer Lifetime Value. Since there are practically zero upsell costs, it can have a huge impact on profitability.

Reps should be actively looking for opportunities each day to upsell existing accounts. 

Editor’s note:

Looking to keep your field sales reps more accountable for their daily sales activities?

Use a tool like SPOTIO’s rep tracking software to monitor activities and better plan sales territories:

Weekly Sales Reports

Weekly sales reports should tell us how effective daily activities are in driving quality leads and opportunities into the pipeline. 

Here are the metrics to include in your weekly sales activity report.

Number of New Leads

This metric determines how many new sales qualified leads your reps are acquiring every week. Knowing this enables management to determine if goals are being reached and whether you need to make adjustments. 

For instance, if there’s a low number of new leads each week it might be due to not contacting enough prospects, contacting the wrong type of prospects, or having poorly optimized outreach scripts. 

Here’s a formula you can use to calculate new leads pre-qualified by reps each week:

# of new leads over 30 days / 4 weeks = # of new leads per week. 

Number of Meetings Booked

Getting lots of new leads each week is great. But if your sales reps aren’t booking meetings with them, then they’re efforts are moot. Booking meetings is a clear indicator new sales qualified opportunities.

Further, calculating the number of booked meetings can help determine if your reps are able to communicate the value or your product or service. 

You can use this number to determine, on average, how many leads are needed to generate a meeting (opportunity). 

You can use this formula to calculate weekly booked meetings:

# of meetings booked per week / # of new qualified leads = the percentage of leads that agree to meetings. 

First Meeting Show Rate

Are leads actually showing up to scheduled meetings? Some will be a no-show, so it’s important to track how often this occurs. 

Determining your first meeting show rate will identify patterns that can signal issues with your prospecting or sales tactics. 

To calculate this metric, you can use the following formula:

# of leads that show up to meetings / # of meetings booked per week = percentage of prospects that show up to the first meeting. 

Lead-Opportunity Rate

It’s important to identify how many leads turn into sales qualified opportunities. I.e. how many leads turned into an actual meeting. Understanding this number will help you reverse engineer the sales cycle. 

For example, if a manager knows the average lead-opportunity conversion rate, they will be able to estimate how many new leads they need each week in order to hit a target number of new opportunities (meetings). 

This intel is critical when it comes to setting sales activity targets for each rep. 

To calculate this, you can use the following formula:

# opportunities / # leads * 100 = lead-opportunity rate per week. 

Number of Proposals Sent


Proposals sent is a metric that tracks the number of potential quotes and sales packages sent to customers after discovery calls, meetings, and demonstrations are finished.

This is a strong leading indicator of how effective reps are at demonstrating value during sales presentations. 

Monthly Sales Reports

Monthly reports should show how well the sales team is building the pipeline and converting it into net new revenue.

Number of Lost Deals

Your sales reps are getting leads, but how many are not closing? This metric can help pinpoint errors in the qualification and/or nurturing process. It can also indicate a flaw in the types of leads your marketing and salespeople are generating. 

Number of Won Deals

You win some, you lose some. How many leads are your sales reps winning over? Knowing this number can help identify what is working for your top sales reps. Use these insights to refine the sales process and train/onboard new team members. 

Pipeline Value (by Stage)

The value at each stage in the pipeline can give a great top-level view of your financial health, and also help identify potential bottlenecks in the sales process. 

For example:

Do you have a lot of potential revenue tied up at the meeting stage? Maybe you have a lot of revenue potential tied up in proposals?

These insights can help you direct resources to weakest areas in your pipeline. 

Image: SPOTIO pipeline visibility. 

Close Rate

The average number of deals your reps close will identify whether your sales reps are winning more than they’re losing. If your close rate is low, then you can determine which reps are struggling to win deals and need further training or guidance. 

The formula for this is:

# closed won deals / (# closed won deals + lost deals)

Average Deal Size

It’s important to know how much revenue the average deal brings in so that you can better allocate resources. 

For example:

If 50% of your team is working to close enterprise accounts, but the average deal size is only $2,000, it would probably be a better use of resources to shift more reps onto smaller accounts. 

Here’s a formula you can use:

Sum of the value of won deals/ # of won deals

Net New Revenue

This is both a directional and north star metric. 

Sales teams need to be bringing in a specific amount of new revenue each month in order to hit annual quotas. 

