Businesses want their sales team to be as efficient as possible. However, achieving efficiency isn’t always easy. If things aren’t going well, it can be tempting to push harder on the things that aren’t working, but feel comfortable, rather than take a step back and put changes in place that could actually help the sales process.
Data is one element that can make your sales teams join the 1% of Elites . It can show teams opportunities they may not see, help develop sales tactics that work, and help track performance.
Sales efficiency is the ratio between how much revenue a sales team generates and how much it costs to produce this revenue. A good sales efficiency means an organisation creates a high amount of income at a low cost.
Improving sales efficiency generally means focusing the team on tasks that bring in the most sales. It can be increased in a number of ways – here are some of them:
When looking to increase your sales efficiency, data is an important tool to help ensure you’re targeting the right clients.
This means identifying the types of companies that are most likely to buy from you and targeting them.
You want to ensure your sales team is focusing on the activities that generate sales. It’s crucial to understand what your team does and where its sales come from.
If most of your sales come after contacting warm leads generated by your website, you may want to focus your sales team on this rather than have them spend hours every day cold calling.
The 80/20 principle is very true in sales. You must always ask the critical question: what are our most leveraged activities and how can we do more of them?
Performance tracking can help ensure your sales team is putting in the work required to make sales. Once you’ve found out what activities lead to sales, tracking your team can check they are putting in the mileage needed to hit your targets.
Performance tracking generally leads to increases in activity. Whether or not the increase in activity leads to better sales performance depends on the efficiency of what the team is doing. This goes back to the last point: find and execute hard on the most leveraged activities.
An efficient sales team is often an agile one. Agility allows an organisation to react and change its strategy when it finds out that that certain things work better than others. A good sales team will spend time trying to improve – sometimes that is a whole new channel, and sometimes it’s a different approach to a regular channel.
Agility is also about taking advantage of opportunities: new information may open up a sales opportunity or channel.
Red Flag Alert’s data helps sales teams increase their efficiency by providing detailed intelligence — updated daily — on every business in the UK. This can cut a team’s reliance on static sales lists that degrade quickly and are of little use once out of date. Here’s how Red Flag Alert can help:
Red Flag Alert’s database has 50,000 business updates every single day. This contains key business information like growth, financial health, changes of owner and new subsidiaries.
Changes to an organisation could be the difference between an ideal target, and one that almost certainly won’t buy your product. By using up-to-date information your sales team will be able to constantly find new targets and stop wasting time with businesses that are no longer relevant.
The data provided by Red Flag Alert is highly detailed and can equip sales teams with all the information they need to pre-qualify and close sales.
For example, Red Flag Alert’s data can tell you the revenue growth and profitability of a business. If a company is growing but its profitability is not, there could be an opportunity for management consultancy businesses that focus on maximising profit margins or procurement companies that save money on costs.
Or perhaps you want to focus on manufacturing businesses with large debtor books so you can provide invoice financing – Red Flag Alert can provide the right searches for this.
Whatever your business, using data to zero in specifically on the best targets will help your sales conversion.
Red Flag Alert’s data integrates directly into your CRM. This gives your sales team access to the most up-to-date information about a prospect and means they won’t have to spend time manually updating their lists, thereby allowing them to focus on bringing in revenue.
It also means that data is the same throughout your organisation and offices. Sales teams in your regional offices have access to the same data at the same time as the sales team in your head office.
Red Flag Alert’s data can be searched and filtered, making it easy for your sales team to build better prospect lists based on the most effective sales metrics.
For example, if you want to create a list of targets with a certain number of employees in a specific industry, you can do that easily using Red Flag Alert’s data. Better prospect lists can lead to improvements in efficiency as sales teams can focus on companies that are likely to be receptive to your product.
Data can increase your sales efficiency by supporting account-based marketing. It’s often better to sell more to your current clients rather than spending time acquiring new ones; using Red Flag Alert to monitor current clients for opportunities is a great way to do this.
If you provide office supplies and you notice a customer’s business is growing, you can react and contact them about selling the equipment they may need to deal with their expansion. If your customer opens a new location this may be the perfect time to approach them about new insurance or energy services.
This client data can be pushed to key people in your business so opportunities are addressed in real time.
The detailed, up-to-date data provided by Red Flag Alert can be a crucial tool in increasing your sales team’s efficiency. We offer a free consultation that:
If you want to see how Red Flag Alert can help your company, and try us out for yourself, book a free trial today.