Customer Journey
Jul 15

3 Ways to Increase Sales Rep Productivity with Sales Management Software

Nate Joens

Nate Joens

Co-founder, head of innovation

Your sales reps aren't working out. Or maybe they're brand new. Or maybe, they are working out, but they've hit a ceiling.

Everyone can benefit from greater productivity. Especially when you're earning commissions that depend on it.

So what are you doing to increase your reps' productivity? You're likely using some form of sales management software to track rep productivity today, so you can see where the status quo is.

How can you move your rep's status quo to perform more tasks, more effectively? You can try these 3 ways to increase rep productivity, that's how :)

Setting up your sales management software

Let's start with the end in mind. What exactly is the goal of sales management software, and what are you, your reps, and your marketing team trying to accomplish with it?

According to HubSpot, "Sales management software is used by salespeople to manage and record their day-to-day activities and keep track of their pipelines, contacts, quotas, and more.
It's also used by sales managers and leaders to identify trends, growth opportunities, and team wins as well as manage rep onboarding, coaching, and motivation."

Great, so in order to improve rep productivity, you must first be able to track your current productivity today, and compare it to what it might be after you implement changes and improvements.

So what improvements can you make to your sales management software system?

Here are 3 ways you can below:

1. Give your sales reps an assistant

I know I know, of course, you can always improve any team member's productivity by just hiring an assistant, or another person to help, but bear with me.

According to SalesForce, sales reps today are spending just 34% of their time selling. Let that sink in for a second.

That means that 66% of a sales reps time is spent:

  • Generating leads
  • Administrating leads amongst team
  • Qualifying leads
  • Scheduling appointments
  • General admin

So how do you give them that time back? An assistant.

But not just any assistant, an AI Assistant.

I get it, you don't want to add another body to your payroll, just to improve the productivity of who's already on your payroll.

As a startup, our team at Structurely was the same way. So we hired an AI assistant to help our reps spend more time closing and less time, well, not selling. Here's how:

We analyzed our funnel and identified areas that were lower-value tasks for our reps but were valuable enough for us not to ignore. Here are a few of those areas in our funnel below.

We analyzed our funnel and identified areas

With those campaigns identified, we put our AI Assistant into action, right through our CRM (which is HubSpot), all automatically. It took just 3 steps, and our reps had their very own assistant engaging, nurturing, qualifying, and updating CRM data all automatically, just like this:

1. Create a custom field to enroll leads (individually or in bulk) by use case

Create a custom field to enroll leads

2. Create custom 2-way conversational scripts and unresponsive drip campaigns (we did this using Structurely's script customization)

Create custom 2-way conversational scripts

3. Integrate with your CRM so data from the conversation is automatically synced back

Integrate with your CRM

Our reps saw their productivity double in no time with their new assistant focused on the more mundane, lower immediate value sales tasks. This allowed our reps to spend their time working closely with leads closer to close.

2. Get sales and marketing synced up on sales lead tracking

What's tracked is what's measured. And what's measured can be improved.

The more data your operations team is able to uncover about your customer's journeys, the more informed your sales and marketing teams can be to identify what's working and double down, and what's not working and stop investing.

There are many tools and tactics you can use for sales lead tracking, but once again, you must start with the end in mind. Your website activity tracker should be able to answer:

  • Where did this lead originally land on our website?
  • Where did they go from there?
  • How long did they stay on our website?
  • How many times have they returned?
  • And more

When your sales (and marketing) team has this data at their fingertips, you can then start to implement more robust lead scoring methodologies to increase sales rep productivity by even more (keep reading into the next section to talk about our lead scoring methodology).

Like you can see below, our sales reps can view all activity history, from the website pages viewed to content downloaded and more, all in their CRM.

This lets them personalize their outreach, conversations, and demos to the specific journey each lead took to find us, all without our reps digging around through endless tools or teams.

our sales reps can view all activity history.

(p.s. want a really powerful productivity booster? Combine the data from your website tracking with the AI assistant mentioned in step 1 above. This allows you to send behavioral-based messages to leads who are taking specific action on your website, which is highly effective, and entirely automated)

3. Use a lead scoring system that works so you can set it and forget it

You've likely experimented with a lead scoring system in some way before, even if just basic. If not, you probably have some process that determines when, and if, and who is eligible for engagement as a lead.

The bottom line is, your reps shouldn't have to worry about who the leads they need to contact today are. It should be a no-brainer. Your lead scoring system should do that heavy lifting for them so they can log into their sales enablement tool, or CRM and have a task list queued up with the highest scored, or highest intent leads who are closest to buying.

Your lead scoring system.

As you can see above, our sales reps log into their system of record (HubSpot) and have a task list queued up of the highest priority tasks based on our lead scoring methodology.

At its highest level, you can use a lead categorization and lead quality scoring mechanism, similar to the following:

Lead Quality (source-based):

  • A
  • Referral
  • Word of mouth
  • B
  • Organic found
  • SEO
  • C
  • Pay-per-click
  • D
  • Unknown source

Lead Categorization (time and activity-based):

  • 1
  • New lead registered in the last 5 minutes
  • Appointment/demo SET
  • 2
  • Lead is responsive
  • Post demo attended
  • Pre or post demo no show/reschedule
  • 3
  • Lead is responsive
  • Post demo or demo no show, but it's been 6+ months since
  • 4
  • Lead is not responsive
  • But lead has interacted with website, emails, or content in some capacity
  • 5
  • Lead is not responsive
  • Has not interacted with any collateral for 6+ months (or ever)

Want an even more in-depth lead scoring methodology? Check back to our blog, or subscribe, to get updated on our next lead methodology deep dive, where we'll share our exact lead scoring system line by line, calculation by calculation.

Optimize your sales rep's time by automating what should be automated, and letting humans focus on closing.

Let's face it, humans suck at repetitive tasks. Computers are more consistent because they never forget, can juggle nearly infinite things, and can multitask like we humans cannot.

So let the computers do their job. Let them act as an AI Assistant that engages, nurtures and qualifies the longer-term or lower quality leads. Let them automatically track the activities and actions your contacts and customers are taking with your company. And let them do the math that tells you when a lead or customer has a higher likelihood to close.

Then, and only then, should you let your reps in to focus on what they do best, closing, Because nobody can, nor should, replace the skills that we humans possess to build relationships, educate and inform and win.

Happy closings,

Nate and the Structurely Team

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