Whatever the case may be, you’ve come to the right place!

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about field sales, including what field sales is, why it’s important, the duties field sellers are asked to complete, the challenges they face on a daily basis, and how to build your own field sales strategy.

What Is Field Sales?

Field sales, oftentimes referred to as outside sales, is the act of selling products and/or services from outside of a typical office setting. To do this, professional field sales reps travel to prospects and engage with them in a face-to-face manner.

The opposite of field sales is inside sales, where sales reps sell to prospects from a distance. These kinds of reps don’t meet with leads in-person. Instead, they use phone calls, emails, text messages, etc. to connect with prospects.

Both field sales and inside sales have their benefits. We’ll talk about the specific advantages of field sales in the next section.

Why is Field Sales Important?

So, why would you want to employ a field sales team? Because there are legitimate advantages to doing so. Here are four of the most important ones:

Higher quota attainment

Studies show that the average field sales representative has a close rate of 40%. This is much higher than the 18% close rate attained by most inside sales reps.

Because field reps are able to convert leads into paying customers at a more consistent clip, they hit their quotas more often. In fact, the average field sales rep attains quota 65% of the time compared to just 55% of the time for inside sellers.

Stronger customer relationships

Field reps are generally better at building relationships with leads and customers than their inside sales counterparts. It makes sense when you think about it — field reps meet with prospects for in person meetings. They can look them in the eyes, shake their hands, and communicate more naturally. Face-to-face conversations also minimize misunderstandings, which is another relationship booster.

Better for complex sales cycles

Does your company sell complex products? Are they expensive, often requiring multiple decision-makers to greenlight before you get a signed contract in hand?

If so, you should definitely consider building a field sales force.

Field sales allows reps to meet with prospects in-person as we’ve already discussed. This enables them to build stronger, more trusting relationships, which is mandatory when pitching high-priced goods and/or services.

You wouldn’t buy a $10,000+ product from some random stranger who calls you on the phone, would you? Of course not! But you might from the flesh and blood human sitting in front of you—especially if you’ve just been talking for 30 minutes and enjoy their personality.

It’s also much easier to demonstrate complex products in person than it is via video-conferencing technology like Zoom and Google Meet.

Valuable source of customer insights

Last, but certainly not least, field sales allows sellers to glean incredible amounts of customer data. What does your target market struggle with? What do your current customers like and dislike about your products? What new features do they want?

The answers to these questions are usually much easier for field sales reps to attain because they’re able to spend more time with customers and get to know them.

Field Sales Roles And Responsibilities

Now that we’ve covered what field sales is and why it’s important, let’s talk about what field sales representatives actually do on a day to day basis.

Your job description as a field seller will vary depending on the industry you work in and the company you work for. Still, there are common duties that just about every field rep must complete. Let’s take a look at what they are:

Perform daily sales activities

If you’re familiar with sales at all, you know that field sales reps have to identify leads, get in contact with them, and attempt to sell products and/or services. We’ll talk about all of these things in the following sections.

But first, let’s discuss the other things sales reps do on the regular—the less flashy stuff, such as planning routes and updating CRM software.

• Planning Routes: As mentioned previously, field reps spend a significant portion of their on-the-clock hours traveling from prospect to prospect. This allows them to build stronger relationships and close bigger deals more often. But every minute a rep spends in the car is a minute they can’t spend closing deals. That’s why field reps need to minimize windshield time, which they can do by planning efficient routes between prospects. Software like SPOTIO makes this super easy to do. Simply plug in the addresses you need to travel to and SPOTIO will tell you how to get there without wasting time.

• Updating CRMs: CRM software, which is short for customer relationship management software, allows reps to easily store and recall important customer and prospect information. What was that lead’s name and what’s the best way to contact them? Your CRM will tell you—as long as you update it with these details. The best field reps spend time every day updating their CRMs with new information so that it’s there when they need it.

• Scheduling Follow-Ups: Field reps are asked to find prospects, nurture leads, and close deals. To do all this, they have to plan routes, update CRMs, overcome objections, learn about their company’s newest products… It’s a lot! The only way to get it all done is to use technology. Tools like SPOTIO will let you schedule calls and visit reminders, automate emails and text messages to send at specific times, and more. That way nothing falls through the cracks and you can consistently meet quota.

For more information on daily sales activities, read our full article on the topic.

Identify prospects

How do sales reps know who to make sales pitches to? It’s simple: they take time to identify potential customers and then approach them with an offer.

So, if you’re interested in becoming a field sales representative, you’ll need to learn how to identify prospects for your company. There are multiple ways to do this. For example, you can use websites like LinkedIn to source leads. Or you can use SPOTIO Lead Machine.

Image: SPOTIO’s Lead Machine enables reps to filter prospects using 200+ different data points.

Lead Machine is great because it provides 200+ different data points to help users find red-hot leads in the specific territories they’ve already been assigned to work.

Qualify leads

Have you found a few prospects to contact? Great, now you need to qualify them.

Here’s the truth: just because someone can buy your company’s product or service doesn’t mean they will. They might be strapped for cash. They might already use one of your competitor’s products. Maybe they’re just too busy to listen to your sales pitch right now.

