Sales Performance

SPOTIO Polled Outside Sales Professionals to Uncover the Top Challenges Faced

SPOTIO surveyed more than 250 B2B outside sales professionals and leaders to uncover:

1) The top challenges in the field
2) How reps and leaders spend their time
3) The biggest opportunities for increasing efficiency
4) Market trends

Drawing upon detailed responses study participants from SMB and Enterprise organizations to create a picture of outside sales as it is today, the State of Field Sales 2019 report highlights the nuanced elements of an outside sales team and areas where companies should invest for greater success.

Top Challenges Facing Reps and Leaders

According to the study, more than a quarter of outside sales reps reported that their number one challenge in the field is building a pipeline of quality leads. On the other hand, sales leaders are more concerned with getting the most from their investment in training and onboarding.

While the hard and soft costs of turnover is well documented, the fight to retain talent continues for today’s outside sales leaders.

The study reveals one struggle they have in common: the need to acquire and adopt better tools and technology to support the business. Although this issue presents itself in various ways, poor technology implementations are failing to promote communication, collaboration, and transparency.

Key Issues

Potentially related to the poor adoption of technology, data accuracy is also identified as a pervasive issue for sales organizations, with incomplete and inaccurate data muddying the water. In fact, sales reps report that they spend as much time manually entering data (13 percent of their time) as they do connecting with customers.

This is only one ineffective administrative burden taking reps away from selling. The findings imply that ineffective technology is not only providing inadequate value; it is taking up too much valuable time for sales reps.

For the second year in a row, the study reveals that reps are spending way too much time on non-selling activities. The inside sales industry has seen an explosion in technology to minimize administrative burden while improving insights and efficiency. But the outside sales industry has not seen the same kind of investment. Paving the way for outside sales team that are serious about improving the efficiency of the sales efforts.

How Outside Sales Rep’s Spend Their Time

To Conclude

The State of Field Sales report drew on insight from the sales reps, sales managers, and executives alike. The one thing they all agree on: Poor quality leads, lack of tools, and ineffective technology implementations are inhibiting growth and success for sales organizations.

Even though outside sales teams make up 71% of the sales force, outside sales’ CRM adoption is lacking. Without mapping tools, comprehensive lead nurturing, pre-qualified leads, and enhanced communication capabilities, outside sales teams are missing major opportunities.

Access the full report here.

About SPOTIO

SPOTIO is the leading field sales enablement solution for sales managers and reps to facilitate unprecedented productivity, increased revenue, and shorter sales cycles. The platform provides managers with real-time visibility into their team’s activities for improved sales development. Sales reps receive access to the mobile application with targeted prospect data, historical knowledge of each account, and document management functionality.

Thousands of customers rely on SPOTIO to accelerate growth with their sales teams such as Vodafone, Renewal by Andersen, and Oak Street Health.

10 Ways to Become a Successful Telecommunications Sales Rep

The telecommunications market is poised for huge growth. In fact, it’s forecasted to grow to $1.46 trillion by 2020.

How big is your slice of that pie?

Ultimately, that will depend on how successful you are as a sales rep.

In telecom sales, the most valuable reps are the ones that get their feet out the door and talk face-to-face with their customers. Taking the hard work they’ve put into researching and understanding their product, they can put that to use in-person by answering questions and helping customers find the best solution for their needs.

While there are many moving pieces in the sales process, there are a handful that typically prevent telecommunications sales reps from reaching their true earning potential. We’ll look at each one in this article, and then cover 10 ways you can level-up and succeed.

Key Responsibilities of Telecommunications Sales Positions

So, what exactly do people in telecom sales positions do?

First, telecom sales managers are the ones that organize the team and get it ready for action. They take on the responsibility of hiring and training new sales reps, preparing them to form the best possible team.

These sales managers also equip teams with the best tools, and keep track of the team’s performance as a group and as individuals, providing help when necessary and pushing them to achieve more.

For telecom sales reps, the job is very similar to other sales roles.

To start, they’ll need to prospect for new potential customers and qualify those leads to find the ones that really fit their business. Next, they’ll develop a personalized pitch that takes into account the needs and circumstances of each prospect.

For many reps, a lot of time is also spent following up with those leads, answering questions, combatting objections, and helping them find the perfect solution for their problems. Lastly, a telecom sales rep must know how to successfully close the deal.

Why Telecom Sales Reps May Not be Earning to Their Full Potential

While the telecommunications sales market is full of potential earnings, some sales reps are still not raking in the cash.

Why?

There are some common reasons why a telecom sales rep might not be earning the amount they dreamed of.

If you’re not earning to your full potential, check yourself against this list of common sales mistakes:

– Reps don’t follow a defined sales process.
– Reps aren’t conducting effective qualification.
– There’s no established strategy for assigning sales territories.
– Sales reps are unprepared for the objections their leads raise.
– Reps don’t follow up with their qualified leads.
– The team lacks a system for tracking rep performance.
– Sales reps are undereducated in their product, how it works, and how it solves problems for their customers.

Do you see yourself reflected in this list? If so, don’t worry: each of these common sales issues can be solved.

In fact, if you’re looking to level-up your sales game, we’re going to discuss 10 ways that you can improve your skills and reach your earning potential.

10 Ways to Boost Your Telecom Sales Pipeline

1. Set a 30/60/90 Day Plan

One of the biggest reasons that sales reps fail to reach their potential (or their quota) is because they lack a viable plan to do so.

That’s where the 30/60/90 plan comes in. This tool is normally used in an onboarding scenario, but it can also help an established sales rep to align themselves with the team, and work forward toward the goal of closing more sales.

It normally looks something like this:

(Source)

Basically, this involves separating out goals for the short term and the long term. What can you accomplish in 30 days? In 60? In 90?

Write down these goals, and measure your success as you move forward. That way, you’ll keep progressing.

2. Know the Customer Better Than They Know Themselves

Who are your customers?

If you can’t answer that question clearly, it’s time to get back to your customer personas.

These personas are built like profiles of real people. The information should include demographics, company information, pain points, goals, challenges, shopping preferences, data on where they go to gather information, and so forth.

Check out this example from L&T:

Ultimately, you need to know your customers and the challenges they face every day; then you’ll be able to appeal to them better on a personal level. Using customer personas allows you to view your leads, not as just numbers on your sales charts, but as real people that you can provide solutions for.

3. Build Transferable Product Knowledge

Other than people who work in telecommunications, who really understands how this stuff works?

The majority of your customers probably don’t understand the inner workings of the telecom services and products they use. More than that: they don’t really want or need to understand.

Here’s where you, the telecom sales rep, come in: your must become the friendly guide who leads customers to the products that will solve their problems most efficiently.

