Poor time management, regular rejections from leads, and a lack of understanding of the right target customer are just some of the many productivity-draining hurdles SDRs encounter daily.

Fortunately, you can solve each of these with the right processes, tools, and a listening ear.

In this guide, we’ll show you easy strategies for improving sales team performance. We’ve also got proven tips on how to motivate reps.

What is sales efficiency?

Sales efficiency measures how effectively your sales team utilizes its available resources—primarily time, budget, and effort—to generate the maximum possible output, such as revenue, closed deals, or qualified opportunities. In simple terms, it’s about achieving the best sales results with the lowest necessary investment of resources.

Why is tracking sales efficiency important?

Tracking sales efficiency is important for several critical reasons:

• Provides visibility beyond revenue: While revenue growth shows what was achieved, efficiency metrics reveal how it was achieved. It helps you understand if your team is working smart or just hard, highlighting the effectiveness of your sales operations and processes, overall resource utilization, and baseline sales performance within the sales organization.
• Identifies bottlenecks and inefficiencies: Monitoring metrics like sales cycle length, lead response time, or conversion rates between stages helps pinpoint exactly where deals are stalling or where salespeople are struggling. This allows you to diagnose and fix specific problems in your sales process or identify areas where coaching is needed.  
• Optimizes resource allocation: Efficiency data shows which activities, channels, or customer segments yield the best results for the effort and cost invested. This allows you to allocate budget, time, and personnel more effectively, focusing resources where they will have the greatest impact and maximizing return on investment (ROI).
• Improves forecasting accuracy: Teams with efficient, well-tracked processes tend to have more predictable sales cycles and conversion rates. This leads to more reliable sales pipeline data and ultimately more accurate sales forecasts, which is crucial for business planning.  
• Increases profitability: By focusing on reducing wasted effort and lowering Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) relative to Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), improving sales efficiency directly contributes to higher profit margins and sustainable revenue growth.
• Supports scalability: Inefficient sales processes become increasingly costly and difficult to manage as a company grows. Tracking and optimizing efficiency ensures your sales engine can scale effectively without costs spiraling out of control.

9 common sales efficiency challenges

While the goal of maximizing sales efficiency is clear, numerous obstacles can stand in the way of achieving it. Sales teams often grapple with specific issues that drain resources, slow down processes, and ultimately impact the bottom line.

Recognizing these hurdles is the first step toward overcoming them. Here are some of the most common sales efficiency challenges:

Lack of automation

Sales reps end up tied to an unproductive work cycle between manual prospect research, data entry, and other admin tasks, spending less time on core selling activities.

The result? Reps can’t focus on qualifying and nurturing leads – their primary job.

Research from HubSpot confirms sales representatives spend only one-third of their time talking to prospects. The rest of it goes into writing emails (21%), entering data (17%), prospecting and researching leads (17%), and scheduling calls (12%).

💡Pro tip: Using a customer relationship management (CRM) software can help you automate many tasks and streamline workflows, from choosing which leads to contact first to getting AI-backed suggestions on when to follow up with prospects.

For example, a robust CRM can automatically curate prospect data from various sources. It can also track progress on each account by automatically logging in updates such as follow-up emails sent to prospect A, demo calls delivered to prospect B, etc.

Poor time management

Outreach calls can be time-consuming, particularly if SDRs are still learning to identify the best leads to reach out to. To add, these calls often lead to nowhere except for demotivating reps.

What’s more, it’s not uncommon to see SDRs focusing too much on a lead that never converts, all while delaying closing a warm lead.

All this points to one thing: helping sales professionals better manage their time is necessary to save them from falling down a rabbit hole of inefficiency.

Struggling to follow the sales script

A sales script is a performance shortcut. And it can encourage reps to focus on leveraging proven strategies and tactics that deliver results.

The problem, however, is that not all SDRs realize the sales script’s potential. As a result, they struggle with sticking to using it.

Lack of customer understanding

Not knowing who they target is a recipe for SDR inefficiency.

In fact, without a thorough grip on the ideal customer profile (ICP), sales representatives are likely to waste a lot of their time chasing the wrong leads.

It also means there’s a high risk of them losing warm leads. The reason? Reps fail to reach out to them in time.

No data or bad data for target accounts

Manually researching target account data can be time-consuming and error-prone.

On top of that, some sales intellifemce tools that promise to deliver target data might not refresh it in time — leaving sales professionals with wrong or inaccurate target account data.

Called someone in California at 5 am

This is all too common when SDRs manually comb through prospect information from their database.

