Sales reps juggle prospecting, personalized outreach, and account engagement, all while trying to hit quota.
When they prioritize the right tasks for their time and energy, they maintain momentum. Especially when it comes to generating pipeline and meeting goals.
Increasing sales productivity requires collaboration between sales reps and managers. Instead, it’s a collaborative process where managers assist in creating streamlined workflows and automating repetitive work.
Ready to begin? We’ve got your back. This guide shares expert advice on boosting sales productivity, including what reps can do to meet their sales goals and how managers can support them. We also cover the tools that actually move deals forward faster.
What is sales productivity?
Sales productivity refers to the sales team’s efficiency and effectiveness in reaching out to, engaging with, and nurturing target accounts. The goal: close more deals and hit revenue targets without burning out your team.
5 tips to improve sales productivity
Improving sales productivity takes more than good intentions. We talked to revenue leaders who've done it to find out what actually works. Here's what they had to say:
1. Facilitate productivity
A productive work environment is essential to increasing sales team efficiency. An efficient work culture gives reps space for meaningful work—not endless meetings and tool-switching.
Here’s how you can facilitate productivity in your company:
- Reduce internal meetings
The average employee spends at least a third of their week in meetings. Async communication cuts meeting time and creates space for deep work.
Schedule in-person or video meetings when they add clear value. This way, reps will have more time to put into money-making activities such as creating personalized sales videos.
- Reduce the number of tools reps use
“Reps must spend as much time in a few core tools (CRM, Gong, Calendar, Zoom) as possible. Tools that keep reps focused in their core workflow maximize selling time and boost efficiency,” observes Braxton A Carr, Director of Sales Enablement at UserGems.
The solution? Create a streamlined sales workflow fueled by a few core tools with powerful features. Make sure all these tools integrate well with each other. That way, salespeople can find the information they need while staying in their primary workflow.
For example, our pipeline generation tool, UserGems, integrates with Salesforce. As a result, it automatically shows warm contacts in a target account within the CRM. This saves reps’ time — boosting their productivity.
- Celebrate both big and small wins
Since sales is a mentally taxing profession that can quickly drain reps’ motivation, it’s important you boost your team’s sales productivity by celebrating wins.
Sara Angell, UserGems’ Account Development Manager, talks about this: “Create an environment where successes are shared among the team. Small incentives can help to get everyone to contribute. When the individuals share where they are winning and how, the rest of the team naturally wants to replicate to find their own success.”
2. Create feedback loops
Another proven way to improve sales productivity is to share consistent feedback so reps can understand where they’re lagging and how they can be more efficient.
Expand feedback beyond manager-rep conversations by encouraging peers to exchange feedback and learn from each other as well.
At TeamBuilding, for example, managers work closely with their team to provide productivity coaching. Their Sales Manager, Carley Congdon, explains, “At teambuilding.com, we take a holistic approach when it comes to improving our sales team’s productivity. The most important aspect of this approach is ensuring that there is a continuous feedback loop between our Client Advisors [sales team] and their manager.
“We make a point to involve employees in conversations regarding their performance so that managers can understand the full scope of roadblocks or employee ideas for improved processes. From there, we do everything we can to remove obstacles so that advisors can sell successfully.”
What’s more, Braxton stresses the importance of peer-to-peer coaching and feedback sharing as many people learn while performing their daily tasks. In fact, 52% of folks use peer feedback to learn and develop their skills.
Keeping this in mind, “It is important to cultivate introspection in reps. Having them review and provide feedback on their calls can help them connect the dots. This creates a feedback framework driven by the reps rather than by management,” writes Braxton.
3. Detach from the outcome and regularly review what went wrong
“Detach from the outcome; you'll close some deals and lose others, so focus on understanding why each deal closed or stalled,” recommends Anthony Banayote, Inside Sales Representative at Gong.
This one’s also a highly recommended tip that experts shared in our guide on how reps can close their month on a high.
Put simply, when you miss your sales quota, focus on why you weren’t able to hit it. Consider this: “Did you communicate sufficient value, did you complete thorough discovery, etc.,” Banayote suggests.
To figure out why reps couldn’t close their target number of deals, coach them by going through sales call recordings to identify areas of improvement. Banayote explains, “Use Gong to go through your closed lost deals and understand where you missed the mark, why the deal didn’t close, identify decision makers, and then start the process again.”
For managers, it’s also important to arm your sales team with tactical sales productivity best practices. “We want to make sure we are checking data on what’s actually happening in deals rather than just offer general ‘sales knowledge.’ Deal Cycle Activity is the genesis of training, not the other way around,” Braxton A Carr adds.
4. Reward performance
Another important sales productivity tip is to reward efficient performers. This motivates them to keep hitting their sales goals and inspires others to work harder.
TeamBuilding’s Carley Congdon shares how they do this: “Managers call out exceptional performance, of course. However, we have also built peer-to-peer praise into our company culture by encouraging sales team members to shout each other out during team meetings and on our #you-are-awesome Slack channel.