This requires you to have two important skills:

– An encyclopedic knowledge of the products you sell and how they work.
– The ability to transfer that knowledge successfully.

Don’t bombard leads with unimportant details about the inner workings of the telecom world. Leave the technical jargon at the office, and focus on clearly explaining how your solution solves a problem.

By doing this, you can become the helpful consultant and confidant that customers call when they have an issue they can’t solve.

4. Prospect Smarter

Did you know that 42% of sales reps say that prospecting is the part of the sales process they struggle with the most?

If you want to level-up your sales, you need to take prospecting by the horns.

First, you need to find the right tools to research effectively. For example, SPOTIO’s Lead Machine helps field reps perform quick research by taking a target area and detailing the places where you’ll find better leads.

To find your perfect prospects, simply input your ideal customer data and SPOTIO will filter results for you. You can sort by over 50 data points such as age of home, credit capacity, square footage, income, etc.

Let an expert tool like SPOTIO do the heavy lifting for you, and you’ll find that prospecting is a breeze!

Another way to improve your prospecting skills is by warming up leads in social media. Connecting on LinkedIn is a great way to ‘meet’ new prospects. You’ll also learn important details about them, such as where they live, where they went to school, etc. These details can help you establish common ground when you finally talk to them.

5. Map & Assign Territories

Without clear territories, the sales reps on a team will be stepping on each other’s toes, working the same areas, or missing out on valuable leads.

It’s the job of the sales manager to assign territories. By doing so, they can help their whole team to stay focused and work more efficiently.

Using a tool like SPOTIO, telecom sales managers can map out specific areas for their reps to work in based on data points such as:

– Cities
– Counties
– Zip codes
– Specific streets or addresses
– General neighborhoods

This quickly enables managers to complete balanced territories for their reps to work, increasing their productivity and helping them reach their goals.

6. Use Pain-Based Qualification

Purchase decisions are usually motivated either by pleasure or pain. In telecom sales, it’s safe to say that most purchases are made because of some sort of pain, whether their wireless internet doesn’t reach the back corner of the office, their conference calls keep cutting out, or their current telecom equipment is out of date.

It’s your job as the telecommunications sales rep to uncover that pain, and qualify this lead for your product.

Start by trying to understand the problem and the steps that have been taken to solve it. Ask questions like:

How did you try to fix the problem?
Why did you choose that approach?
What caused other alternatives to be ruled out in this case?
Why do you think this solution didn’t work?
What would you like to do differently this time?

Then, you can dig a little deeper into the actual pain that this problem has caused:

– How much did this cost your company?
– How did it affect you (or your team) personally?
– How committed are you to solving this problem?

This line of questions is known as the Sandler Pain Funnel, and will help you understand the problem better, as well as how your product can solve the issue.

But it gets better: by using these questions, you’ll help the lead to see they have a pain point, and you’ll have agitated it to the point where they’re ready to take action.

7. Prepare for Objections

Sales reps who aren’t prepared for objections will quickly get shot down.

That’s why you need to know exactly what to say when common objections come up.

First, write out a list of the most common objections that you face.

Next, write down questions you can use to better understand the objection, and an appropriate response. Each prospect has their own motivation or thinking, and its important that you understand the root cause of this objection before you respond.

For example, let’s say the objection is over the price. Are they concerned because the price seems too high for what they’re getting? In that case, you can help them understand the value of the product and what it can do for them. But if they’re concerned about price because they have a tight budget, you might focus on the ROI that other customers have received.

8. Pitch (Perfect)

To build the perfect pitch, know your prospect and your product, and match their problems to the best possible solution. In other words: explain clearly what you do, but focus on how it benefits the customer.

Check out this example of a fantastic elevator pitch from G2Crowd:

“G2Crowd is the user-voice platform for people to be able to say how they actually think about software, and not be told by the analysts, or people who don’t use it, or the reference from your best customers. You’re actually hearing directly from the user and engaging with people who actually use the product.”

This pitch is short, informative, and motivational. You can follow this example by making your pitch clear, and focusing on how your product benefits the customer.

Always remember to be enthusiastic. That enthusiasm for your product can easily transfer to your prospects.

9. Up Your Follow-Up Game

The best way to improve your follow-up is the vary the channels you use. Field reps obviously focus on the in-person contact, but when don’t limit your follow ups to meetings.

Try sending a follow up email, getting on the phone, or even getting in contact over social media. This varied approach may help you reach a prospect better.

Also, when following up, be persistent. It’s been found that 80% of sales require 5 follow-up touches after a meeting, but a whopping 44% of sales reps give up after the first follow-up.

Don’t leave valuable prospects on the table.

Of course, there is a balance here: while you should be persistent, don’t let the follow-up process drag on forever. Set a limit of a couple of months, and if you get no response, know when to stop.

10. Track Rep Performance

To improve rep performance, all data must be stored and tracked. For telecom sales managers, using a tool like SPOTIO can help them keep an eye on how each of their reps is performing, and who may need a little help.

SPOTIO’s rep tracking feature allows managers to stay informed in real-time as their outside sales team is in the field.

Sales reps can drop pins as they work, updating the status of new leads and letting their managers know where they are. Managers can also see data on how sales reps are performing, who’s hitting or missing their quota, and so forth.

Final Thoughts

Working as a telecommunications sales rep may not be the easiest job, but it is well worth the effort.

This industry is only growing as we move forward, and the telecom sales reps who are working to improve their game now will reap better rewards in the future.

Are you ready to be one of them?

If so, using the right tools will help you up your game and make a difference. SPOTIO has helped sales teams increase productivity by 46%.

What could it do for you?

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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.

8 Compelling Reasons to Invest in a Sales Activity Tracker

Why You Need a Sales Activity Tracker

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

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

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

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

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

In this post, we’re going to look at:

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

Let’s get tracking.

The Importance of Tracking Sales Activities

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which Sales Activities Should Be Tracked?

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

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

Qualitative

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

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

Examples of qualitative activities you can track are:

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

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

Quantitative

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

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

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

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

A few examples of quantitative data are:

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

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

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

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

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

The result of this data?

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

8 Reasons to Invest in a Sales Activity Tracker

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

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

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

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

How does this help your sales figures?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. A sales activity tracker will pinpoint bottlenecks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. A sales activity tracker will help streamline processes

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

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

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

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

8. A sales activity tracker delivers more revenue

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

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

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

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

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

How to Track Sales Activities (5 Steps)

Step 1. Identify your overarching sales goals

The first step to tracking sales activities is setting goals.

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

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

Image Source

Write out what your goals are going to look like:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 3. Assign KPIs to these sales activities

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

– Attempts
– Contacts
– Qualified
– Leads
– Sales

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

Easy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lastly, keep everyone in the loop.

