Is A Lack Of Data Affecting My Sales Team’s Productivity?

If you are looking to grow your business, the productivity of your team plays a huge part in how quickly you can achieve your business goals. Productivity can be affected by may variables, including making sure your employees feel valued and appreciated, sharing results across different departments and making sure all goals are aligned.

When it comes to solving a lack of productivity you may be concerned that employees will question your trust or think you want to micromanage the team. However, if you look to solve some of the problems that could be causing the lack of productivity, you’ll not only be helping your business to grow, but also improve the overall company culture.

Sharing information between sales and marketing teams

In most organisations, marketing are usually tasked with generating as many leads as possible, while sales are tasked with converting them into customers.

However, as most consumers now prefer to do research before interacting with a salesperson, marketing’s job becomes much more than just securing contact information. It is more about educating the lead and nurturing them towards your company’s solution. Sales are then able to focus their time on converting these sales qualified leads (SQLs) more efficiently.

If you’re in the enviable position of having plenty of leads, prioritising who your sales team should focus on can be difficult.

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This is where lead scoring comes in. By attributing points to particular behaviours — such as opening certain emails or visiting certain website pages, like your pricing page — you can start to distinguish between leads further down the sales funnel and those who are still in their research stages. This can be done automatically, with alerts for your sales teams notifying them of any hot leads.

For the leads that aren’t quite ready to be contacted, your sales team can work alongside marketing to pass on their knowledge and insights, helping them to create content the sales team know your buyer personas are looking for.

A study by Kapost found that 65% of sales reps are unable to find the content the prospect is looking for. What are the chances that your sales team are spending time digging through marketing or sales information looking for what they need, to only create something themselves? By providing these frequently asked questions to the marketing department they can produce and distribute this much needed content through marketing automation at the right stages of the buyer’s journey. As a result, by the time your leads become SQLs they are already educated, speeding up the interactions with the sales team and avoiding repetitive conversations being covered on a one-to one basis.

By aligning your marketing and sales teams closer together you’ll be able to get a much fuller picture of what your leads need in order to convert, and both teams can work together towards a shared goal.

Set up regular meetings for marketing and sales to sit down and share insights of what is working and what isn’t. This will help both teams work more productively and avoid wasted efforts on things that might not lead to sales. According to SiriusDecisions, B2B firms with tightly aligned sales and marketing teams achieved 24% faster three-year revenue growth and 27% faster three-year profit growth, so what’s stopping you?

Share one financial goal

This collaborative way of working will also help to avoid blame being shifted from one department to the other. If both sales and marketing are working towards one financial goal, both teams will be just as responsible as the other to help reach the business goal, meaning your sales team will be able to feedback on the quality of leads and help steer the marketing strategy in the right direction for every campaign.

By using a sales and marketing software stack, you’ll be able to collect all of your marketing and sales data in one place, allowing both teams to access it when they need to, understand where a lead came from and the how long it takes for a lead to turn into a customer. All of this data can be used to spot trends and drive more sales.