Every company strives to increase sales, but not everyone understands how to do this. Sales Department Optimization.
B2B sales growth is impossible without a transparent system: a built funnel, the speed of transactions moving through it, data and control points.
Many managers are confident in night clubs and bars email list their employees and do not question their work. However, even the most experienced managers may not notice important things.
Artem Elisov, Commercial Director of Kompleto, told us what to pay attention to when analyzing the work of a department, what metrics to use, and how to motivate employees.
Start with a sales funnel
Nowadays, it is difficult to evaluate focus on a single goal the effectiveness of digital sales without close communication between sales and marketing departments.
Their connecting link can be a CRM system, which will also help to identify key factors for optimal performance, such as:
- sales department throughput;
- employee conversion by funnel stages;
- automation zones.
Let’s look at each point in more detail.
CRM is more than just a call log. It’s a tool that lets you see where your funnel is losing money, which market segments are bringing in more LTV, and how managers are impacting business performance through compliance and benchmarks.
Sales department throughput
Sales force throughput (SFT) is a measure turkey data of the number of new customers that managers can effectively process in a given period. For example, in a day, week or month.
PSOP allows:
- understand the workload of employees;
- define benchmarks and KPIs;
- Set the number of employees for scaling.
How to measure PSOP:
- Determine how many deals each manager is currently working on.
- Calculate the average number of transactions per employee.
- Compare the results of individual managers with the average.
To make it clearer, let’s give an example:
Image taken from the author’s archive
There are 3 managers in the team. One closes 20 deals per month, the second – 25, and the third – 21. The total number of deals: 66. We divide them by the number of managers and get the average number of deals per employee – 22.
A deviation of more than 20% from the average value is a reason to analyze the situation, identify the cause of the difference and take measures to improve productivity.
What can affect this and how to deal with it:
Image taken from the author’s archive
Conversions by Funnel Stages
They consist of the overall conversion and the conversion of transitions from stage to stage.
Image taken from the author’s archive
From the example above, we see that the second employee works most effectively, with a conversion rate of 16% across the funnel stages. This is 4 times more than the first one.
It can be noted that the first one has a strong drop from the 4th to the 5th stage of the funnel, and even fewer clients reach the 7th and 9th stages.
What to do if there are significant differences in conversions:
- analyze the reasons – at what stages it falls and why this happens;
- identify best practices – find out which of the second employee’s methods work best;
- observe the employee during the working day – perhaps the problem lies not in his working methods;
- train and implement the acquired knowledge – share best practices with the first employee and help him improve his performance.
It is important to consider that the quality of leads for each manager should be the same. If not, then you need to filter by products and channels.
Automation
Before determining which processes to automate, you need to understand why you want to do it in the first place.
Goals of automation:
- increasing the capacity of the sales department;
- increasing conversion;
- quick introduction of a new employee to a position;
- control over compliance with regulations;
- workday analytics;
- improving the benchmarks by which the department operates.
Now it’s time to figure out what can be automated:
- template tasks;
- transactional communications – messages like: “Your application has been accepted”, “Payment was successful”, etc.
- standard scenarios – for example, responses to customer requests or objections;
- production processes;
- document flow;
- commercial offers.
Important: To correctly compile a list of such processes, conduct a sales department briefing.
Once you’ve built your funnel, it’s time to automate it.
Image taken from the author’s archive
According to the regulations, at each stage determine:
- type of task (meeting, call, preparation of a commercial proposal, etc.);
- the deadline for its implementation.
All of this will help avoid delays and ensure that necessary actions are taken consistently, which will ultimately increase conversion and improve sales department results.