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

Ready to track your sales?

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

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

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

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

The State of Field Sales Report 2019

State of Field Sales Report 2019 Cover Image

The State of Field Sales Report 2019

For the second edition of the State of Field Sales Report, SPOTIO surveyed over 250 B2B outside sales professionals and leaders to discover the top challenges in the field, how reps and leaders spend their time, the biggest opportunities for increasing efficiency, and market trends and analysis.

Data in this report is from a blind survey conducted in June 2019 that generated 273 responses across the United States.

Fill out the form below to access this report:

Double The Size Of Your D2D Team In The Next 3 Months

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

The 3 Most Common Reasons For Rapid Expansion

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

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

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

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

8 Essentials Recruiting Strategies To Double The Size Of Your Team

#1 | Always Be Sourcing

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

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

5 Sourcing Tactics

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

#2 | Get “Millennial-ized”

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

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

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

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

Embrace a coaching culture, then brag about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#3 | Supercharge Your Job Ads

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

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

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

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

#4 | Offer More Than Just Commission

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

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

1… Consider ramping new sales hires with a draw

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

2… Provide a career path

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

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

#5 | Treat Great Applicants Like Great Customers

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

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

#6 | Don’t Ignore Passive Candidates

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

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

#7 | Oh, Referrals

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

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

#8 | Nurture Talent

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

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

One Final Thing

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

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

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

Your Guide on How to Improve Sales Quota Attainment

Quota attainment is a measurement that tells you whether your sales team have met their target during a given time period. It’s a simple concept; if the sales target is met, they have attained quota. Likewise, quota attainment can be measured as a percentage. If someone has reached 50% of quota, they are half-way to reaching their target.

But why are sales quotas important? Besides ensuring a plan is in place for achieving success for your organization, research shows that delayed gratification – the ability to sacrifice immediate benefits and work toward achieving larger goals down the road – is an important skill that leads toward greater, more impactful results.

The process of quota setting and quota attainment not only drives success for the company and a salesperson’s paycheck, it also is a high energy, motivational journal that can help reps and organizations maximize their potential and their results.

In this guide, we’ll explore sales quota attainment as well as actionable strategies sales organizations can use to drive toward quota attainment success.

5 Types of Sales Quotas

Let’s talk about some different types of sales quotas and the methods in which they operate. Setting an unfair quota can create confusion and angst amongst the sales people and management. It also may dissuade the mentality and confidence needed to be successful in making sales.

1 | Volume Based Sales Quotas

This is the most common quota and is suited best for small business. It’s based on the number of units sold or money made during a specific time period. This type of quota is meant to motivate the sales reps to make as many sales as possible.

2 | Profit Based Sales Quotas

This type of quota is based on a companies profits where by both the number of units sold is as important as controlling costs. Managers incentivize the sales reps so that they can focus on closing the deals that are the most profitable. Profit-Based Sales Quotas are best suited for reps selling in multiple markets or unique territories. It makes it easier to calculate and measure performance where variation is concerned.

3 | Activity Based Sales Quotas

This particular type of sales quota is best suited for a salesperson or a sales team who are making sales that are quantifiable such as making a certain number of phone calls or setting a specific number of appointments.

This type of quota has many different sales people or sales teams who are contributing to the end result and is best for industries that have long lead development cycles and little to no inventory. For example, you hire telemarketers, inside sales reps or appointment setters.

4 | Cost Based Sales Quotas

Cost Based quotas are best used in industries that reduce costs per deal like time invested rather than focusing on revenue.

5 | Combination Strategy

This is where the manager sets say, a volume-based quota and another one for activity. This helps the sales rep focus on both ‘quality’ and focus on ‘how’ they approach the sale.

10 Tips to Attain Your Sales Quota

#1: Start with A Winning Sales Process

A winning sales process is the backbone to any sales organization. Before you can even think about quote attainment, you must start with a consistent, repeatable and well-enforced sales process that guides your sales team through the right sales cycle milestones.

This ensures you have a balanced focus on filling your pipeline, nurturing leads and moving qualified leads to closure.

An efficient and effective sales process is customer-centric, clearly defined, replicable, predictable, goal-oriented, measurable, and adaptable. A sales process falling short of possessing any one of these characteristics is highly likely to perform at a disadvantage in a densely competitive industry. Focus on incorporating each component into every stage of your process as it’s built. Learn more about building a sales process in this resource from SPOTIO.

#2: Assign Sales Territories to the Right Reps

Sales territory management is the process of using data to segment customers and prospects to ensure the best use of company resources. In addition to cutting out the noise of low-return accounts, thoughtful sales territory management aligns salespeople with the most appropriate customer base – whether that’s by geography, vertical, expertise, or past relationship.

With a tool like SPOTIO’s Precise Location Tool, you can drop pins on a map, creating a visual way to design the most logical sales routes. This saves valuable time and money so that you can introduce more customers to your product or service. Get more sales territory planning tips in this resource from SPOTIO.

#3: Set Realistic Quotas

Since a sales quota is usually tied to a sales person or sales team’s comp plan, commission, and bonuses, it’s critical to have realistic quotas in place to ensure sales reps can envision success and stay motivated to work toward this target. Whether you’re setting an activity-based quota, a volume-based quota, or a profit-based quota it is critical to establish a baseline baser on trends and forecasted growth, secure a bottom-up approach, and leverage data that shows what the team is capable of achieving.

#4: Keep All Information Stored In Your CRM

High-performing sales organizations use a system for tracking each action needed to get to a sale. This includes customer and prospect conversations, important information, and administrative things like calendar appointments

More often than not, CRMs now offer mobile applications so sales reps have what they need while on the go. The Field Sales CRM empowers sales teams with an intuitive mobile interface. It gives sales reps easy access to the data needed to make sales decisions while giving leadership complete visibility to what’s happening in the field.

#5: Shoot for Quality Over Quantity

Nothing kills productivity more than sales reps wasting time working poorly qualified leads. To ensure your sales force maximizes time and resources, reps should spend more time on quality vs. quantity. Whether you qualify leads in person, by email, by phone or by chat, personal and targeted conversations help you better get to know your customers so you’re best position to serve them. It also helps them build confidence in your understanding of their opportunity so they are confident about moving forward with you and your solution.

#6: Warm Up Leads on Social Media

In 2017, two-thirds of buyers said they use social media to make purchase decisions.

Social media is one of the most powerful tools available today for sales reps. Before you knock on a door or pick up a tool, social media gives you great insight to what’s important to your prospect or customer. It allows you to understand them professionally and personally. It gives you the tools to relate and be personable. Sites such as LinkedIn help you understand your prospect’s top priorities and how they define success.

