Ironing Out the Kinks: Where Are Your Sales Process Inefficiencies?

Like an all-star sports team, your roster of sales people needs to be performing at optimal efficiency at all times. After all, their job is to bring in sales, right? And to that end, you need to make doubly sure that the process they’re following is water-tight. With that in mind, we’ve collected up three of the most common sales process inefficiencies and analysed them for you. The question is: are they already affecting your processes?

Make the most of your team’s time

Have you ever noticed that the cream of the crop of salespeople are almost always checking their calendars? There’s a reason for that, and it’s called time management. In sales, time is always money. That’s why any inefficiencies in this area of the sales process can actually have far-reaching implications. Let’s imagine you have a small yet highly capable sales team. If you’re bogging them down with admin tasks or other jobs that could really be handled by others (or by CRM software like AutoVu), you could be losing efficiency. Try to make it so that every hour of your team’s time is focused solely on the job you hired them for: making sales.

Don’t waste effort on poor quality sales leads

We’ve all had that one prospect that seems to take up more time than any others, only to wind up not actually making a purchase. This situation is quite literally the enemy of sales process efficiency. It’s a good idea to have some level of oversight of sales lead quality at the managerial level, because this will help you weed out the weak links. As we’ve discussed, your sales team’s time is very valuable, so you don’t want to waste it on prospects that will almost certainly never convert.

Don’t push too hard too soon

Nobody likes the hard sell, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a place in your sales process. However, if your team implements this kind of tactic too early in the process, it can actually scare good prospects away. Instead, analyse past results and use the data to tweak your current sales funnel. With this kind of information, you should be able to pinpoint exactly where prospects are liable to drop off – and that’s where the Hail Mary pass (i.e. the hard sell) might be a useful tactic to deploy. It’s really all about strategy, but subtlety and discretion also has its place.

So how is your sales process efficiency looking? If you’ve been noticing a drop in the number (or quality) of prospects, it might be time to revisit it. And to make it even easier for your sales team to do their jobs, why not try the AutoVu CRM platform? Check out the site for more info about the software, or call our team today on 0845 474 8824.