Failing to hit this number in a given month should prompt management to look closer at weekly performance and daily sales activities to identify weaknesses or bottlenecks in the sales process. 

How to calculate it:

Gross revenue minus sales returns, allowances, and discounts.

Revenue by Territory

This is an important metric to track because it tells you where your most receptive and valuable markets exist. This level of insight can help dictate where you assign top sales performers. 

For example:

You could re-assign them to a high-value territory, or bring them in to train reps in underperforming territories. 

Editor’s note:

You can use a tool like SPOTIO’s Territory Manager to set goals, define territories, assign reps and track revenue performance:

Monthly Percentage of Goal

Each year, the C-Suite comes up with annual revenue goals they’d like to reach. And it’s up to marketing and sales to achieve them. With this metric in your monthly sales activity report, you can track progress and forecast whether you’ll hit quota as time goes on.  

Here’s a formula you can use:

Cumulative sales MTD (in dollars) / the monthly goal (in dollars) = percentage of goal

40 Experts Reveal What They Track in Daily, Weekly and Monthly Sales Activity Reports

 




Nicole Suther


 Human Marketing | Marketing Manager
Daily: number of leads, number of opportunities, number of booked appointments. Weekly: cost of acquisition, conversion of leads to opportunities. Monthly: sales cycle length, revenue per deal, revenue per opportunity, closed lost/closed won deals.

 




Richard Harris


 Sales Hacker | Director of Sales Training and Consulting Services
First meeting conversions, First meeting show up rate, 2nd meeting show up rate

 




Mica Longanecker


 Referral Rock | Director of Sales
Our top 3 Sales Activity metrics are number demos, number of emails, and number of calls. We track number of Demos on a weekly and monthly basis to ensure that reps are getting enough leads and converting those to demos. We track number of emails sent/replied and number of calls placed/answered on a monthly basis to check that reps are a) completing enough activity and b) that activity is moving the sale forward.




Max Pittman


CIENCE Technologies Inc. | Sales Executive
Meetings, opportunities, conversion to closed won deal.




Aristide Basque


 SH1FT | Co-Founder
We monitor our close rate, lead to close time, lead source to close rate, average deal size and total deal size. We track our metrics monthly in our sales reports because we like to give ourself enough time to adapt. When we tracked everything on a weekly basis, it didn’t allow us to have enough time to be creative to improve our sales results.




Bob Apollo


 IPSP | Founder
We believe that outcomes are far more important than raw activities. So – on a daily basis, we encourage our clients to monitor advances. An advance is typically represented by a prospective customer committing to or completing an action that represents tangible progress in the buying/selling process.

 

In addition, on a weekly basis, we encourage them to monitor the volume and value of opportunities that have moved from one stage to the next (including closed won), as well as the volume and value of new opportunities that have been added to the pipeline.

 

Then, on a monthly basis, we encourage them to aggregate their progress, assess trends, analyze the reasons behind positive and negative variations, and identify any necessary corrective actions.




Spencer Smith

The top three metrics that we track for sales activity reports are number of connection attempts, number of connections made, and average deal size. Connection attempts tells us how much effort they’re putting in, connections made tells us how well those efforts are going, and average deal size tell us how customers are responding to those connections.




Ben Walker

Number of calls, number of touch points, and sales made.




Jeni Wehrmeyer

Daily: Key Target Conversations and Sales
Weekly: Key Target Conversations, Meetings, Opportunities and Sales
Monthly: Pipeline, Continuations, Sales and % of Goal




Kim Orlesky


 KO Advantage Group Ltd. | President
Number of calls made (because we can’t get meetings without making phone calls to enough new prospects and clients)

Number of meetings booked (we can’t propose and close if we aren’t having any meetings)Pipeline (How much in revenue are we working towards? Our goal is to have 4x the amount of actual revenue needed)




Sean Sheppard


 GrowthX | Founder
1. Number of Deals by Stage
2. Conversion Rates by Stage
3. Sales Velocity (Sales Cycle Time)




Srish Kumar Agrawal

Daily:
1. #of meetings set by each Sales Rep.”
2. Lead Response Time of each Sales Rep.
3. # of Client Conversations by each Rep.
Weekly:
1. # of Outbound Calls
2. Rates of Up-Sell/Cross-Sell
3. Revenue Generated by each Sales Rep.