In addition to using social media for understanding your prospects, staying active on social media allows you to stay top of mind for your prospects and customers.

#7: Re-Engage Old Prospects

It’s nearly devastating when a warm lead goes cold. When you’re looking for a pre-qualified opportunity to help you meet your sales quota, re-engaging old prospects is a great strategy.

When following up with old prospects, try to focus on what is new and different since the last time you spoke. Was a new product offering released? Was there a merger? Do you have a new angle that will help your prospect be successful? Has something changed for your prospect, like a job change or promotion? Lead with what’s different so you can reconnect in a personal and meaningful way.

#8: Invest in Sales Training

While it’s hard to objectively measure the success of a sales training program, anecdotally, sales training is widely credited for top performers’ success. According to a research report from CSO Insights, a well-executed sales training program helps more reps attain quota. In fact, a study of organizations who recently completed a sales training program that “exceeded expectations” showed an 8% increase in sales reps who achieved their quota compared to those organizations with sales trainings programs that “need improvement.”

#9: Motivate with Sales Incentives

Motivation is often the key to success and there’s no better way to motivate than with sales incentives. While some salespeople are naturally motivated, sales incentives give the broader population a reward at the end of the tunnel.

Not all sales people wish to be incented in the same way so it’s important to build an incentives program that caters to different abilities, talents, levels of experience, and motivations.

Top performers respond well to traditional sales incentive programs (e.g., trips, cash, recognition at the annual meeting). If you only want to get more sales from the people who bring you the most deals, then using a tried and true incentive program will likely do the trick. Middle performers tend to perform well to a 3-tiered program that recognizes milestone they achieve throughout a given period.

Finally, poor performers may respond best to a combined carrot and stick approach that includes rewards but also includes things like Performance Improvement Plan when they are not meeting expectations.

Check out this resource from SPOTIO to learn more.

#10: Cross-Train with Top Performers

Not only are your top performers an asset to your bottom line; they are also an asset to the overall team. To drive sales quota attainment, leverage your top performers to help motivate, training and aid middle-of-the-pack sales reps in progress toward meeting their sales quotas.

Using a tool like SPOTIO rep tracker, you can uncover the top performers, then have these reps work closer with new and mid-tier reps to bring them closer to their performance level.

Conclusion

If you aren’t already it’s time to focus on how to optimize sales quota attainment. By investing in this area, you will not just help the company and your salesforce maximize profits, you will also create high energy, motivational journal that makes working in sales fulfilling and exciting.

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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.

3 Types of CRMs (and How to Use Them)

CRM Types

Whether you’re in sales, marketing or customer service, a CRM is critical to the success of your business. It acts as the internal system of record and single point of truth for the company.

Research by Salesforce shows that CRM applications can help increase sales by up to 29%, sales productivity by up to 34% and sales forecast accuracy by 42%.

A CRM lets you establish and cultivate long-term relationships with your customers so that you can increase revenue, profitability, and customer satisfaction.

But which type of CRM do you need? Which is best for your business?

CRMs make up the largest software category – estimated to reach $35B by 2023 – with thousands of vendors catering to different industries, company sizes and sales team structures.

Across the categories, three main types of CRM emerge:

1. Operational
2. Analytical
3. Collaborative

So it’s important to know which type is best for your business.

In this article, you’ll discover more about each type of CRM, what each one offers, how you can use them in your business, and why they should not be viewed as a silver bullet.

What is a CRM?

A CRM – short for Customer Relationship Management – is a software solution that helps businesses to capture prospect and customer interactions in a single database.

In 2008, only 12% of businesses used a cloud-based CRM – this figure has now increased to 87%!

Research by Innoppl Technologies showed that 65% of sales reps who adopted a mobile CRM solution hit sales quota. Only 22% of reps using a CRM without the mobile functionality hit the same sales targets.

Teams can use the information in a CRM to send emails, make calls, add notes, schedule appointments, create reports, and manage sales pipelines from the CRM system. Any interactions from the customer are automatically added to their record, so everyone has the latest visibility.

Who Uses a CRM?

Sales teams can use a CRM to learn more about their prospects and customers, and manage their sales pipeline better. The CRM also helps automate day-to-day tasks, like scheduling follow-up calls at an agreed interval. And managers can track, view, and report on their team’s performance.

Editor’s note: Different sales team structures – inside vs outside vs channel – have very different needs and should not take the same approach to customer relationship management.

For example, a field sales CRM should look, feel and act a lot different than an inside sales CRM. The type of CRM should always match the business model. The risk is lower end-user adoption. In fact, over 90% of companies have a CRM adoption rate less than 40%. And the #1 reason for lack of CRM adoption – manual data entry.

Image Source

Marketing teams can use a CRM to target their ideal customer profiles (demographics, location, etc.) when planning campaigns. The CRM also measures the ROI on their marketing activities and campaigns so they can adjust accordingly in the future.

Customer service teams can use a CRM to help maintain and retain existing customers. The CRM database provides insights into a customer’s previous issues and interactions, so they can manage the current situation and plan future customer engagement activities.

The Core Benefits of a CRM

A CRM solution allows you to focus on selling and keeping your customers happy.

But there are other benefits, too, like enhancing customer relationships, reducing customer churn rate, increasing sales and revenue, and automating communication and tasks.

Let’s take a look:

Enhance customer relationships

Research by Software Advice shows that 74% of users said their CRM system gave them improved access to customer data.

A CRM captures every interaction along the customer journey (prospect to lead to customer) from multiple teams to create a 360 degree view of the customer. Using this information enables you to provide better customer service and communication across all departments.

Reduce data entry

A CRM reduces the mundane data entry tasks by automatically adding and updating customer records in the database. For example, when a potential customer visits your website or signs up for your mailing list, or when existing customers send an email, their information is automatically loaded into your CRM.

Improve communication

With every piece of customer information in one place, you can ensure everyone across the business is communicating the right message consistently.

Visualize pipelines

A CRM helps to visualize your sales pipelines so you can prioritize which deals to work on. By visualizing the pipeline, managers can create conversion percentage benchmarks and immediately see when deals are falling through the cracks.

Reduce churn rate

Research by Capterra shows that 47% of polled CRM users said their CRM had a significant impact on customer retention.

Using data from the CRM – e.g. user requirements, preferences, buying habits, etc. – you can customize and personalize your products and services to help reduce churn rate.

Increase revenue

Insights from a CRM help you identify your most profitable customers and build stronger relationships with them. This inside knowledge increases your sales revenue as you know the optimal time to target repeat business.

With a deep understanding of the ideal customer profile, you can create “lookalike” accounts when prospecting. For example, once you know who your most valuable clients are, and where they are located, you can formulate more targeted marketing and field sales campaigns.

