Forty percent of companies failed to reach their sales goals in 2020. While several factors undoubtedly contributed to this, sales team effectiveness is one of the most significant.

The good news is that sales effectiveness can improve. In this article, we’ll look at eight sales effectiveness tools and strategies that sales managers can leverage to optimize their team’s performance.

What Is Sales Effectiveness?

Sales effectiveness (also known as sales efficiency) is a measure of sales performance. This definition can apply to individual salespeople, an entire sales force, or a sales organization. While the exact metrics used to determine sales effectiveness can vary between organizations, KPIs such as win rates, quota attainment, and revenue growth are all popular ways to measure the overall effectiveness of a sales team.

Best Ways To Monitor Sales Effectiveness

While generating revenue and growing the company’s bottom line is the ultimate goal of every sales team, there’s more than one way to measure sales effectiveness. If you want to understand how your sales professionals are performing, here are a few effective ways to monitor sales effectiveness.

Customer Acquisition Rates

While it’s true that cross-selling and upselling to your existing customers costs less than acquiring new customers, how well your sales team attracts new customers is a big indicator of its performance. Customer acquisition rates look at just that: how many new customers your sales team brings on over a certain period of time (usually quarterly).

Customer Attrition Rate

The opposite of customer acquisition rate, customer attrition rate measures how many customers leave your company over a given time. In many instances, customer attrition results from factors outside your sales team‘s control and is thus more a measure of your overall CRM performance than a sales metric alone. That said, your attrition rates can still shed light on how well your team handles your existing customer base.

Sales Cycle Length

The average sales cycle length for B2B companies is 102 days. If your sales cycle is longer than you’d like, it could indicate that your team members are not closing deals as quickly as they should. By examining your company’s average sales execution time frame, you can identify bottlenecks that are slowing down the process and create an optimized sales pipeline.

Strategies That Help Boost Sales Effectiveness

Once you can measure sales effectiveness, it’s time to start looking for ways to improve it. Here are a few great sales effectiveness strategies to boost your conversion rates and promote sales growth.

Create a Sales Enablement Initiative

Sales enablement is providing sales reps with the tools and resources they need to excel at their job. It can include sales training and coaching, procuring software to help improve sales efficiency, and working with your marketing department to create sales content that your team can use.

Sales enablement is all the rage right now, and for good reasons: When it comes to improving sales force effectiveness, few things are more impactful than a well-executed sales enablement strategy.

Align Your Sales Strategy With Company Goals

It’s always beneficial to provide sales reps with goals and benchmarks to strive toward, but it’s also important to ensure that those goals align with your company’s overall goals. For example, if your company’s primary objective is to grow its customer base, setting customer acquisition goals for your team will align its efforts with that objective. If your primary goal is to increase your existing customers’ average lifetime value, customer retention and upsell/cross-sell goals may make more sense for your team.

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Embrace the Power of Following Up

Did you know that only 2% of sales occur on the first meeting between a prospect and a sales rep? This stat tells you all you need to know about the importance of the follow-up. By teaching your sales reps how to follow up with customers effectively, you can create more sales opportunities for them to capitalize on and take full advantage of your team’s qualified leads.

Provide Sales Training

We’ve already touched on sales training and coaching as an element of sales enablement, but it’s important enough that it warrants mentioning again. If you don’t provide your reps with the thorough training they need to perform at the highest possible level, your sales team‘s effectiveness will suffer.

Onboarding new reps to get them up to speed is important, but it’s also important to provide continuous training to hone their skills continuously. It’s also a good idea to train your sales leaders and provide them with the knowledge they need to lead their teams to the promised land.

At Sales Assembly, we provide industry-leading sales training courses to sales reps and sales leaders alike. Learn more about how Sales Assembly can provide your team with the personalized training they need to start closing more deals and generating more revenue.

Best Sales Effectiveness Tools

Along with training, providing your team with the right tools is key to boosting sales effectiveness. Here are a few great tools to consider if you would like to add some new weapons to your sales team‘s arsenal:

Copper

Copper is a CRM offered by Google, making it a great tool for teams already familiar with Google products. Copper also integrates nicely with other tools from Google, such as Calendar, Gmail, and Chrome.

Catalyst

Catalyst helps sales teams pinpoint more opportunities by providing customer health profiles and segmentation features. This tool also offers workflow productivity support, helping keep your agents as efficient as possible.

Chili Piper

Staying organized setting meetings with prospects can be difficult for sales reps who are juggling calendars, meeting invites and more. By providing sales reps with an easy way to set time with prospects and get back to value, Chili Piper helps ensure that reps can stay on top of their tasks in a simple and reliable way.

Boost Your Organization’s Sales Effectiveness With Sales Assembly

You can use many tools and strategies to boost your sales team‘s effectiveness, but none are more powerful than the right sales training. At Sales Assembly, we provide industry-leading sales training courses that are proven to turn any team into a fine-tuned revenue-generating machine. See how effective sales training can improve your team’s performance and grow your company’s bottom line: Get started with Sales Assembly today.

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