Highspot Blog

How do you guide your sales team to achieve better results? The answer lies in using the right tools and strategies to improve sales productivity.

On an intuitive level, most team leaders and managers understand that the more buyers your team can engage (within a given period of time), the more deals they’ll close for your company. It’s simple enough: if your team used to reach out to 10 buyers per hour in the past, and they now reach out to 20 buyers per hour, assuming that their closing rate remains the same, you’ll get 2x the amount of successful deals.

There are various ways you can go about boosting sales productivity (for instance: setting up training sessions and getting your reps to read the best books on sales), but the most effective thing you can do is invest in a sales productivity tool or sales effectiveness tool for your team.

In this article, we walk you through the different categories of sales productivity tools that can turn your team into a lean, mean, revenue-generating machine.

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Seventy-six percent of The Extremely Productive (The XP) hold themselves accountable for doing what they tell themselves they’re going to do. Only 34% of The Rest hold themselves to this same level of accountability.

In RAIN Group’s new Extreme Productivity Benchmark Report, which includes data from 2,377 respondents, “holding yourself accountable” was the top behavior exhibited by The XP. It was also the No. 1 key driver of Extreme Productivity, and the behavior that represented the biggest difference between The XP and The Rest.

The data is clear: No matter if you’re in sales, marketing, or another field, the importance of holding yourself accountable can’t be understated. If you can master this, you’ll stay focused and achieve greater success.

Here are three ways to improve self-accountability.

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Every founder anticipates the moment when their business must scale because rapid growth demands it. But growing a business is as challenging as it is exhilarating.

That’s because it’s difficult to hire, train, and enable a sales force capable of sustained growth. Only 16% of sales leaders are confident that they have the talent they need to succeed in the future. Research conducted by Xerox showed that 87% of the new knowledge learned in sales training is lost within 12 weeks. And once they’re trained, up to 1/3 of a sales professional’s time is spent looking for or creating content to share with prospects.

Though harrowing, these numbers reveal an opportunity for operational changes that can optimize the sales process from onboarding to content. The solution I’m referring to is sales enablement.

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You need the skills to perform and the content to deliver.

Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon. That’s pretty well known. What’s less well-known is his distinguished service as a fighter pilot in the Korean war and his close brush with disaster. On his seventh mission, the wing of Armstrong’s Panther jet clipped an anti-aircraft cable and was cut completely in half. With his plane mortally wounded, Armstrong prepared to bail out, but he had one problem — he had never received proper ejection training.

So, what did Armstrong do? He grabbed the flight manual and studied in the nick of time, learning the protocol and following the steps to make it out alive.

A key moment with a customer isn’t quite as life-and-death as bailing out of a wounded fighter jet — but there is an interesting analogy in this story worth exploring.

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Marketing and sales teams may have different goals day-to-day, but they both work toward the same overarching objective: grow the business. When marketers and sellers can put aside their differences and focus on working toward that goal together, great things happen. Content marketing is one such area where marketers stand to benefit from sellers.

Content marketing, which can generate 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing, is a powerful tool in a marketer’s arsenal, and pairing content marketing with sales takes it to the next level. Results improve, leads convert, your data is supercharged — and your business grows.

Take a look at the four ways a sales team can give your content marketing campaigns a boost.

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Plutarch, famed philosopher of Ancient Greece, was an expert critic. He had something to say about the study of poetry, friendship, ideal dinner conversation — pretty much everything. Among his most useful critiques, Plutarch offered his contemporaries a takedown of education, and specifically the way things are taught.

Plutarch believed lectures and other one-way knowledge transfers didn’t provide the emotional, inspirational context students needed to perform. In fact, he’s frequently quoted as saying, “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”

Eons later, Plutarch’s critique remains incredibly relevant, particularly for sales training. The legacy methods that most businesses rely on don’t give working modern reps the learning environment they need to succeed.

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It’s no secret — B2B pipeline generation is a challenge. Finding the perfect potential customer can vex even the most experienced marketing or sales professionals. To help ease the pressure, here are some tried-and-true strategies to maximize your prospecting opportunities and deliver more qualified leads — and, ultimately, pipeline and revenue — for your business.

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Regardless of what line of business you are in, content-based marketing provides businesses with an effective way to engage audiences while also generating new leads that translate to revenue growth.

The prerequisite to driving high-quality leads into the hands of the people who can capitalize on them is to discover what content your target audience actually wants to see. Creating content that provides value follows a methodical process with a few key steps. Here’s how to get started.

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What is sales effectiveness?

There isn’t one single answer. Some might say effectiveness comes down to performance against goals, while others might define it in terms of revenue or profit. Sometimes, it even gets conflated with sales efficiency. While both sales effectiveness and sales efficiency relate to the improvement of sales performance, efficiency reveals how fast sales reps complete tasks — but not whether they’re performing the right tasks. That’s the focus of sales effectiveness.

Because sales effectiveness is variable and unique to each company, it can be difficult to assess your sales team’s efforts. But without a clear definition of sales effectiveness, it’s impossible to get started measuring and, most importantly, improving.

To help with this conundrum, we’ve written a guide to provide a straightforward explanation of sales effectiveness and the metrics that matter. Read on and we’ll walk you through the process of identifying, measuring, and improving your sales effectiveness.

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In the early days of sales operations, sales ops professionals measured financial analytics, conducted reports, and predicted sales forecasting. Mainly, they were problem-solving number crunchers.

These days, they do all that and much more.

Modern sales ops professionals play a vital role in the success of a sales organization by staying ahead of problems and enabling the sales team to focus on selling. When implemented alongside strategic training, tools, and engagement techniques, sales operations can help sales teams become more productive and efficient and have a positive impact on both the top- and bottom-line performance.Continue reading article ›