How To Ensure Your Sales Teams Actually Have Time To Sell All organizations, no matter what size, need to know how to ensure your sales teams actually have time to sell. Resa Gooding is a partner in an Hubspot certified agency and they mostly help companies, especially startups, in Israel. As one of the top three agencies in Israel, they primarily work with startups and other traditional companies such as agriculture and manufacturing. They are helping them understand the value of CRM and how to effectively apply it to their companies. Challenges salespeople face The most common problem in the sales force is the lack of training given to the sales team. This lack of experience causes inefficiency as the companies throw their sales reps in deep waters and expect them to swim. Many companies are so focused on the technology or the product they’re producing, they don’t spend adequate time sharing the value and benefits of their product with the sales force. An untrained team ends up spending more time on the administrative tasks instead of selling. They need to be given the information and the tools to effectively sit down with a new prospect. If management fails to offer the sales team a way to stay accountable to the work day activities, management can mistakenly think their team isn’t working. There has to be a system in place so the sales team can report their activities and successes. Having this in place also gives management a tangible way of seeing the work their team is doing. For example, how many calls they’ve made in the workday. Resa set up marketing campaigns for her clients but began to see that if sales people didn’t know how to work with the prospects that came from the marketing, the efforts were in vain. She saw that to make marketing effective, the sales people needed to be able to summarize conversations properly and sales reps needed to reduce their time spent on administrative efforts. They needed to be equipped to spend their time selling. Resa aims to give salespeople the time to study their product, set up appointments, and communicate with prospects effectively, instead of spending their time doing administrative tasks. Ensure that your sales teams are having the time to sell Sales reps need training in order to be successful and reach their goals. Sales processes they can follow have to be set up so their efforts can be checked by management. This promotes accountability. There are three tools that can be used to ensure that sales teams are getting more time to sell their company’s product. Connect your email inbox to your CRM software You can use HubSpot, SaleForce, or other similar CRM software. At the end of the day, what matters is that your sales team is more efficient in their work. The first thing you can do is connect your email inbox to the CRM software you’re using. This is efficiency at its best. Using this software allows your manager to see the emails exchanged between you and prospects or customers. Enabling the manager to view this communication directly eliminates the need to summarize conversations at a later time. Leave that to your CRM. Both marketing and sales today can be measured through this software. Managers and the sales team no longer have to meet each time reports need to be made. All aspects of the sales process can be viewed as needed and everything is measurable. Earlier salespeople, like the ones who sold door-to-door, had to write down all their data or write a report about their sales day. Today, the salesperson just needs to connect to their email inbox on the CRM platform and reports are immediate. Using CRM increase the sales reps’ available time up to 21% compared to doing the reports manually. For example, when you attend a conference, typically you have to wait until you get home to input information manually.

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