Whether you’re building a sales team from scratch or trying to optimize your current processes, you want to ensure your sales ops are efficient. The bottom line is the more efficient your sales team works, the more sales you can make. Plain and simple.
But what can you do besides set up a sales funnel and monitor your deals pipeline? Lots of things! In this article, we’ll dive into a handful of ways you can tweak your sales process to make work easier for your team and more profitable for your business.
Have the Best Timing
Timing is everything in sales. Your sales operations success often depends simply on how fast you can respond to customer queries. With that in mind, it’s critical to have an optimized process and workflows that help your team strike while the iron is hot.
Automation is one of the best tools to use if you want to improve timing. You can automate emails, phone calls and messages to interested leads to give them more information or directly answer their questions. It’s a great way to enroll people in nurture or sales emails and continue building the relationship between them and your brand.
The best part is with automation, your response can be instant. No one will be wondering where that email from your company is or have time to start researching your competitors. You’ll be the first person they think of and you can sell them on your brand while they’re most interested.
Simplify Your Process
Especially in large businesses, the sales process can get out of hand pretty quickly. You might realize you have duplicate steps or simply too many hoops for your team and potential customers to jump through until they reach a sale. This creates friction points where leads will drop off or slip through the cracks of your pipeline.
Streamlining your process helps keep your team on the same page and move customers toward a sale quicker. Look at your current process and identify areas that are duplicated or are no longer necessary (maybe because you’ve updated software or changed product details).
Once you take out those areas, you can focus only on the steps that move people closer to a sale. Remember that it takes an average of five follow-ups before someone is ready to buy, so you should have at least that many touchpoints in your process.
Improve Internal Communication
It takes a lot of organization to successfully manage a sales team, especially when it comes to communication. Every time a lead is passed on to the next member of the team, they need all the information — who are they, what are they interested in, what are their concerns and what did they discuss with the last member of the sales team?
When your whole team is on the same page, you can speed up your closing timeline and show that you care about your customers. People never want to repeat themselves and having an informed sales rep can go a long way to helping them feel valued.
A great way to improve internal communication is to use a CRM. Choose a platform that allows you to track the customer journey and deals pipeline simultaneously. You also want a place where all customer communication is recorded and stored. This way all a sales rep has to do is pull up the customer’s record and they’ll have instant access to all the information they need. Some platforms even offer conversation intel to help sellers improve communications with customers.
Enforce Established Workflows
The final way you can improve your sales ops is to create company workflows and ensure they’re enforced. When you have a whole team of people using the same platform or CRM, things can get messy. Create processes for how to create, save and store things within your sales platform so it’s easy for anyone to find.
With these tips you can improve your sales ops efficiency and take your business to the next level.
