Your sales reps are the bread and butter of your business. They’re arguably one of the most important assets of your organization. If you want them to be more engaged with their prospects, efficient with their time, and more productive with their sales efforts, then you have to start by understanding their daily routines.
Here’s why.
Why You Should Focus on Your Sales Rep’s Experience First
According to Gartner research, your sales rep’s experience is directly correlated to your customer’s experience. Companies that make the shift to improve their sales reps’ experience, see an increase in customer satisfaction upwards of 11 percent and a decrease in customer effort by 9 percent.
Bottom line, if you want to improve the productivity of your sales team, start by understanding and appreciating their daily lives. Both inside and outside of the office.
Ready to get started?
5 Ways to Improve Your Sales Reps Daily Work Experience
Start With a Temperature Check
You can’t fix what you don’t know is broken.
While your first inkling may be to jump in with both feet and start tinkering with your rep’s daily schedules, please don’t. You may end up doing more harm than good.
Instead, take stock of everyone’s current situation. Ask your fellow sales reps if they’re experiencing any frustration with the tools they’re using or processes that are in place.
This is an ideal time to know if there are any stressors going on in the personal lives of the sales team. Stress over late bills, angry spouses, or health concerns doesn’t disappear the moment a sales rep steps into the office. Those stressors can stay with employees throughout the day and can have a direct impact on performance.
While you work through this brief discovery, pay attention to any patterns that might emerge. These patterns can help steer you in the right direction as you look to make improvements in everyone’s daily cadence.
Improve Communication
One of the easiest ways to improve a sales rep’s daily routine (and their correlating productivity level) is to improve how you and your team communicate.
To improve communication, start by focusing on improving efficiency. This means:
- Hold Shorter, More Effective Meetings
Every meeting should have a clear purpose. Going into a meeting, everyone invited should have a firm understanding of that purpose and be ready to work together to achieve said purpose efficiently. Do your best to avoid tangents or inviting people that aren’t critical to completing the purpose of the meeting. You can always send a recap email to anyone that needs to be looped in. - Ditto for Your Emails
Keep your emails concise, on-topic, and clearly organized. Don’t let rambling emails distract your fellow sales reps from reading and retaining critical information or requests. Bold important tasks, use bullet points, and even italicize critical information to improve the effectiveness of your email communication. - Provide Team Members With the “Why” Behind a Decision
Rolling out a new process? The sales rep should know why. Sunsetting a new tool? Same. Scheduling a new weekly meeting? Likewise. If you don’t set the “why,” you invite your fellow sales reps to speculate. Which, in turn, can increase stress and throw a wrench in their daily productivity. Instead of hiding information, strive to be as transparent as you can into the “why” a decision or request was made.
Ensure Goals and Expectations Are Set and Reasonable
A demoralized team is not a high-selling team.
Sure, a little pressure can be a great motivator for any sales rep. However, too much pressure can easily derail your team’s will to work.
Set goals and expectations that are reachable and solicit agreement on these goals., Once the goals are established, don’t even think about moving the goal post.
Treat Your Reps as People - Not Sales Machines
Show some empathy. If someone is having a tough day due to stress outside of work, don’t tell them to just toughen up. Let them know that you and the company care about their personal struggles and provide support when needed.
If there is a grievance about a particular tool, process, or sales enablement material, actively listen to the grievance and the argument behind it. If enough people are voicing the same concern about the same tool or process, chances are that the system or tool is hurting more than it’s helping. Make the necessary changes to remove this stressor from the day-to-day of the rep.
Create the Right Structure
Should meetings be in the afternoon or meeting?
Should training be a weekly or monthly occurrence?
When should product demos be scheduled?
Set your team up for success by creating the right daily structure. If a sales rep’s day is constantly being interrupted with internal meetings, chances are they aren’t going to be able to unleash their full productivity.
Work with your fellow sales reps to set up a daily schedule that effectively batches their time to take care of administration work, while also leaving them with plenty of open time for prospecting, holding demos, writing proposals, and following up with leads.
Remember, even the best sales rep is limited to 24 hours a day. The goal is not to work longer hours, it’s to be more effective and productive with the hours you have. The better the sales rep’s daily experience, the more work they’ll be able to produce within a given work day.
Need more insights on how to help your team sell? Watch our on-demand webinar Tools Don't Sell, People Sell.