In fact, not only do they end up calling at the wrong hour, but they also commonly call incorrect numbers or contact the same number twice. 

Lack of motivation

According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace survey, 85% of employees aren’t engaged in the workplace.

When it comes to SDRs in particular, motivation levels are often low – thanks but no thanks to tedious tasks and (almost) consistent rejections from prospects they contact.

Deals stalling in the sales cycle

Opportunities frequently get stuck at specific stages, such as negotiation, legal review, or security assessments. Difficulty maintaining momentum and proactively moving deals forward extends the sales cycle length, increases the cost per deal, and delays revenue recognition.

Time spent on non-revenue generating activities

Sales reps often find their days consumed by tasks that don't directly contribute to closing deals. Excessive time allocated to internal meetings, manual CRM updates, compiling reports, and other administrative burdens significantly reduces the time available for active selling and prospect engagement.

10 best practices for improving your sales team’s performance

Knowing the heart of the problem solves almost half of it. All in all, here’s a brief answer to your question on how can you improve your SDR performance:

1. Create a repeatable sales process
2. Define daily, weekly and monthly sales activities
3. Sell to customer needs
4. Manage and nurture leads effectively
5. Invest in high-quality sales training
6. Host regular one-one meetings and help reps set SMART sales goals
7. Develop a consistent sales prospecting workflow
8. Create a sales enablement process
9. Use an automated sales intelligence software
10. Align incentives with strategies that boost sales

1. Create a repeatable sales process

This means setting up a clear, consistent plan for how your sales team handles key steps like finding and qualifying leads, talking to prospects, and closing deals. Having a set process helps everyone work smarter and faster because they know what to do when.

The main steps usually involve researching, prospecting, understanding customer needs, presenting your solution, handling questions, closing the deal, and following up afterwards.

When everyone follows the same steps, it's easier to spot where things might be going wrong if deals aren't closing.

2. Define daily, weekly and monthly sales activities

This is about listing out the regular tasks your sales reps need to do to keep things moving and ensure there are always new opportunities coming in. Think of it like a checklist for staying productive.

• Daily tasks are the everyday basics: reaching out to new people, following up, updating the CRM, and getting ready for calls.
• Weekly tasks often cover planning the week, checking progress numbers, team catch-ups, and looking over the pipeline.
• Monthly tasks are usually more big-picture: looking at overall results, planning your sales strategy, reviewing key accounts, and maybe some training.

Having these activities clearly defined helps everyone stay focused, even though these tasks can take up time.

3. Sell to customer needs

Don't just jump into selling your product. First, find out what the customer really needs. Spend time learning about their problems and what they're trying to fix. Once you know their main issues, you can show them exactly how what you offer helps them specifically. Talking about the benefits that solve their particular problems leads to more effective sales conversations, works way better than a standard pitch, makes customers feel understood, and increases overall customer satisfaction.

4. Manage and nurture leads effectively

Getting leads is step one, but you also need to keep track of them and guide them along. This means regular follow-ups, like those daily and weekly tasks we talked about, and using a CRM to remember all the conversations. 

Good lead nurturing and management stops people from being forgotten or slipping away. It's also about knowing which leads to focus on and keeping the sales process moving forward smoothly, so deals don't get stuck.

5. Invest in high-quality sales training

Investing in high-quality sales training is more than just a good idea; it's essential for building a team that consistently performs well. When reps are well-trained, they understand customer needs better, build stronger relationships, and ultimately close more deals more effectively. It directly addresses the common gap where buyers feel sellers don't fully grasp their situation.

Good training starts from day one. New hires need a solid foundation covering core skills like finding the right prospects, engaging customers meaningfully, presenting solutions clearly, understanding the chosen sales methodology, and confidently handling questions or pushback. This initial grounding helps them avoid common early mistakes and builds a strong base for future success.

But training shouldn't stop after onboarding. The best teams commit to ongoing learning because the market, techniques, and tools constantly change. Regular updates and skill-refreshers ensure all your team members stays sharp, adapts quickly, and knows how to leverage the best approaches available.

Modern sales tools can also play a valuable role in development. Some platforms analyze actual sales calls and offer specific, data-backed feedback, helping reps see exactly where they can improve and providing personalized coaching opportunities at scale.

By consistently investing in developing your team's skills—both initially and continuously—you create a more capable, confident, and prepared sales force that is ready to meet challenges, satisfy customers, and drive better results.

