In the past, companies that needed to grow simply added more staff or increased productivity per employee to scale their operations. However, with tighter budgets and a focus on sustainable growth, improving productivity per representative has become even more critical. To set your team up for success, it's essential to identify ways to avoid tactics that will lead to delays or escalating costs.
What used to be our stand-by approaches have changed. If you’re relying on old-school sales tactics like spreadsheets, cold visits, and cold telephone calls, you may be burning out your salespeople and your reputation at the same time. Every time you get one of those vendor cold calls, there is a salesperson on the other end who feels just like you do about how much making these calls sucks.
Credible estimates tell us that sales reps spend only one-third of their time selling with the rest of their time spent on administrative tasks or data entry.
It’s a safe bet that your sales team is spending at least 5 hours or more each week just managing the technology they need to communicate.
That’s more than half of a day, wasted every week.
But that’s not all, 72% of salespeople spend another hour a day in data entry.
There went another half day.
Remember when sales were mostly in person or on the phone? While many people relied upon the personal interaction of tradeshows and vendor visits, it all got shut down during COVID. Is it possible that some of those in-person skills have gotten a little rusty? If you have salespeople who are new to the team or industry, they may have skipped the hard-won lessons of your veteran salespeople and might need a refresher on the skills of in-person meetings.
Here are a couple of ways to refresh those in-person skills. First is a quick refresher on the essential skills for in-person sales. Following that are four classic sales books that can spark fresh insights into the skills for effective sales.
Does all of your effort on search engine optimization, help or hurt your brand? It’s easy to miss the brand impacts of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) while you are working to ensure that customers can find you online. Search strategy is deeply interwoven with the experience that potential customers have with your brand.
Sports fans love a good fight, and there's one going on right now in the online search world. It all started on November 30, 2022, when Open AI made their service ChatGPT public. Over the holiday season, Google's top leaders had to wake up from their long winter's nap to a widely reported code red, because they realized the dramatic impact this was already having.
The lack of effective email is a growth barrier
It is frustrating! I know they have my email address and my phone, but my house hasn't been pressure washed for more than a year. I think the power washing company has abandoned me. I think I know why.
It's not because I was a bad customer. I had plenty of dirt on my vinyl siding, and I paid promptly. The technician was only here for a couple of hours and I said thank you, even though some of the spray fluid came through the kitchen door and ruined the tablecloth.
I was stunned when I heard him say it. In just a few short words, Andy Crouch, speaking at the Faith Driven Entrepreneur Conference 2022, captured what we've been working to explain for the entire life of our company. It was as if we'd finally found the words that describe our purpose. Clarity about the "why" fuels the work.
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