Collaboration

Without a CRM, business functions often work in silos with separate pieces of customer data. A CRM shared across business functions means you can work together to achieve the same goals and objectives.

Editor’s note:

We’ve looked at the core benefits of a CRM solution, but the application and use cases will vary depending on the specific needs of the team using it.

In the next section, we’ll cover the 3 main types of CRM tools, and focus in on the sales team use cases for each different type.

3 Main Types of a CRM

There are three main types of CRM systems:

Operational
Analytical
Collaborative

Let’s take a look:

#1 – Operational CRM

An Operational CRM is the most common type of CRM and is used in many different industries.

This type of CRM is excellent for handling customer-facing communications and helping businesses manage their day-to-day sales, marketing, and customer service operations.

Sales automation

An Operational CRM can automate your sales process from lead generation to closing sale, as well as managing your sales force. For example:

Scheduling follow-up reminders to contact prospects at agreed intervals.
Tracking a contact and updating their status from prospect to qualified lead once they’ve completed certain actions or met specific criteria.
Reporting on sales team performance.

Field sales example:

SPOTIO’s CRM helps Field Sales Reps build and visualize their pipeline with its lead management module. Reps can filter leads, opportunities, and customers with colorized pins to visualize their pipeline:

Inside sales example:

Salesforce offers a variety of CRM categories, including Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, Analytics Cloud, App Cloud, and Sales Cloud with functionality best suited for larger inside sales teams.

Inside sales reps can use the Sales Cloud CRM to manage contacts, access sales enablement documents, track sales activity – leads, opportunities and closed deals – and take action from any location, on any device.

The CRM allows reps to spend more time selling to the right prospects, and do it with the best data at their fingertips.

Editor’s note: It’s important to remember that one size does not fit all.

For instance, an early stage inside sales software company should be using a different CRM than an enterprise outside sales team.

Similarly, many companies have both outside and inside sales teams. In this situation, it’s better to have one primary CRM and then “bolt-on” a mobile technology built specifically for the needs of the field sales teams.

For example, large enterprise sales teams often use Salesforce for its core internal sales activities and then bolt on SPOTIO for its field sales reps, as both tools work together seamlessly.

SPOTIO’s native 2-way integration with Salesforce makes it easy for reps to collect data and record notes in the field then sync it back into Salesforce in real-time.

See how Salient Medical Solutions bolted SPOTIO’s mobile CRM functionality on top of Salesforce and increased field sales productivity by over 15%.

Marketing automation

An Operational CRM also allows you to automate some of your marketing activities at various stages of the customer funnel. For example:

– Adding and tagging new email subscribers to your CRM automatically.
– Initiating a welcome email campaign whenever a new prospect enters the system.
– Identifying existing leads in your CRM for your next marketing campaign.

HubSpot allows you to automate your email campaigns using targeted workflows, and then personalize your emails for each recipient using specific details from your CRM:

Key Features

– Stores and organizes contact and lead information
– Streamlines daily business operations
– Automates some sales and marketing activities

You should consider an operational CRM if:

– You have a linear sales process
– You are a sales and marketing led business (new business focused)
– You lean towards workflow automation and prefer software to perform redundant administrative tasks

#2 – Analytical CRM

An Analytical CRM gathers, stores, and analyzes information about your customers. This typically includes customer data, marketing data, sales data, and service data.

Here’s how each of them dovetails together.

Customer data includes general details like location, age, gender, marital status, and income bracket. The more data you gather, the clearer picture you create; e.g. What does this person want? What are their buying habits? These reports help you plan your marketing campaigns.

The SPOTIO Lead Machine is a great time-saver when you want to generate qualified leads in a chosen territory. Using up-to-date customer profile data you can find prospects who are ready to buy in three quick steps:

1. Select your target area
2. Create your ideal customer profile (e.g. income, credit capacity, age of home, eco friendly, square footage, etc.)
3. Import your leads and start selling

Marketing data lets you measure the success of your campaigns. For example, you can generate reports to discover which leads convert the best and which campaigns yield the highest ROI.

Sales data, along with marketing and customer data, help you plan new campaigns, assign sales territories and track rep performance. Reports can help identify sales trends and patterns. So, for example, you can understand:

– Which products are your Top Sellers
– Which products sell least in Winter
– Which products sell most in Florida
– Which reps sell the most
– Which territories should be assigned to different reps

Service data helps with three core areas:

1. Customer service
2. Customer satisfaction
3. Employee performance

Customer service

Your staff has access to data in the CRM which includes buying habits and past purchases, so when they’re dealing with a customer, they can quickly check for up-sell or cross-sell opportunities.

Customer satisfaction

An analytical CRM system allows you to capture and address customer satisfaction issues early on. For example, if customers complain about the same thing; e.g. a software bug, you’ll be able to see the pattern and issue a quick fix to stop any further escalation.

Employee performance

As well as tracking customer complaints, an analytical CRM can also track how your employees are handling those complaints, plus other customer interactions in general. These reports help identify areas for improvement in performance reviews.

For example, SPOTIO gives managers a clear view of how the top sales reps are performing and also where leads are falling off in the sales process:

Historical data shows exactly what happened with every prospect up to the point of the last contact. The background knowledge saved within SPOTIO prepares the sales reps for their next customer meeting and helps sales managers coach their team to success:

Key Features

– Gathers, stores, and analyzes customer information from multiple teams.
– Helps organizations to plan sales and marketing campaigns.
– Tracks key performance indicators set by the business.

You should consider an analytical CRM if:

– You have account management driven sales process
– You have a finance led management style
– Your end-users are data driven and value metrics

#3 – Collaborative CRM

A Collaborative CRM – sometimes called a Strategic CRM – enables an organization to collect, organize, and share customer information across multiple teams. For example, sales and purchase history, customer service contact, marketing preferences, and technical support interaction.

When teams collaborate and share customer information, they can maximize profitability, and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

There are two significant parts to a Collaborative CRM:

– Interaction management
– Channel management

Interaction management allows you to record and analyze every interaction a customer has with your company. Monitoring interactions helps you identify issues that an individual or groups of customers may be experiencing.

Channel management allows you to record the preferred method of communication for each of your customers. Some customers prefer text messages, others prefer a phone call, and some might prefer email. Either way, it’s better to contact your customers using their preferred method, so you get a positive response.

For example:

Imagine your company sells a mobile app. A Collaborative CRM would allow multiple teams to resolve issues reported by customers.

The customer service team can get an overall view to see how many customers are experiencing the same problem with your app.

If it’s a widespread problem, they can alert the technical support team and request a quick fix to alleviate the situation. Then, when the fix is ready, the customer service team can contact each customer using their preferred communication channel to advise them of the next steps.

