Sales Productivity

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get Your Sales Team Back on Track

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

Let’s dive in…

1. Make Safety a Priority

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

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

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

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

2. Understand the Market

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

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

3. Evaluate Your Business Plan

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

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

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

4. Retrain Your Staff

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

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

5. Use a Multi Channel Sales Approach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Discover New Prospecting Opportunities

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

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

Here are a couple of resources you can use:

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

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

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

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

7. Analyze Past Data

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

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

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

8. Invest in New Technology

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

 

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

9. Be Active

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

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

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

Own the “New Normal”

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

Good luck!

How to Choose the Best Sales Reporting Software For Your Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s dive in!

What is Sales Reporting Software?

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

Sales reporting software helps teams:

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

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

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

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

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

1. Is it For Inside or Outside Sales Reporting?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Is it Easy to Build Reports?

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

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

5. What Level of Customization is Available?

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

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

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

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

6. Does it Provide Activity-Level Reporting?

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

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

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

7. Can it be Used in the Field?

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

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

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

8. Does it Provide Automated Notifications?

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

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

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

9. Does it Integrate With Other Data Sources?

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

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

10. How is Data Secured?

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

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

11. How Does Pricing Scale?

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

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

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

12. Have You Checked Customer Reviews?

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

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

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

13. What Level of Customer Support is Provided?

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

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

Speaking of free trials…

Take Your Shortlist For a Test Drive

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

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

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

SPOTIO is Best for Field Sales Reporting

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

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

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

 

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

5 Critical Sales Tasks for any Field Sales Team

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

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

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

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

1) Establishing Rapport with Prospects

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

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

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

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

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

2) Identifying Customer Needs and Tailoring the Pitch Accordingly

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

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

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

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

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

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

3) Presenting High-Level Insights into the Offering 

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

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

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

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

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

4) Streamlining Longer and Complex Processes to Close Deals Faster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5) Managing Flexible and Varied Schedules Effectively

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

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

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

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

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

About the Author

Ali Mirza
Founder & President
Rose Garden Consulting

 


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

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

The Ultimate Guide for Tracking Sales Productivity

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

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

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

On the one hand…

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

On the other hand…

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

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

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

Luckily, technology can help.

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

Begin by measuring the sales process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What sales activities should you focus on?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Negotiations. Answering questions and managing objections.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Automated sales tracking tools

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

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

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

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

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

Route Planning is also easy

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

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

Spotio Routing

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

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

About the Author


Ryan Gould
Vice President of Strategy and Marketing Services
Elevation Marketing


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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Choose the KPIs that matter for your organization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Keep your team aligned with their goals

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

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

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

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

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

3. Set and Track Key Sales Activities

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

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

These include the following:

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

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

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

4. Establish rewards and consequences

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

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

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

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

5. Keep your sales activities transparent

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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Author Bio

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

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

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

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

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

38 Best Apps for Sales Reps

Mobile Apps

SPOTIO
Slack
CamCard
Keynote
Evernote
Dragon
Quickvoice
Skype for Mobile

Travel / Route Planning Apps

SPOTIO
TripIt
Google Maps
GateGuru
Tripcase
Parkopedia
Milebug
Rome2rio

Prospecting Apps

Lead Machine
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Hunter.io
SellHack
NerdyData
InsideView

Lead Management Apps

SPOTIO Lead Management
Hubspot CRM
Salesforce

Productivity Apps

SPOTIO Territory Manager
Wunderlist
Any.do
Expensify
Dropbox

Closing Sales Apps

SPOTIO e-Contracts
HelloSign
DocuSign
Proposify
Square

Best Apps for Sales Tracking

SPOTIO (Sales Tracker)
HubSpot Sales Hub

 

Best Mobile Sales Apps for Reps


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

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

SPOTIO

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

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

Slack

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

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

CamCard

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

 


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

Keynote

    • Free
    • Mobile App: iOS



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

Evernote

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

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

Dragon

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

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

Quickvoice

Free
Mobile App: iOS

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

Skype for Mobile

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

 

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

Best Travel / Route Planning Apps for Sales Reps

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

SPOTIO

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



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

TripIt

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


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

Google Maps

 

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

GateGuru

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

Tripcase

Best Apps for Sales Tracking

SPOTIO (Sales Tracker)

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

 

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

HubSpot Sales Hub

$500/month

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

[White Paper] The Ultimate Guide to Multichannel Communication

Ultimate Guide to Multichannel Communication for Outside Sales

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll talk you through everything you need to know about how you can take a multichannel approach to enhance prospecting efficiency and boost sales.

Smaller - Ultimate Guide to Multichannel Communication Whitepaper Cover_Shadow

Fill out this form& get immediate access!



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Product Update: Multichannel Activity Management

An outside sales rep spends countless hours each week communicating with prospects and customers, but more often than not, these activities go unnoticed. This is due to the fact that in order to document these interactions, it requires an average of 10.7 hours – or 23% of their time – each week to plug this information into their CRM. Time that should be spent selling.

