How to Think about Sales Productivity

Efficacy and Selling Better

Efficacy looks at whether our sales efforts are effective.  It is a bit more difficult to measure, but employing an efficacy view helps prevent an overreliance on interim metrics. Well-designed processes find a balance between volume and quality.  Efficiency asks simply, “how do we get more?” But an efficiency- only focus may result in high volume, low quality customer interactions.

Efficacy asks

• Who are the best prospects?
• What are our best industries?
• Which titles and job functions should we target?
• Which companies are in a buying cycle?
• What are the most effective messages for each of these targets?
• Whom should I be calling now?
• Whom should I not be investing time into?

Answering these questions requires feedback loops, analytics, A/B testing, customer research, and alignment between sales and marketing.

Lead Scoring and Enrichment

In addition to emphasizing volume, we should focus on being more effective in our sales efforts. A key area for improvement is in lead scoring. If sales reps can better prioritize their activities, they can greatly improve their targeting, timing, and messaging. ConnectLeader’s Adaptalytics lead enrichment and scoring combines market insights from leading vendors such as Bombora (Intent) and Zoominfo (Contacts). It also factors in Best Time to Call and contactability to drive outbound sales activity.

Enriching leads drives both efficiency and efficacy. Efficiency benefits come when reps

• No longer have to search for direct dials or guess at emails.
• Can bypass gatekeepers via direct dial phones.
• Spend less time sending bounced emails or calling execs no longer at a firm.
• Quickly personalize templated emails instead of creating them from scratch.
• Can drop a pre-recorded voicemail
• Have fewer notes to record in their CRM as activities and outcomes are quickly recorded.

Efficacy is also improved via better targeting and messaging. For example, intent data identifies companies with a spike in online research around key topics. This spike signals that the prospect is likely to be entering a buying cycle around a specific technology. The key is the surge above baseline for the company. IBM will likely have higher baselines for most topics than a 100-person firm, so it is the positive deviation from historic interest levels that signals intent.

Efficacy is also about training and guiding new sales reps. Recorded calls help new or junior sales reps review recent calls with managers. Calls can be analyzed for positioning, objection handling, and setting next-steps. Sales efficacy and training also improve when managers listen in on calls and whisper advice to sales reps.

When cadences are employed, both efficiency (no longer having to track follow up tasks, no longer having to write emails from scratch) and efficacy (tested multi-channel messages sent on an optimized schedule) improve. Cadences provide a scheduled outbound roadmap that integrate voice, email, and social activities over a multi-week period. Platform analytics help identify the most effective cadences and email templates, helping to improve productivity and increase revenue.

That only half of B2B sales reps make quota is worrisome. It’s not that half of sales reps are weak performers, but that selling has become a complex, multi-stage process of convincing large, informed buying teams to purchase our products. To meet this challenge, we need to provide sales reps with tools for prioritizing their activities, sharpening their messaging, and managing their outbound communications. More time should be spent communicating with strong prospects and less on non-sales activities or engaging weak prospects.