6. Host regular one-one meetings and help reps set SMART goals

Sales managers must conduct regular one-on-one sessions with SDRs as this will help them review their progress and understand where their time goes. Also, they should offer help and suggest tips for improvement.

Often, the overwhelm arising from hitting goals results in SDRs poorly managing their time. To solve this, help them break bigger sales goals into small ones, and small sales goals into daily or weekly tasks.

For example, if a rep aims to become an account executive (AE), assist them in getting there with SMART goal setting. Give them a sales target of an average of 15 sales-qualified opportunities (SQOs) per month for ten months straight. Next, help break an SQO into small goals such as 100 dials, 300 emails, 30 videos, etc. An actionable plan gives reps direction, making them more productive.

Knowing the results and having clearly defined incentives to achieve them boosts SDR motivation – another hurdle blocking their efficiency. Put another way, sales managers must take the time to define measurable key results that their team needs to achieve within a specific time frame. Then they can add incentives to encourage reps to achieve these results.

7. Develop a consistent sales prospecting process

Establish a well-defined, repeatable process for how your team prospects for new business. This provides structure and ensures reps follow proven steps efficiently.

Here’s what you should do:

• Show, don't tell why the script works. For example, give SDRs access to (and coach them using) call recordings of reps leveraging the sales script and how they’re succeeding with it. It’s also good to conduct calls in front of reps to see exactly how the script helps.  
• Create a sales prospecting process complete with check-ins. Doing so will help you keep a pulse on your team’s performance. 

💡Here at UserGems, we follow this workflow for our remote sales team – feel free to swipe it. 

8. Create a sales enablement process

84% of sales reps hit their quota when their employers implement a sales enablement strategy, as reported by Aberdeen.

However, what makes a successful SDR program is ensuring you don’t just dump reps with sales enablement content. Instead, run them through the content (battle cards, case studies, and pricing guidelines, etc) to understand how, when, and why they should use it.

For example, explain how email templates can optimize your reps' prospecting workflow.

9. Use an automated sales intelligence software

To maximize SDR efficiency, it’s essential you invest time in identifying the right sales intelligence tools to increase sales productivity.

Keep in mind that the right tool can improve sales team productivity. And drive up your ROI by cherry-picking the right prospects for reps to connect with at the right time.

Take UserGems, for instance. Our B2B prospecting tool has helped companies like UserTesting grow their ROI by 18 times in one year. [Read the case study.]

10. Align incentives with strategies that boost sales

Your sales compensation and incentive structure is a powerful lever for driving behavior and should be carefully designed to support your key strategic goals and efficiency efforts. Simply rewarding total revenue might not be enough if your sales strategy requires focusing on specific products, longer-term contracts, higher-margin deals, or faster sales cycles.

Ensure your incentives directly motivate reps to pursue the outcomes and activities that matter most for efficient growth. Clearly communicate how the incentive plan works, ensuring reps understand exactly what actions lead to rewards. Regularly review the plan's effectiveness using performance data to ensure it consistently encourages reps to focus their energy on the most productive and strategically valuable actions, thereby boosting overall sales efficiency.

6 Sales efficiency metrics and KPIs to track and measure success

Improving efficiency isn't just about implementing new strategies; it's also about understanding whether those sales efforts are actually working.

Tracking the right key performance indicators and metrics provides crucial visibility into your team's performance, highlighting strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for optimization.

1. Customer Acquisition Cost 

This metric tells you the average amount of money your company spends to gain a single new customer.

It's calculated by dividing your total sales and marketing expenses over a certain period by the number of new customers acquired in that same timeframe.

Tracking CAC is vital for efficiency because it directly measures the cost-effectiveness of your customer acquisition strategies; a lower CAC generally indicates higher efficiency in acquiring customers.

2. Customer Lifetime Value

This represents the total net profit your company predicts it will gain from a customer over the entire duration of your business relationship.

While LTV itself measures value, its ratio to CAC (LTV:CAC) is a critical indicator of sales efficiency and business health.

A strong LTV:CAC ratio signifies that your sales and marketing efforts are efficiently acquiring customers who generate significantly more value than they cost, supporting sustainable growth.

3. Lead Response Time

This measures the average speed at which your sales team follows up with a new lead after they make an initial contact, such as submitting a website form or requesting information.

Reducing lead response time is crucial for efficiency, as studies consistently show that faster follow-ups dramatically increase the chances of connecting with and qualifying leads before competitors do or the lead's interest cools.

4. Number of Sales Calls Per Rep

This activity metric tracks the volume of outbound calls made by individual sales reps over a set period, like a day or week. It helps measure individual productivity and effort levels.