Monthly:
1. Source of Each New Opportunity that is Created
2. Customer Acquisition Cost
3. Lead Conversion Ratio




Chad Burmeister


 SclaeX.ai | CEO
Data sourced and attempted, Digital Outreach (email, social and digital paid-ads) and Dials. Target per virtual BDR = 9,000 sales activities per month PLUS 50,000 Digital Paid-Ads.




Colleen Stanley


 SalesLeadership | President
I am going to give an atypical answer based on our current COVID-19 environment. Measure the “give” goal in your organization. How many times a week are are your salespeople helping clients outside of the contract. How many times is your sales team helping referral partners by providing introductions or insights? How many times is your sales team helping each other open and close business. Give is the metric to measure.




Seb Dean


 Imaginaire | Managing Director
New leads, conversion from lead to customer, time to conversion.




Andy King


 Jamjar | Director
Website impressions, form completions, lead to customer conversions.




David Jackson


 FullStack Labs | CEO
We’re a little different as we record and send videos to new prospects instead of cold emails. So we monitor the number of videos recorded and sent each day, week, and month. Then we measure the number of new client meetings booked each week and month, and of course, new deals closed each month.




Ian Evenstar


 UNINCORPORATED | CEO / Founder
Landing page conversions.
 New opportunities & exploratory calls.
 Website traffic by source.




Angela Ash


 Flow SEO | Digital PR Specialist
We like to measure several key metrics, but at the top of the list, we have revenue from sales, revenue from each client, and the overall yearly growth pattern. When we’re looking at our sales report, it’s important that we see the overall bottom line, as well as how we’re performing with each individual client.

 

It’s also imperative to our strategies to understand if we are meeting the expectations set from the previous quarter.




Andrea Loubier


 Mailbird | CEO and Founder
Every company’s sales report looks different, because it’s important that we monitor metrics that are valid for our specific type of business. For us, we need to understand which percentage of our revenue is coming from new clients, as well as which percentage is being derived from existing clients.

 

Beyond those two metrics, we also need to understand how many current clients have recently renewed their services agreement. This provides us with an authentic map of what we’re seeing in terms of new and old business.




Alexandra Zamolo


 Beekeeper | Head of Content Marketing
Our top three sales metrics might be a little different than most, and they can change, depending on the quarter and what we happen to be focusing on at the moment.

 

However, on a regular basis, we are always sure to monitor the revenue that we generate by market, by product and by sales professional. We need to understand how our services are performing in different geographical areas, as well as which members of our marketing team are going above and beyond.




Greg Brookes


 Kettlebell Workouts | CEO and Founder
Now is a time when it’s important to really keep an eye on what’s working, and what isn’t, so that we can pivot when necessary to maintain our successful, cost-effective strategies. Our top three metrics that we have really been keeping an eye on include the success of our campaigns, seeing where we rank against our competitors, and understanding which markets show the best performance. This provides us with the right focus for our current quarter.




Carrie McKeegan

Many of our clients stay with us for many years, but sometimes we do encounter clients who need help solving a particular problem. These are two metrics that we need to try to focus on: one-time clients and recurring clients. Additionally, we like to see how this impacts our annual revenue.




Dario Sipos


 DWR | Digital Strategist
Sales Growth, Sales Target, Lead Conversion Rate.




Jake Fisher


 Bridges Strategies | President
We keep a close eye on the total amount of estimated revenue and quantity of deals in the stages of the funnel before a proposal. This helps us identify issues early. 

We also look at the close rate from proposal to closed won. This helps us uncover potential issues in the exploratory phase.




Rob Bedell


 Bedell Enterprises | Outsourced VP of Sales
I understand the use of metrics, but I’ve seen too many times when people leading sales teams rely too much on the metrics and not enough on results. If you hired good salespeople, all you need to do is tell them the results you want, give them the tools and coaching to achieve those goals and let them sell. So measure what you want, results. not effort.




David Zeff


 Whistle | CEO
Total Sales, SQL to SAL, Customer NPS score.




Mike Brooks


 Mr. Inside Sales | Owner, Mr. Inside Sales
Script grading adherence (obtained by listening to recorded calls and measuring adherence to the company accepted best practice approach, Closing ratio, calls to contact ratio.




Alex Birkett


 Omniscient Digital | Co-founder
For our agency, we actually keep it very simple. We’re a small operation and our business is mostly built on referrals, but for outbound sales, we look at these metrics:
1. Monthly recurring revenue
2. Net new revenue (monthly)
3. Net new clients closed (monthly)
4. Meetings booked, proposals sent, outreach emails sent, and response rates.
We could probably optimize some of our outbound, but honestly, we’re mainly focused on referrals and inbound for now.