We’ve recognized that this is a big problem and have created a solution… Spotio is thrilled to announce the release of Multichannel Activity Management.

This new feature offers activity management capabilities to include visits, calls, texts, and email; providing a complete view and real-time digest of the activities happening in the field. Get the visibility you’ve been missing.

Feature

Spotio’s Multichannel Communication feature eases the administrative burden of activity tracking by auto-logging the interactions taking place through the Spotio app into your CRM.

Benefits

Face-to-Face Visits

Eliminate rep administrative burdens and reduce manual work that goes into recording face-to-face interactions.

Calls

Provide sales reps with a central hub of call activities – inbound, outbound, and missed – to easily track communication with prospects.

Texts

A single view for all the texts that have been sent and received between a rep and prospect or customer. The automatic transfer of SMS communication into the CRM makes it easy to track and measure all text communication that happens.

Emails

Integrated with your email provider, auto capture every customer email communication for full picture of engagement.

The Result

By utilizing a tool that automates this list of activities, your sales team greatly benefits. Management can track performance over time and discover whether or not the activities resulting from visits are working or not; while reps greatly reduce the manual burden of having to document sales activities taking place in the field.

• Eliminate the costly guesswork and provide your outside sales team with the visibility they’ve been missing.

• Instantly sync every activity into your CRM.

• Auto-log each customer interaction for a complete picture of engagement, while keeping sales reps focused on what matters most.

• Run performance and activity reports by rep, territory, or by team.

• A complete view and real-time digest of the activities happening in the field.

To learn more, schedule your demo here.

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

Spotio is the #1 outside sales software that will increase revenue, maximize profitability, and boost sales productivity.

Hunter vs. Farmer: 7 Things You Should Know Before Using Salesforce Maps as a Field Sales Solution

Successfully and strategically mapping out sales territories requires coordinating countless moving parts. Yes, you’ll need to manage the basic sales assignment process of connecting reps with their regions – but savvy business owners and sales managers recognize that a comprehensive field sales methodology requires far more than just outlining boundaries and choosing the right account executive. 

Salesforce Maps (formerly MapAnything) has proven to be a popular choice for sales organizations looking to up their infield selling game. However, businesses across virtually every vertical often realize that the current SF Maps functionality doesn’t quite suit all of their needs.

To best optimize a sales territory campaign, executives must implement a full-scale, robust mapping solution that goes beyond program basics to include other factors such as gathering data sets, managing leads, and measuring performance.

Salesforce Maps Often on the Fields Sales Solution Shortlist 

Designed specifically for field sales strategies, Salesforce Maps does what all mapping software should do: help organizations add geographic context to the selling process. The system also automates standard selling situations, such as contact details, new account creation, lead gathering, and various customer service components. 

Sure, SF Maps uses functional mapping and productivity optics. However, as B2B field sales team begin to experience the pressure of making sales in highly-competitive markets, they quickly realize that selecting the right territory mapping solution boils down to far more than cool visuals. Before you invest heavily in Salesforce Maps, it’s important to explore some key considerations that could shape your final decision

The Hunter (SPOTIO) vs. The Farmer (Salesforce Maps)

Image Source: Codeless

As a global leader in the CRM space, Salesforce platforms (including SF Maps) are typically reliable options for business owners. However, it’s important to note that just because Salesforce Maps is a good solution, it doesn’t mean that it’s the best solution for your outside sales team. While business owners may initially explore SF Maps when sourcing digital mapping strategies, many discerning entrepreneurs choose SPOTIO as their final solution.

Leveraging Field Sales To Grow Your Corporate Operations

Both Salesforce Maps and SPOTIO offer a diverse suite of sales automation and geographic technologies. However, Salesforce Maps’ configuration makes it uniquely designed for sales teams trying to sell (or farm) into already existing customers, establishing it as a potential option for businesses looking to sustain their current operations. 

SPOTIO, on the other hand, goes head-to-head with SF Maps farming capabilities – and then takes things up a notch. In addition to providing system support when selling into established customers, SPOTIO’s functionality is positioned specifically to help companies prospect (or hunt) and find new business opportunities to grow their corporate reach and revenues. 

7 Ways SPOTIO Will Help You Hunt Down (and Close) More Deals

The SPOTIO field sales solution, much like Salesforce Maps, provides the conventional mapping feature set, including:

Map Visualizations

SPOTIO’s map visualization technology uses a geographic interface to help users aggregate and analyze complex location data sets. The system offers big-picture intelligence that helps pinpoint new prospects, leads, and revenue-generating opportunities within a designated sales territory.

For reps, this means instant insight on where they have their best chance to maximize closed deals and overall ROI when spending time in the field.

For managers, SPOTIO’s map visualizations help pinpoint where reps are converting deals – and which region’s need a little more focused selling attention. 

