Lots of us struggle with productivity and especially the pressure that comes with it. Almost every company faces its struggles with sales productivity.

Companies place a tremendous amount of pressure on the sales team despite not always giving them the tools they need to succeed.

Organizations need to understand that growing its sales teams and creating more aggressive goals is not going to solve its productivity issues. Businesses need to dig deeper into the sales rep world and teach them how to be more productive within their field.

The following tips are to help salespeople be more productive in their sales.

1. Get organized

It’s hard to juggle multiple accounts, manage countless meetings, and respond to dozens of follow-up emails and tasks every day. With a lot on salespeople’s plates, they must stay organized. Finding a solution that fits you, whether it’s a planner, sticky notes, calendar, a reminders app, etc. can help. Being organized will allow salespeople to know what you can and can’t take on at the moment and what project you need to focus on here and now.

2. Track your time

Observe how you spend your day working. How much time does it take to find, research, and contact leads, send emails, check your accounts? Know what you are spending your time on, analyze your day to see where you can be more productive.

3. Use data to your advantage

Data helps you sell. Get the right data in the right context. Setting up your data flow to cover the right topics and deliver it to you in the correct way can ease and speed up your selling. Be able to deliver up to date statics in seconds to your client.

4. Generate high-quality leads

Finding high-quality leads can be tough, but being productive means you need to find them the first go around. Remember that quality trumps quantity. Create a lead qualification system to guide you in the right direction. Know your target market and find individuals that fit it. There are hundreds of lead generation services out there for little to no cost.

Here are a few we recommend:

• Infofree
• SalesFlower
• FreeSalesLeads – free to use for up to 60 days

5. Invest in on-boarding and make ongoing sales coaching a priority

On-boarding allows you to teach your new employees the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviors to become effective within your organization. On-boarding allows for upfront teachings of how you do business, speeding up the learning curve. By continuing training with ongoing sales coaching, you and your salespeople will be well educated and know how to close a sale quickly and effectively.

6. Automate your sales process

With the newest technology, there is plenty of software and services that can help you automate tasks you otherwise have to spend time doing by hand. If you automate everyday activities, you will save time and allow sales reps to get back to core selling activities. There are numerous ways to automate processes for your reps, including using email templates and follow-up email generators.

7. Align Marketing and Sales

These two should go hand in hand. Marketing and sales professionals are both working towards the same goal and therefore should be supporting each other. They should share research, insights, and plans. Knowing what the marketing team has learned and is doing can help salespeople refer to and bounce off of when trying to close a sale.

8. Start social selling

Sales reps need to develop relationships whether online such as social media or offline such as at meetings and events. Social media specifically, allows you to network, prospect customer service, and learn about your target market from demographics to interests to community. Knowing and understanding the target audience from social media allows sales reps to effectively drive an engaging and meaningful conversation they otherwise wouldn’t get from the typical ways.

9. Evaluate and reevaluate sales processes

Make sure you are continuously reevaluating your sales processes to make any improvements necessary. By first determining what works and what doesn’t work about your existing process, you can start to recreate and monitor a new model. You want to be continually integrating optimized processes into your workflow. The beginning of each new quarter is a good time to reevaluate your procedures and readjust accordingly.