Maddy Osman


 The Blogsmith | SEO Content Strategist/Founder
As a freelancer who’s working to expand my business to more of an agency model, the most important metrics for me to track each week/month include meetings with new prospects, proposals sent, and opportunities in the pipeline.
  
Even when business is good, it’s important to not sit still and plan for the future — there should always be some type of deal in the works so that if existing clients church, I can replace the revenue they represent.




Lisamarie Monaco


 InsuranceForBurial.com | National Independent Agent
Proprietary CRM, Activity reports, Agent Summary.




Bryan Coles


 RKD | Client Strategist
We monitor leads, qualified leads and sales.




Alice Kemper


 Sales Training Werks | Founder, Creator of Great Monday Morning Sales Meetings
The key metrics we monitor are Client Engagement, Retention, and Upsell. If we’re not talking and connecting with our current and future clients… someone else certainly is.
When we’re good at Client Engagement, Retention is high and client turnover is low. We want to retain our current clients because it’s an indicator we are achieving our purpose goal to be a valuable resource to businesses assisting with their success. Little to no turn-over also means we are in continuous growth mode and not catch-up and maintenance mode. Plus, we know our customers will be a prime referral funnel.
Upsell… well we know our best customers are our current happy customers who want more of what we offer as their trusted advisor and their strategic business partner. This also keeps us fresh to continue to create and serve the ever-changing needs of the marketplace.




Kristie Jones


 Sales Acceleration Group | Principal
# of new pipeline deals added by rep. each month/ # of touches needed to book a discovery call/ Conversion of discovery mtg. to pipeline deal.




Damian Thompson


 Salesability | Founder – Chief Scale Officer
Revenue Booked – Lead to Proposal Conversion Rate – MQLs.




Rene Grajales


 Staples | Vice President, Ssles
1. Number of buying customers
2. New logos acquired
3. Revenue generated by role




Chris Gadek


 AdQuick | Head of Growth & Marketing
1. Local Sales – to monitor the impact that our company is having on our local area, so that we can see how to better utilize our local keywords for SEO.
2. National and International Sales – this metric will allow us to see how well we are performing in different regions, so that we can pivot and make quick changes when needed.
3. Individual Sales Stats – understanding which members of our sales team are performing better is important, so that we can offer assistance and additional resources to help those who may require it.

38 Best Apps for Field Sales Reps in 2020 (By Category)

If you’re running a top-performing sales organization, your sales reps are on the go by design. Salespeople are the perfect candidates to take advantage of the productivity benefits offered by mobile sales tools.

With a plethora of apps for sales professionals, it’s hard to know which are best sales apps for you and your team. That’s why we’ve done the research for you. We reached out to our top clients, ran extensive research, and compiled this list of the best sales apps for reps.

We’ll look at the unique benefits, pricing, and ways your team can immediately take advantage of each tool.

38 Best Apps for Sales Reps

Mobile Apps

SPOTIO
Slack
CamCard
Keynote
Evernote
Dragon
Quickvoice
Skype for Mobile

Travel / Route Planning Apps

SPOTIO
TripIt
Google Maps
GateGuru
Tripcase
Parkopedia
Milebug
Rome2rio

Prospecting Apps

Lead Machine
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Hunter.io
SellHack
NerdyData
InsideView

Lead Management Apps

SPOTIO Lead Management
Hubspot CRM
Salesforce

Productivity Apps

SPOTIO Territory Manager
Wunderlist
Any.do
Expensify
Dropbox

Closing Sales Apps

SPOTIO e-Contracts
HelloSign
DocuSign
Proposify
Square

Best Apps for Sales Tracking

SPOTIO (Sales Tracker)
HubSpot Sales Hub

 

Best Mobile Sales Apps for Reps


Outside sales reps spend their days out meeting with prospects and touching base with clients. This is a fact which makes the use of any applications that can streamline communication and organize ones day, a necessity.

Whether it’s supporting administrative needs, simplifying the act of taking notes, or pulling together presentations, these apps makes life easier for sales reps by reducing the burden of sales tasks.