Furthermore, this information can be shared with the marketing team so they can tailor messages in the future.

The integrated e-Contract functionality in SPOTIO gives sales reps immediate access to office files and documents. Instead of emailing documents back and forth, customers can sign contracts on the spot:

Reps can also take pictures onsite as well as access files, such as product spec sheets, presentations, etc.

Key Features

– Collects, organizes, and shares customer data across multiple teams
– Improves the overall customer experience with unified messaging
– Increases customer satisfaction and loyalty

You should consider a collaborative CRM if:

– You have multiple stakeholders and departments moving in and out of the platform
– You have multiple locations or have a digitally driven company culture where most communication occurs online
– Your comfortable with customer data being easily accessible by most in the company

Accelerate Your Pipeline With Customer Relationship Management

So, what type of CRM does your business need?

Here’s a quick recap:

An Operational CRM is excellent for handling customer-facing communications as it helps businesses manage their daily sales, marketing, and customer service operations.

An Analytical CRM is best for getting an overall picture of your sales, marketing, and service performance as it gathers, stores, and analyzes customer information from multiple teams.

A Collaborative CRM is best for connecting multiple teams and improving customer loyalty, as it gives a 360-degree view of the customer journey from prospect to customer support.

All that said, a CRM is not a silver bullet. Rather it is a foundational cornerstone of your sales tech-stack, and companies that are achieving the most success – whether operational, analytical or collaborative – recognize this.

A CRM will only take your sales, marketing and customer support so far, and oftentimes you’ll need to purchase additional software to integrate with a CRM as your team evolves and business grows.

Outside sales teams looking for an all-in-one CRM solution that accommodates operational, analytical and collaborative use cases should try a demo of Spotio’s field sales CRM today!

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Accelerate the Sales Onboarding Process: 8 Field-Tested Steps

The success of your sales team depends on the strength of your reps.

But finding the right reps (and retaining them) is easier said than done. Training Industry Magazine estimates that it takes an eye-watering 381 days to train a new sales rep to perform at the same level as a tenured sales rep.

And even when they’re fully trained, the average tenure of a sales rep is a mere 2.5 years.

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Combine all that with the fact that the average cost of replacing a sales rep is $115,000, and the thought of losing reps becomes a little scary (not to mention, leaving a large hole in your company’s pocket.)

But there is a way you can lessen the financial blow to your company. By improving your sales onboarding processes, you can improve your sales rep retention stats and speed up their ramp time.

Let’s take a deeper dive into sales onboarding, and look at the eight steps your company can use to accelerate your onboarding process. What is Sales Onboarding?

Before we can talk about improving the onboarding process, we need to understand exactly what we’re talking about.

Sales onboarding is the process companies go through to welcome new sales reps into their organization and train them on new skills, company knowledge and behaviors.

Unfortunately, a lot of companies are failing miserably with their sales onboarding processes. A 2018 Sales Management Association study found 62% of companies believe they are ineffective at onboarding new sales reps.

It’s important to dissect this stat and look at how effective onboarding can impact a business.

3 reasons you need to nail your onboarding process

1. Better retention rates

Employees are 60% more likely to remain with an organization for three years or longer when a standardized onboarding process is used. Get your onboarding processes wrong, and it’ll cost you big time in rehiring and retraining sales reps.

But why is onboarding so essential for retaining reps?

Well, it’s their first taste of the company, and they want to know that the job they’re about to commit to is worth it. If you can’t get your onboarding processes right, it’ll be harder for reps to find their place in the sales team, and it’s unlikely to fill them with confidence about the company.

2. Less ramp time

The longer it takes to get your reps up to selling speed, the more money you’re investing into an employee that’s not making any sales.

A lot of companies are stuck in an old-school approach when it comes to onboarding sales hires. They make their new sales reps attend lengthy meetings and shadow other reps for weeks (or months) at a time without letting them make so much as a sales call.

With a solid onboarding process in place, your reps will be able to start generating sales sooner, which will cut their training costs at the same time.

3. Greater sales results

The most significant benefit of having a watertight sales onboarding process lies in the sales results.

One Sales Enablement Optimization Study found companies that used onboarding for the training services and taught their new reps best practices were able to boost their win rates by 14%. By streamlining your training at the onboarding stage, you can not only get reps selling more, but you can get them selling faster.

8 Best Practices for Effectively Onboarding New Sales Reps

Now you know why you need an effective onboarding process, let’s look at how to implement it in your own company.

#1: Outline core competencies

First things first – make a list of everything you need from the rep to perform at the top of their game.

There isn’t a set list of competencies you should outline as this step will depend on the goals of your sales team. Some companies will value negotiation and selling techniques, while sales teams with outside reps might include things like in-person conversational and closing skills.

Whatever you decide your company’s core competencies are, make sure they’re made up of suggestions from senior sales managers and reps. After all, they’re the ones on the ground selling, so they’ll know better than anyone what skills are needed to make new hires as productive as possible.

#2: Map out a standard process

Next, standardize your processes.

Even if you plan your ramp time for new hires to be short, without a process, it’s unlikely the whole thing will go smoothly. Mapping out and standardizing your processes will mean your new hires will know what’s in store for them in their first weeks and months at your company.

A standardized process will bring your new rep up to speed on aspects of your company like:

Company culture
Detailed sales processes and cycles
Products and offerings
Buyer personas
The company’s history
Team structures
Sales playbooks
Standard project lengths

Gong recommends giving new hires access to an entire activity map of a sales cycle, so they’re able to see how a deal is closed, end-to-end:

Using a CRM can help at this stage, especially if you’re hiring at scale. As you’re likely to have a ton of documents outlining your processes, personas, and product offerings, using a CRM like SPOTIO can help keep everything organized and on track.

For example, in the SPOTIO dashboard, you can create a pipeline to store all of your onboarding paperwork and guide new hires through their onboarding without a ton of manual effort from sales managers.

And even if your senior sales managers are out on the field, they can check in with new hires with the team chat feature to make sure they’re staying on track.

#3: Document everything

We’re talking about documenting your onboarding processes, as well as keeping track of how well reps are doing in their training.

Likely, your sales reps won’t be able to retain every single piece of information you throw at them during the onboarding phase. A study by Sales Performance International found about 50% of the content in sales training is forgotten within five weeks, and less than 10% of it will be remembered in a year.

So documenting everything, and making processes available to your new hires so they can revert back to, is crucial to successful onboarding.

It always helps to have some resources and reference guides that they can use to refresh their memory on the fly. You can also include helpful tips and tricks like phone scripts and templates so the rep can familiarize themselves with what your typical sales process looks like.

