Budgets are tight. Reps are struggling to meet quota. Enablement teams are under tremendous pressure to drive sales productivity, velocity, and consistent revenue.
Often, the sales department is a company’s highest expense, which means that maximizing the potential of every rep to scale productivity is mission-critical in today’s economy. Increasing sales productivity ensures that you drive more revenue with each rep you have. To that point, reps who use Highspot experience 16% shorter deal cycles, a 14% increase in deal size, and a 16% increase in win rates.
In an economic downturn, how can you unlock sales productivity and strengthen business results? To address this, we’ll provide data-backed insights that you can use to boost immediate productivity in your organization.
Why is Sales Productivity Important?
Sales productivity is how companies drive consistent revenue. When resources are limited, maximizing the output of your existing reps is key. Every deal matters.
Unlocking sales productivity is often easier said than done. However, by increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of every deal, you can improve the performance of each seller – and maximize revenue generated per rep. Sales enablement can support reps in boosting productivity which can lead to faster sales cycles, larger deal sizes, and more deals won.
How Can Enablement Help Expedite Sales Cycles?
To drive overall sales productivity, sales needs to accelerate deal cycles. The faster reps can close deals, the faster they can generate revenue for the business. Below, learn two ways that enablement can help expedite deal cycles to drive rep productivity.
Ensure Sales Content is Easy to Find
Without enablement, sales teams often waste hours looking for the right content they need for different sales scenarios, delaying buyer conversations. Reps don’t have time to waste.
TIP: Store your content in a central location, regularly review and maintain it to ensure it’s fresh, and structure it intuitively for reps to navigate. When our customers organize their content effectively, their reps find the content they need nearly 3x as quickly, making them 26% more efficient.
Structuring your sales content in a way that makes it seamless for reps to discover can save them hours per week, resulting in more time to engage new buyers, support customers’ needs, and accelerate decisions.
Build Efficient Onboarding Programs
Onboarding can help you ramp new sellers on your sales process, tools, and content – and serve as a key lever in accelerating sales productivity. The longer reps take to ramp, the more money you’re spending before sellers start bringing in revenue for the business.
TIP: To accelerate rep learning time and retention, keep your onboarding courses brief, broken down in digestible chunks of information for sellers to easily consume. This will also help you avoid having to retrain them in material they’ve already completed, which can significantly impede sales velocity.
By preparing reps for their jobs efficiently, they will be more confident in their roles and can start generating revenue faster.
How Can Enablement Help Reps Win Larger Deals?
Another way to accelerate sales productivity is increasing average deal size, where your customers buy more from you and spend more on each purchase, leading to greater overall revenue. Here are two ways that enablement can help reps expand value with customers and win larger deals.
Instill Rep Confidence With Contextual Guidance
To help reps close larger deals, equip them with contextual guidance so they feel confident navigating different sales scenarios.
TIP: Build Sales Plays so that reps have the right context, content, and suggested actions to take for any sales situation, including cross-selling and upselling scenarios to increase deal size. In fact, when our customers adopt Sales Plays, reps see 22% higher buyer engagement.
Providing reps with scenario-specific guidance empowers them to engage the right decision-makers and close larger deals with confidence.
Reinforce Learning So Reps Are More Effective in Every Deal
Sales training is critical to increasing rep productivity. Creating dynamic learning programs, for example, arms reps with the skills and behaviors to perform consistently. The more engaged your reps are during training, the more they can retain the information.
TIP: Give reps opportunities to practice their learning throughout your training programs. When our customers use scenario-based video practice along with assessments in their training courses, they see 92% higher learner engagement.
When reps demonstrate learned skills, they can more easily adopt winning behaviors so your team can close larger deals.
How Can Enablement Help Increase Win Rates?
Increasing win rates is another crucial outcome of enhancing sales productivity. When reps can more effectively engage buyers and adopt winning behaviors, they can close more deals and drive revenue for the business. Learn how enablement can help reps win every deal.
Improve Your Buyer Engagement
A powerful way to enhance your revenue teams’ productivity is by improving buyer outreach. Emailing individual attachments is time-consuming and lacks insights into buyer preferences. Instead, you can enhance buyer engagement through pitching, where reps can send content at scale, personalize their engagement, and track how content resonates with buyers.
TIP: When sellers actively pitch content using Highspot, they engage with 2.5x as many buyers and receive insights to personalize the best content for every conversation. You can essentially get the work of 250 reps out of 100 reps – meaning you can engage more buyers with the reps you have.
By doing more with less, and understanding what works best with prospects, reps can land relevant value in every interaction and win more deals.
Empower Your Sales Coaches With Insights
Sales coaching ensures sellers adopt the right behaviors to eliminate skill gaps and improve rep effectiveness. Having clear visibility into rep performance helps frontline managers know what behaviors to coach. Having limited insight into rep activities makes it harder for managers to coach effectively.
TIP: With insights into rep performance, your sales managers can understand how rep activities correlate to performance and reinforce winning behaviors. In fact, 25% of customers that struggled with coaching prior to Highspot report a significant improvement in their abilities to coach reps since leveraging the platform.
Effective sales coaching improves consistent rep performance and strengthens your frozen middle, so you won’t have to rely just on top performers to close deals in today’s market.
Eliminate the Guesswork in Enablement
When time is money, doing more with less is key. Especially in difficult economic times, ensure you have the right enablement in place to improve sales productivity. By taking a rigorous approach to enact change with reps, you can more consistently win larger deals at a higher velocity.
This blog post is the inaugural post of Highspot’s new research-backed blog series, Highspot Insights. With the help of our research teams, we provide data-driven best practices for sales enablement. If you have a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.