SPOTIO

Team: $39/user/month
Business: $69/user/month
Pro: $129/user/month
Mobile App: iOS | Android

SPOTIO is an all-in-one solution for managing your sales force. Covering a breadth of capabilities such as appointment scheduling, sales rep management, team chat, CRM, and more, Spotio reduces the burden of having to manually keep track of your administrative tasks, giving you time back to focus on selling.

Slack

    • Workspace | Free
    • Standard | $6.67/month/user
    • Plus | $12.50/month/user
    • Mobile App: iOS | Android

Slack is a messaging and collaboration app that makes it easy to get things done with individuals and teams. With more than 8 million active users, Slack is a fail-proof way to reach prospects, colleagues, and customers and move things along with real-time communication.

CamCard

    • Team | $5/month/user
    • Business | $12/month/user
    • Mobile App: iOS | Android

 


No more overburdened wallets or lost cards. Camcard makes collecting contacts seamless by instantly reading business cards, converting them into a digital format, integrating the information into your phone contacts, and storing it securely for only you to access.

Keynote

    • Free
    • Mobile App: iOS



Keynote is an app designed to give creative and professional presentations on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. Keynote’s features allow you to interact with and edit presentations in real time with your team and gain the competitive edge.

Evernote

    • Basic | Free
    • Premium | $7.99/month/user
    • Business | $149/month/year
    • Mobile App: iOS | Android

Evernote makes it easy to organize your notes and plan your to-do lists with the convenient features of voice-to-recording, scanning, image uploading, and basic handwriting to transform quick interactions into notes.

Dragon

      • Free | In-App purchases
      • Mobile App: iOS | Android
        • 1 Week Trial | Free
        • 1 Month | $14.99/user
        • 12 month | $149.99/user
        • Enterprise pricing available upon request
        • Mobile App: iOS | Android

        Dragon is a mobile dictating tool with unlimited word input. It has a 99% accuracy in formatting and editing recorded notes. Documents made in Dragon are easy to share through email, Evernote, Dropbox, and even the most popular cloud-sharing services.

Quickvoice

Free
Mobile App: iOS

Quickvoice is a very popular voice recording app with over 5 million users. It makes recording ideas, notes, meetings, and presentations simple.

Skype for Mobile

  • Free | In-App purchases available
  • Mobile App: iOS | Android

 

Skype is one of the most widely used apps for making voice and video calls. Bring the whole sales team together and complete your sessions while working remotely.

Best Travel / Route Planning Apps for Sales Reps

For sales teams, efficient travel is key to success. These top travel and route planning apps are designed to help users optimize their time and get around with ease.

SPOTIO

Team: $39/user/month
Business: $69/user/month
Pro: $129/user/month
Mobile App: iOS | Android



Route planning is essential to being an effective sales rep as no time can be wasted nor appointment missed. With Spotio you can quickly organize the best suited routes and assign territories to team members quickly and clearly; streamlining your sales process.

TripIt

  • Tripit | Free
  • Tripit Pro | $49/year
  • Mobile App: iOS | Android


TripIt keeps travel efficient and clear. Just forward your travel confirmations to plans@tripit.com and TripIt will put together a master travel itinerary to make sure no time is lost.

Google Maps

 

Google Maps makes navigating traffic stress free by using live traffic patterns to  avoid accidents and traffic jams. Google maps also gives multiple options for routes and transportation which creates flexibility especially when navigating inner city traffic patterns.

GateGuru

GateGuru is an app designed to help flyers navigate terminals by alerting travelers of wait times, security warnings, locations of amenities, and securing rental cars. GateGuru designs your travel experience to be carefree and as efficient as possible.

Tripcase

Best Apps for Sales Tracking

SPOTIO (Sales Tracker)

Team: $39/user/month
Business: $69/user/month
Pro: $129/user/month
Mobile App: iOS | Android

 

SPOTIO provides sales operations teams with a real-time visibility into what’s happening in the field. Know which activities drive the best outcomes and fix the ones that are broken.

HubSpot Sales Hub

$500/month

With Sales Hub, monitor how deals are progressing, organize all sales activity in one place, and speed-up sales cycles; track all activities in a single contact timeline.

Conclusion

We live in a digital world with more and more options available each day to support teams throughout the selling process. By taking advantage of the latest tech solutions and diversifying your portfolio with the best sales apps on the market, you and your team will accomplish more.

_____

Questions or comments? Contact Spotio at info@spotio.com or comment below.

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.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.