SPOTIO CRM can double up as an onboarding kanban to keep your processes organized

If you’re using a CRM for your sales onboarding, you can tie-in feedback to each process so your new hire can take a look at what they did well, and what they need to improve on. Giving your new hires feedback is crucial—more than 60% of sales reps leave their jobs if their managers are poor coaches. So help them be the best they can be from the moment they start at your company.

#4: Use pre-boarding

Pre-boarding can be a controversial topic. You’re essentially making content available to your new reps before they’ve started at your company.

But hear us out.

Making onboarding materials available to your new sales reps is a great opportunity for them to familiarize themselves with the company, and what their new role is going to be all about. Sales reps might take it upon themselves to look through the documents and immerse themselves in the companies practices, particularly if it means it will get them selling faster.

Pre-boarding can also help your new hires to find their way around your sales software, which will help to speed up their ramp time. After all, the quicker they’re able to start selling, the faster they’re able to start earning commission.

#5: Instill focus with a 30-60-90 day plan

Starting any new job is tough, but you can help to ease the pain by giving your sales reps a clear plan of what their first three months with the company is going to look like.

Assigning new reps with a 30-60-90 day sales plan helps sales managers determine their approach to learning the business, ability to create and track measurable goals, and willingness to hold themselves accountable.

Sales Enablement Manager Brian Goth recommends creating a detailed plan that’s broken down into processes, products, tools, and industry.

The ultimate goal of having such a detailed plan in place? To get sales reps selling quicker and bringing money into the company faster. In a example from Gong, reps can add up to $60k in extra revenue if you can get them selling in their second month instead of their fourth.

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Pro-tip: Make sure you don’t just “set and forget” your 30-60-90 day plan. As a rule of thumb, have a senior sales manager review it every 3-6 months to pinpoint what worked, and what needs to improve to make the next onboard even more successful.

#6: Provide ongoing training

As Ryan Robinson points out on Close.io, the learning never stops when it comes to sales training techniques.

And giving your reps ongoing training pays off. After all, high-performing sales organizations are twice as likely to provide ongoing training than their low-performing counterparts. As we highlighted in a recent blog post, a trustworthy rep closes more sales, and they have a certain set of traits:

– They ask the right questions and get to the heart of a prospect’s problem
– They provide insight that allows prospects to understand their problem fully
– They leave their prospects feeling clear about what to do and what to focus on
– They use terms like “certainly” and “absolutely” to inspire confidence

Without ongoing training, it’s hard for new reps to achieve these key traits.

Make sure you’re giving your sales reps proper, personalized training when they’re first hired. This means making sure they know how your company’s products work, how they can solve a prospect’s problem, and they understand the sales process your team follows.

You can even go one step further and track how much training a rep is receiving and how knowledgeable they are about the offering, and set up reminders for your sales managers to make sure they’re nurturing new reps.

Pro-tip: Once your new reps are getting settled, you can build a sales leaderboard in SPOTIO to encourage some healthy competition and drive the business forward.

#7: Show reps how “top-performers” do it

There’s a reason that new sales reps shadow top-performers—it’s one of the best ways for them to learn how processes work, and what’s expected of them.

Pairing your new hires up with top-performing sales reps is one of the best ways to cut their ramp time, and show them the company’s standards on interacting with customers and closing deals.

Having new hires shadow your company’s top performers can also:

Light a competitive spark: By nature, sales reps are competitive (I mean, we’ve even built a leaderboard for it!). Having your new reps see how the best people in the company perform can engage them in the sales process and ignite their competitive streak to want to be a top-performer themselves

Help them see their future prospects: Room to grow in a company is important. If a new hire is able to see professional growth opportunities within your top-performers, this can help boost their interest in their role

Promote teamwork: The best teams work together. Pairing up your top-performers with new reps can create a “mentor” bond that will open up the opportunity to work together down the line, and share sales tips and tricks once the new rep settles in

Be warned: not all top-performers have time to nurture new sales reps, so it’s important to spread the responsibility around. Don’t have your top-performers constantly being shadowed by new hires. Instead, try pairing up reps with top-performers on a rotational basis, and only assign top-performers who you think will be a good match, personality-wise, to the new hire.

Once you’ve assigned a top-performer, get them involved in the new hire’s onboarding process as soon as possible. This will ease the responsibility on the team’s sales manager to keep their onboarding process on track. Plus, it will give the rep mentoring them a sense of ownership in their onboarding as well.

#8: Track rep performance

Finally, make sure you track your new rep’s performance using KPIs.

Even if they’re settling in well and they’re completed the onboarding process, it’s important to track ramp metrics like:

How long it took to fulfill their quota
How many leads in their funnel/demos booked
How many deals they closed
How long it took to close their first deal

Tracking your rep’s performance is essential for a bunch of different reasons. Firstly, it can give you an overall picture of their selling abilities in their early stages. But it can also help you to see how effective your onboarding process was, and what you should be doing to improve it.

To get a larger picture, track whether the rep is hitting their KPIs at the right time and if their training mentor believes they are competent. For outside sales reps, it’s also essential to take a look at how they’re planning territories, and if they’re sticking to their sales routes.

Using SPOTIO, sales managers can build custom reports for each new hire in real-time to get a clear picture of their conversions and benchmarks. Tracking a rep’s performance using solid data can give you a better idea of how many sales they’re bringing in, and if they’re earning their spot on your sales team.

Start refining your sales onboarding process

Bringing new sales reps into your team without a process is hard.

Without a process, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to train and nurture a rep in an efficient way. Not to mention it’ll look sloppy on your part, and during the onboarding phase, new hires are also sizing up your company to make sure it’s a good fit for their career goals.

The cost of replacing a sales rep averages at $115,000 and new hires are 60% more likely to stick around if a business has a standardized onboarding process in place. Refining and perfecting your sales process makes sense—for your employee retention rates and your bottom line.

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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.

4 Costly Limitations of Sales Territory Mapping in Google Maps

Is your team still mapping sales territories in Google Maps?

Three in ten businesses are still assigning sales territories geographically because it’s “the way things are done.” But using Google Maps to plot and plan sales territories is an old school approach. The territories have to be created manually, and it leaves a lot of room for error.

What does that mean for your business? Well, it can lead to missed prospecting opportunities, and more importantly, lost revenue.

To optimize your sales mapping process, you need to include details like prospect demographics, existing customer data and have clear boundaries. Otherwise, your sales reps will be door-knocking the same houses, crossing into each other’s territories, and ultimately⁠—wasting their time.

Let’s dive into why using a free tool like Google Maps to do your sales territory mapping could actually be costing you money, and why you should start mapping territories in a smarter way.