Route Mapping

SPOTIO route mapping offers invaluable insight on how to get to your final destination as quickly and painlessly as possible. Reps and managers can develop and implement customized routes that minimize lost productivity. You’ll use real-time data to help your team lower windshield time and streamline output on every client visit.

Beyond these standard functions, SPOTIO stands out above other solutions like Salesforce Maps as a leading field sales acceleration platform by offering these seven essential hunter features:

1. Create Ideal Customer Profiles

Salesforce Maps captures and visualizes stored company data to help sellers understand their current state of affairs with any specific customer. 

However, SPOTIO offers extended capabilities that allow users to develop ideal customer profiles. Your sales team can quickly sort live information by over 50 data points to help you pinpoint common traits amongst your very best customers to reference when developing prospect lists. 

2. Assign Territories by Number of Homes

Salesforce Maps allows users to create territory boundaries. Unfortunately, establishing a sales territory based on sheer mileage alone is not enough to ensure success. It’s vital to develop territories that gives your reps access to a sufficient number of prospects within their district, without feeling overwhelmed, or capped. 

SPOTIO goes beyond miles and square footage, allowing users to develop balanced territories based on the estimated number of homes in a region. In just a few minutes, managers can create selling regions that offer your team an equal opportunity for success while out hunting for new business. 

3. Use Google Places Data to Target Specific Business Types

SPOTIO’s platform integrates with Google Places to boost the benefits of mapping technology. Again, Salesforce Maps provides sufficient information on current sales customers and activities. However, with its native Google Places integration, sellers can use SPOTIO to designate the very best opportunities within their assigned regions. 

For example, companies selling into healthcare organizations can use Google Places to identify other medical practices. From there, SPOTIO takes over, mapping out the best route to optimize efficiencies during the time in the field. 

4. View Pipeline Activity Inside Your Territory

Like everything else in sales, the pipeline activity within your designated sales regions can be cyclical with upward swings and downturns. Salesforce Maps’ somewhat limited technology profile makes it challenging to accurately view pipeline activity within a district. 

SPOTIO’s mobile functionality equips users with “notes as you go” field data entry that promotes accurate, thorough pipeline activity tracking that benefits virtually every level of a sales organization. 

Busy sales reps appreciate having the ability to quickly zero in on their most urgent potential sales. Additionally, managers and group leaders value using pipeline activity data sets to pinpoint possible deals as well as marketplace momentum, trends, and dips. 

5. Re-Engage Smarter With Historical Data

Let’s face it: effectively selling often relies on an “if at first you don’t succeed” mentality. 

Exceptional sales leaders understand that to truly optimize results within a territory, reps must continuously refine their strategies and increase their overall territory penetration. However, tracking the extensive volume of historical data through Salesforce and other (often more manual methods) can prove a major time waster. SPOTIO’s historical data functionality streamlines accessing past communication and transactions. Reps can quickly refresh on the details of the last appointment, while managers can use the stored insight to help the team better direct (and close) on the next engagement. 

6. Map Faster Routes (aka Spend More Time Selling)

SPOTIO Routing technology quickly separates it from Salesforce Maps. 

SPOTIO expedites route efficiencies, enabling account reps to best plan out their field days. The system utilizes current data sets to develop courses based on essential factors such as distance, appointment time, meeting length. The system even calculates time needed for both driving and walking. SPOTIO’s agile technology profile instantly calculates all relevant details to craft a map route that gives your account executives the best chance to lower time behind the wheel and increase time in front of your clients. 

7. Get Real-Time View of Rep Activity and Performance

Unlike Salesforce Maps, SPOTIO prioritizes rep activity and performance. A simple push of a button allows users to determine the exact position of reps in the field, providing a live update every two minutes or whenever an app activity is logged. SPOTIO delivers the information managers need to help reps optimize their time in the field to close deals and grow the business without infringing on staff member’s privacy during off-hours. 

Connect Your CRM With SPOTIO

SPOTIO integrates directly into your existing CRM. Bolt on the power of SPOTIO’s mapping and field sales acceleration platform to your Salesforce CRM. The system is designed to integrate seamlessly with Salesforce and deliver accelerated value and usability. 

SPOTIO’s 2-way CRM integration instantly redefines mapping visualization within your sales organization. Once installed, SPOTIO simplifies data intelligence aggregation, allowing users to store, analyze, and sync field information automatically into your existing Salesforce configuration. 

Still not convinced?

Maybe you need more information to determine if SPOTIO is the right field sales solution for your organization. Or, maybe you’re worried that the integration process will hinder efficacy and productivity. 

No matter what your questions or concerns, we can help. Contact us today to speak with an onsite SPOTIO specialist to get the information you need. You can also click here for a no-risk product demo to see for yourself what SPOTIO offers to sales organizations pursuing growth, increased revenues, and extended market share.