“Finally, we regularly tie bonuses to specific areas of improvement. This month, our team receives a bonus for maintaining ‘high engagement’ within our virtual training platform, and for previous months, we’ve tied bonuses to exceeding weekly call quotas and qualifying budget on client calls.”
5. Create a scalable sales process
“Focus on a structured scalable and repeatable process,” advises Chris Cicconi, Director of Business Development at Replicant. “We're more productive when we maintain focus on consistent tasks.”
Cicconi also shares an example of what a repeatable process looks like. “Start your day with your prospecting list, figure out who you want to tackle, add names, and research them on LinkedIn, sequence them, start executing those sequences. As opposed to finding and sequencing a name at a time.”
Once you’ve created a sales process or helped reps create their own daily plan based on their most productive hours, get out of the way. UserGem’s Sara Angell cautions against micro-managing, which can jeopardize reps’ productivity.
“Trust your team to do what they need to in order to reach their goals,” Angell says. “Trust can go a long way. If someone is falling off, it’s important to remind them of what their motivation and goals are and tie them to the actions they are (or have stopped) taking. This creates empowerment and builds confidence. Their productivity serves their own goals and growth.”
How do you measure sales productivity?
It’s always helpful to use expert-backed tips to boost sales productivity. But how do you know they’re actually working? Measure your team’s sales productivity. To do so, you will need to track and measure sales activity and actively review your sales reps' efficiency and performance.
Track and measure sales activities
To start, use tools to monitor overall performance. “With the technology available today, it’s very easy to track and measure productivity,” opines Congdon.
“At teambuilding.com, we use a CRM to track all sales data, but most importantly, we set realistic revenue goals for our Client Advisors. Each month, our team members are required to hit a clear and achievable quota while also maintaining an average outgoing call and email metric.”
As for which metrics to review, UserGems’ Braxton A Carr recommends the following: “Time-to-first-deal, time-to-first activity, the ratio of calls-to-admin work, [and] the standard deviation of deal velocity.”
Review sales reps' efficiency and performance
In addition to monitoring your sales team’s performance metrics, the experts we talked to suggested talking to your sales reps on a regular basis. Take the time to understand how efficient they’ve been with completing their tasks and if they’re facing any productivity roadblocks.
Since it can be time-consuming to host one-on-ones with each rep every week, ask reps to update you about their performance. At Gong, for instance, Anthony Banayote uses the 3Ps framework to update his manager about his performance.
“At the end of each week, I email my manager my 3Ps[:] Progress, Problem, and Plan. This is a way for me to measure the work for the week, celebrate wins, understand where I’m stuck, and begin planning next week so I can come in and be productive right away,” Banayote shares.
Top sales productivity tools
By automating repetitive work, tracking ongoing deals, and providing inside data from prospects’ companies, productivity tools save reps’ time and improve sales prospecting.
But for these tools to provide ROI-driving results, it’s essential you select the right ones. Here’s a list of sales productivity tools to consider:
1. Customer relationship management (CRM) tools
CRM software tracks and manages all interactions salespeople have with target accounts. Strong CRM tools include predictive lead scoring and workflow automation. It gives a complete overview of ongoing deals as well — helping reps save at-risk deals and move them to close. A great example would be Salesforce.
2. Pipeline generation tools
Pipeline generation tools enable reps to identify and add potential buyers to the sales pipeline. UserGems, for instance, identifies and alerts when former buyers change jobs. This helps protect revenue, prevent churn when champions move to another job, and identify warmer paths into target accounts by pinpointing members of the buying committee who have used your product before.
UserGems includes Meeting Assistant, which handles admin work for reps. It researches prospects and delivers daily notes reps can use to personalize outreach.
3. Business intelligence tools
Business or sales intelligence tools give you information to better target and engage prospects.
For example, ZoomInfo identifies accounts that are ready to buy. Using this information, reps can quickly reach out to interested buyers before competitors do. Similarly, Datanyze automatically finds out prospects’ contact information — saving reps from wasting time digging up the information manually.
4. Sales enablement tools
A sales enablement platform guides you in creating content (such as scripts and outreach templates) that your team can use throughout the sales funnel. These kinds of tools also analyze which folks are using the content and how helpful they’re finding it. Guru is a strong example.
Improve your sales productivity today to close more deals
Three things drive sales productivity: the right tools, streamlined workflows, and consistent feedback loops.
As you select productivity sales tools or evaluate your current stack, make sure you review how each tool will contribute to your team’s efficiency.
Pipeline generation tools deliver the biggest productivity lift because prospecting remains the hardest part of the job for 40% of reps.
UserGems solves this by tracking customer job changes and surfacing warm paths into target accounts. It tracks customer job changes to identify ex-customers who are likely open to introducing you to their new team. In doing so, it enriches your sales pipeline with warm leads — helping you close more deals.