4 Costly Limitations of Assigning Sales Territories with Google Maps

Sometimes, the best things in life aren’t free. And when it comes to sales territory mapping, using a free tool like Google Maps to plan your sales prospecting can cost you money in the long run.

It’s not that Google Maps is totally useless. In fact, our territory mapping software relies on it for geographical data. But if you’re using Google Maps as a standalone mapping solution, you’ll run into several costly limitations.

Problem #1 – No idea how many homes are assigned to reps

It’s a typical Tuesday morning, and your sales reps are out canvassing neighborhoods you’ve assigned them on Google Maps.

But, how many homes are they supposed to hit in that area?

If you’re using Google Maps, you’ll have no idea. The fact is, you could assign two reps to the exact same geographically sized area in Google Maps, but there is no way to know the actual number of homes you’ve assigned to each rep.

Unless you manually input every home in each sales territory, it’s impossible to know how many homes are in each one. [Image source]

One area might have 50 houses, and the other might have 500.

This is a recipe for disaster when it comes to making sure territories are fairly balanced. If a rep is constantly given areas with fewer homes than other reps, not only will they be closing fewer sales, but they might not be too happy about their commissions at the end of the month, either.

Problem #2 – No idea how many existing customers you have in each territory

Talk about flying blind.

Google Maps gives you the tools to assign territories. But it doesn’t give you any information about existing customers inside the area.

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This is a problem for two reasons.

Firstly, your sales reps could be door-knocking current customers and trying to sell to them. This is a bad look and makes the rep (and your company) look unprofessional. Secondly, it rules out any chances of reps using existing customers for referrals when they’re targeting a territory—because they’ve got no idea where the existing customers are located, and as a result, cannot customize their script.

Problem #3. No demographic information on the homeowners/businesses you should be targeting

An article by Alexander Group found the best and highest performing territories are those that have been ‘optimized’ for sales reps.

So, the more a territory has been scrutinized into fitting your company’s target persona, the more chance reps have at closing clients. Using Google Maps, it’s almost impossible for reps to have this data on hand, and it makes even less sense to send them to an area without knowing the profile of the prospects they are trying to close.

Does the area fit your company’s target persona? Are there businesses or homes in the area that are already customers of yours? Can the prospects in the area afford your product, or more importantly… do they even want it?

You won’t be able to answer these questions if you’re using Google Maps to assign territories, and your reps will be essentially selling blind.

Problem #4. No ability to plot multiple routes at a time

Plotting routes in Google Maps isn’t just time-consuming⁠—it’s limiting. You can only plot a single route at a time.

For a sales rep, this is very restrictive. They must plot a single route and complete it, and then map out another plan. This adds up to a lot of extra admin time for your sales reps. A study by Salesforce found sales reps spend a whopping 64% of their time doing non-selling tasks like admin and service tasks.

But restricting the number of routes a rep can map out not only takes up a big chunk of their time, it makes it easier for prospects to slip through the cracks. If they’re rushing to manually map out routes, they might miss potential prospects in the area.

How to Map Sales Territories Faster and More Efficiently with SPOTIO

Here are 5 ways using a sales territory management app can supercharge your sales efforts.

1. Map Territories With Demographic Data

To start selling smarter, you need data.

Using a sales tracking app, you can build sales territories using prospect data you’ve already got on file. When your sales reps are out in the field, they’ll be able to see every prospect and customer’s geographic location.

This can save them valuable time if they’re out selling and a new lead enters your company’s sales pipeline. Because SPOTIO helps build a rep’s selling route, it can automatically adjust their route if the new prospect is in the area, so they don’t fall through the cracks.

2. Pinpoint Existing Customers & Get Referrals

For reps out in the field, using existing customers as examples can be a powerful tool in their sales toolkit.

Picture this. Your rep is canvassing a street, and they can see on their app that the prospect’s neighbor is an existing customer of your company. This will give your outside rep the ammunition to open their pitch with something like, “You know John Smith next door? He actually hired us last month and was very impressed with the work we did. In fact, seven of your neighbors in the area have trusted us to work on their home.”

See how that ice breaker completely changes the tone of the conversation?

But having powerful data like this can also help supercharge your rep’s referral process, too. Your customers can provide your reps with some of the highest converting and cheapest leads– referrals. They just have to ask.

In fact, 86% of buyers want to be able to ask in-person questions before making a purchase, and a further 90% of all buying decisions are based on recommendations. So if a rep is out selling in the field and getting referrals at the same time, they can kill two birds with one stone.

3. Assign Territories By Number of Homes

Making sure that sales reps have enough doors to knock is essential to their performance and the amount of commission they can make.

But it’s also essential to maintain a balance in your sales rep’s workloads. Using a sales territory mapping app can help assign a fair number of homes to a territory in a more accurate way.

For example, using SPOTIO you can create fair, balanced territories for your reps in less than 10 minutes. Let’s say you want to assign each rep 300 houses to target for the week. Using SPOTIO, all you have to do is start drawing out an area, and the software will tell you the estimated number of homes in that territory.

Once you reach the amount of houses you want each rep to target, all that’s left is to assign the territory so they can start selling.

4. Use City & Zipcode to Eliminate Grey Areas

Distributing territories by city or zip code is one of the easiest methods because it’s black and white.

There’s no grey area, and it minimizes the risk of sales reps crossing into each other’s territories. But there’s a catch. Assigning territories by city or zipcode can lead to unbalanced territories, and one rep having higher amounts of prospects than another.

Because cities or zip codes vary in the number of houses, you may need to give two cities to a single rep, while one city might need three reps. Using SPOTIO to assign these territories can eliminate all this guesswork. SPOTIO can help to ensure you distribute the number of houses for each rep to work evenly by the city or zip code.

5. Use Google Places Data to Find, Filter & Target Businesses

SPOTIO’s native integration with Google Places makes it easier for reps to find the best prospects in their territories.

Let’s say your target prospects are restaurant owners. Using Google Places, sales reps can pull up every restaurant in the area, and then SPOTIO will automatically plan out the best route for them.

And because Google Maps is constantly staying up to date with businesses’ information, your reps won’t be wasting time in the field chasing down leads with outdated addresses.

Integrating Google Places into your rep’s sales plans can make sure the prospect information they’re using is up to date.

Final Thoughts

Google Maps is a great tool to help find a restaurant if you’re out walking the streets. But if you’re trying to use it for sales territory mapping, it’s another story.

For sales reps to be successful in the field, they need more than just a map with boundary lines on it. They need existing customer information, demographic data, and smarter sales routes.

Planning sales territories in Google Maps may be free, but it’s also very limiting. When you add up the cost of lost prospects and the extra admin time spent manually planning routes, ask yourself… what’s free mapping software actually costing your business in the long run?

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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.