While more calls don't automatically guarantee better results, monitoring this figure can reveal valuable insights into how reps manage their time and workload, potentially highlighting efficiency gains or bottlenecks when analyzed alongside conversion rates and call outcomes.

5. Frequency of Customer Contact  

This metric looks at how often your sales reps are interacting with prospects or existing customers over time or during key stages of the sales cycle or relationship.

Maintaining the right contact frequency is an efficiency balancing act – providing enough touchpoints to keep deals moving and relationships warm, but not so many that it wastes rep time or becomes intrusive to the contact.

Tracking this helps optimize sales cadences and ensure timely follow-up without unnecessary effort.

6. Average Deal Size

This metric calculates the average revenue value generated from each closed-won deal within a specific timeframe (Total revenue from closed deals divided by the number of deals closed).

Tracking average deal size is important for efficiency because closing larger deals often requires a similar amount of sales effort and resources as smaller ones. Therefore, increasing the average deal size means achieving more revenue for each unit of sales effort expended, significantly improving overall efficiency and profitability.

Monitoring this metric helps the team focus on higher-value opportunities and strategies, such as upselling or targeting larger accounts, making the entire sales process more productive.

Boost your sales efficiency and double your pipeline with UserGems

Tired of sales teams working harder, not smarter? It's time to boost your sales efficiency and pipeline impact without just adding more resources. UserGems is the AI platform specifically designed to help your sales and marketing teams focus their sales efforts intelligently, ensuring every action drives maximum results.

Our AI agent, Gem-E, acts as your team's intelligent co-pilot. It continuously scans crucial market buying signals – like job changes, technology installs, funding news, and intent data – and integrates deeply with your own CRM history for context. By connecting these external triggers with your internal knowledge, Gem-E provides clear, actionable recommendations on exactly who to target, when to reach out, and why they're a priority now.

Gem-E doesn't just identify opportunities; it helps draft personalized, high-impact outreach messages, saving your reps valuable time and boosting conversion rates.

This AI-driven focus delivers proven, tangible results. Hundreds of companies, including market leaders like Mimecast, UserTesting, and SAP LeanIX, leverage UserGems to achieve over 15X ROI in closed-won revenue and contribute to the millions in pipeline generated through our platform.

Ready to see how UserGems can transform your sales results? Book your personalized demo today.

FAQs

What’s the difference between sales efficiency vs. sales effectiveness

• Sales efficiency focuses on optimizing the process and minimizing the resources (time, cost, effort) used to achieve sales results. It's about doing things right – for example, reducing the cost per lead or shortening the time spent on administrative tasks.
• Sales effectiveness focuses on achieving the desired sales outcomes and hitting overall goals. It's about doing the right things – such as targeting the correct customer segments, closing high-value deals, or meeting revenue quotas.

Overall, efficiency is about the cost and speed of sales activities, while effectiveness is about the success and impact of those activities. You need both, but they measure different aspects of performance.

How do you calculate sales efficiency?

The most common way to calculate a sales efficiency ratio (often called the "Magic Number" in SaaS) is to compare the revenue generated to the cost incurred to acquire that revenue over a specific period (like a quarter or year).

The formula:

• Sales Efficiency Ratio = (Gross Revenue Generated in Period X) / (Total Sales & Marketing Expenses in Period X)  

Sometimes, companies use New Gross Revenue or Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in the numerator, or Gross Profit instead of Gross Revenue, depending on what they want to measure. The key is consistency in how you calculate it over time. This ratio tells you how much revenue you generate for every dollar spent on sales and marketing.

What is a good sales efficiency ratio?

There isn't one single "good" ratio, as it heavily depends on your industry, business model, company stage, and growth strategy. However, here are some general benchmarks:

• Ratio < 1.0: This means you are spending more on sales and marketing than the revenue you are generating from those efforts in that period. This is common and often acceptable for early-stage startups focused on rapid growth and market capture, as they invest heavily upfront.  
• Ratio ≈ 1.0: This indicates you are roughly breaking even, generating about $1 in revenue for every $1 spent on sales and marketing.
• Ratio > 1.0: This suggests your sales and marketing engine is generating more revenue than it costs, which is typically considered healthy and sustainable, especially for more mature companies. Many established SaaS companies aim for a ratio above 1.0.  

More crucial than hitting a specific number is tracking your ratio over time and comparing it to relevant industry benchmarks and your own historical performance. An improvement in the ratio usually signifies increased efficiency.

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