Efficient time management for maximizing sales productivity

Finding the balance between efficiency and effectiveness is key to improving a team’s sales productivity. While it’s important to help sales reps efficiently consolidate content at a faster rate, what’s even more important is to land higher sales more quickly, easily, and accurately for best-in-class effectiveness.

There are plenty of solutions available with today’s modern technology to combat rep’s mismanagement of time. Implementing a tool that shows you what’s working, what’s not, and provides reps with insights for guiding your sales strategy does more than just save them valuable time – it delivers better outcomes and stronger results that translate directly to your company’s success.

You take care to ensure your sales reps have all of the training, lead generation, and content that they need – so why stop short? Arm your team with a modern sales enablement technology to save time for themselves, and earn deals for your business.

Time Management Means Money

Helping your sales reps manage their time is the first step to achieving better business success in the long run. Each individual’s contribution takes time, and makes a difference. The good news is that you can help control how much time their tasks actually take them.

Far too many sales reps today spend more time digging for the right information rather than pitching it to their customers. In fact, IDC surveys found that the time spent searching for information averages 8.8 hours per week, at a cost of $14,209 per knowledge worker per year. Even if you have a small sales team, this is a huge problem.

This means that for every deal a rep lands, they’re leaking money through the process in which it took to complete. The time that could be saved via a content management system is instead wasted – and probably not without some frustration or exasperation with the process itself. So where are you supposed to start?

The answer is obvious, and easy to implement. Free up your rep’s time with a smarter content system to let them do more of what they do best: sell.

Superior Content Prioritization

The first step to organizing and prioritizing your sales content is by finding a sales enablement tool that provides intelligent recommendations, content scoring, and advanced analytics for a smart news feed.

The first step to ensuring that your news feed is as effective as possible is by digitizing your decisions. The very phrase “smart” indicates that your feed should be automatically categorizing content by whatever parameters your business sets. To do this, you need to start by measuring the content your sales team uses, and harnessing these insights efficiently.

Smarter content analytics are at the heart of effective prioritization. Need to know which training program is most popular among sales reps? Looking to find the piece of content that receives most engagement among within an industry-specific group of customers? A smart content filtering feed should be able to provide you with all of the answers you’re looking for – in an instant.

Machine Learning for a Smarter Feed

Utilizing a smart content feed means more than simply saving a few minutes of your day; it gives sales reps a chance to infuse power and flexibility into the management and control of the content they rely on every day.

Only a few of the best sales enablement tools and technologies will use data science or a breakthrough technology like Content Genomics to enable this smart news feed that we discussed above. These tools employ a semantic search that allows quick filtering, finding, and sharing of any given piece of content – when and where it’s most effective.  When coupled with machine learning that operates by visualizing the relationships between each user, opportunity, and lead, reps are better able to showcase the most relevant and effective content for any given opportunity. Plus, it’ll provide you with advanced analytics to optimize your sales cycle moving forward.

Your content is constantly evolving as it moves across your organization, so learn to love – and track – its progression at every step.

Bring It On Home

Improving each individual rep’s sales performance starts with equipping them with the tools to succeed. Give your team a hand, and help increase their sales productivity, with a time-saving technology that will reap business-wide benefits.

Let your sales enablement platform do the heavy lifting – and crunch the numbers – so your team doesn’t have to.

Author Bio

Rachel Davidson is a content specialist at Highspot, the sales enablement industry’s leading platform for content management, customer engagement, and analytics.