Sales representatives are hired to do one thing: sell. But what tasks fall under the umbrella of selling?
We know that representatives are spending huge portions of the workweek attending to administrative tasks that can be outsourced to technology or other departments. But what they aren’t doing can be just as problematic as what they are doing.
Here’s the short list of lesser-known ways that sales reps waste company time and money.
Lack of Direction
Time spent meandering from one task to another is time wasted. Salespeople who don’t plan their day waste a huge portion of their selling time before they even know it. A salesperson is constantly balancing maintenance to existing client relationships with the duty of pushing potential clients through a sales pipeline. An effective salesperson is someone who knows how to plan and manage time. Meandering, creative types belong in a different department.
Identify whether or not your sales representatives are scheduling their days by asking them to repeat their day’s plan of activity to you. What they say is less important than their ability to say it. It’s possible to strengthen weak sales representatives in the skill of time management, but it’s easier to start search for this quality in interviews.
Missing Metrics
As in sports, there are sales statistics that reveal a lot about sales representative performance and the strength of a sales process. Knowing the cause of success and failure allows companies to target marketing efforts and hone in on the most profitable avenues.
Most sales teams track quota attainment, a metric that is truly unreflective of performance. Like sports, sales organizations can benefit from measuring their sales representatives with different, more nuanced metrics that better deliver a “big picture” of sales team performance. Choosing to forego sales metrics is like a professional sports team refusing to look at important game footage. How will the team improve?
No Staying Power
Huge amounts of time and money are spent funneling leads to sales representatives. Think of money spent on PPC campaigns, hours spent on marketing campaigns, money spent on e-mail campaigns, entire departments dedicated to content creation, and the list goes on. After running a campaign to attract leads, failing to follow up on the lead is like flushing all of that time and money down the toilet. And sales reps do just that over and over again, day after day.
For one reason or another, the average sales representative does not respond to leads when they’re hot. And as time passes, it becomes harder and harder for the representative to catch the lead at a convenient time. Contacting a lead over and over to no avail may seem like a time suck, but throwing them away is the real waste.
If you can identify where your team may be missing the mark, you can identify real sales enablement solutions that will help.
