How to define sales productivity

What is sales productivity? How do you measure it? How can you improve it?

Shark Finesse
May 30, 2023
Articles

Defining sales productivity can be difficult as companies big and small may perceive sales productivity differently. Sales productivity can be defined as a measurement of how your organisation uses tools, resources, and processes to achieve key business goals while reducing the time and costs associated with this. Sales productivity can also be referred to as the relationship between a salesperson’s efficiency and their effectiveness. This is usually measured across the entire organisation and this measurement helps to understand what sections of the business are succeeding and where needs some improvement. After you have identified this, you can apply the correct sales strategies to help achieve the best goals.

Why should you measure sales productivity?

Measuring a company’s sales productivity is important for any business. One of the main reasons why you should measure sales productivity is because you are looking to improve and increase your sales. The best way to do this is to measure the performances of your salespeople . Highly productive sales teams close more deals, so recognising the salespeople who may need to improve and assisting them with this will help to improve your overall sales productivity. Giving salespeople the chance to improve their sales productivity will also have a big impact on the morale in your company.

How to improve sales productivity?

There are many ways to help improve sales productivity within your company. Before you begin attempting to improve your sales productivity you must ensure you are auditing your current performance to be able to track your improvements along the way. Once this is set up, it will enable you to effectively measure where to improve and how quickly you are improving. When you discover the sales activities that are the most effective in positively impacting sales, spend more time on these activities. Ask your sales teams to use these more effective activities to enable your business to improve sales.

Another way to improve sales productivity is to continue to give training and coaching to your sales team. This will ensure all of your salespeople are using the same techniques to create a more consistent customer journey.

Using incentives for your salespeople is also a great way to improve sales productivity. For example, this could be rewarding your sales team when they reach a certain number of sales in a particular time frame to motivate them to make sales.

Lastly, make sure you are consistently measuring your sales productivity at regular intervals to ensure you can improve your sales team's performances continuously.

What we do

At Shark Finesse we have developed an enterprise-grade cloud application to help businesses standardise and simplify their value engagements across the entire customer journey.

Shark, a business value engagement platform used by 1000’s of customer-facing teams globally (e.g. pre-sales, sales, value teams, and customer success) is easy to use, intuitive and usable directly with the customer to negotiate the likely business returns from investing in a solution.

By adopting the Shark approach you will fundamentally transform conversations with new and existing customers, close more business, and differentiate from the competition.