You don’t want to waste your valuable time on these kinds of prospects, which is why you should qualify leads before you devote hours to them.

You can qualify your leads by doing online research, having a quick conversation with them, or asking a junior rep in your company to investigate them for you. However you do it, you need to learn if they want what you sell and if they have the money to pay for it.

Engage with leads

Once you’ve found and qualified a lead, you need to engage them. You can do this by calling them, sending a quick email, texting or visiting their place of business.

At this point, your only goal is to build a relationship with the lead. Don’t try to pitch your company’s products or services to sales leads yet — especially if you sell high-end products with serious price tags. That will probably backfire because you haven’t earned the lead’s trust.

Instead, try to book a future appointment with the lead. That way, you can sit down with them, show them the details of your offerings, and, hopefully, start talking about a deal.

Set appointments

To succeed as a field sales representative, you have to make appointments with potential buyers. If you don’t, you’ll have a really hard time closing deals.

Fortunately, if you’ve done a good job identifying prospects, qualifying leads, and engaging with these people, setting appointments should be a walk in the park.

This is especially true if you use a tool like SPOTIO, which syncs with your Google or Outlook Calendar and allows you to easily take notes before, during, and after your meetings. With SPOTIO, all of your prospect data is in one place!

Prepare and deliver sales presentations

Now that you have an appointment booked, you can begin preparing your sales presentation. Make sure you personalize it to the specific lead you plan to meet with!

For example, let’s pretend you sell cutting-edge accounting software. The lead you’re meeting with next week once complained that their current accounting software is difficult to use. As such, the lead’s team wastes hours a week fiddling around with the program.

Address this during your sales presentation. Show the lead how easy your company’s software is and how it will boost the team’s productivity.

When the day arrives, travel to the lead’s place of business at the appointed time and deliver your personalized sales presentation respectfully and professionally.

Build client relationships

You just closed your first deal as a field sales representative — congratulations! But your work isn’t done yet. You need to develop a real relationship with this person so they continue to buy from you.

This is especially important for subscription-based businesses. However, other kinds of companies can benefit from client relationships, too. Once you’ve built them, upsells and cross-sells will become much easier and more frequent.

Challenges for Field Sales Reps

As we’ve just seen, field sales representatives do a lot. So it’s only natural that they run into specific challenges from time to time. Here are four common ones:

Wasting time on admin tasks

Field sales representatives are hired to close deals for their companies, but there are many other things they have to do, too. Administrative tasks such as updating CRM software are necessary but take time away from a seller’s true purpose.

Image: SPOTIO enables reps to automatically log prospect interactions and transfer the data to your CRM.

One of the best ways to overcome this challenge is to invest in SPOTIO, which automatically tracks user sales activities, automates many of their messages with prospects, and otherwise eliminates the busy work reps have to do.

Finding qualified leads

It doesn’t matter how skilled you are, you have to have access to qualified leads to close deals at a consistent clip. The bad news is. Finding qualified leads is tough.

Fortunately, there are plenty of software tools that can help.

SPOTIO’s Lead Machine is a powerful prospecting solution for finding potential buyers. You tell Lead Machine where your territory is, and it narrows down leads using 200+ filters.

Handling sales objections

What do you do when you know that a prospect will benefit from your company’s products and/or services, but, after giving them your pitch, they say, “No thanks.”

You have two options: you can cut bait. Maybe they weren’t that great of a prospect after all and you should focus on other leads. Or, you can dig deeper and try to understand why this lead is rejecting your offer. What objections do they have?

Option one is easier. But option two will help you learn more about your target audience and close more deals. Overcome this challenge, you’ll be more successful.

Optimizing travel time

Finally, we have the dreaded windshield time, i.e. the time that field sales reps spend driving from one prospect to the next. It’s completely necessary. But time behind the wheel is time reps aren’t closing deals, which can be really frustrating.

Once again, SPOTIO can help reps overcome this issue. No, our platform won’t help you teleport from lead to lead. But it will use technology to help you plan the most efficient route between them.

With SPOTIO, you’ll be able to hit all of your leads in the most logical order, saving you time and gas money in the process.

Challenges For Field Sales Managers

Field sales reps aren’t the only ones who have to overcome challenges to succeed. The folks that manage them have struggles, too. Here are six of the most common challenges for field sales managers that you should be aware of:

Mapping and assigning territories

Territory mapping and assignment is essential to success in field sales.

Make your territories too big and your reps won’t be able to adequately cover them. Make them too small and your reps won’t have enough leads to fill their time. Oh, and make sure your territories don’t overlap or your reps will end up fighting over prospects.

Image: SPOTIO helps reps and managers geographically represent CRM data on maps.

Does this challenge make your head spin? Try SPOTIO’s Sales Territory Mapping feature. With it, you can cut territories using geographic boundaries or by drawing on a digital map. This kind of precision will ensure your reps never double up and bump into each other.

Tracking sales activities

As a field sales manager, you need to know how your reps spend their time in the field. It’s not that you don’t trust them to do their work. It’s that you need to understand what sales activities are successful and which aren’t. That way you can plan more effective sales strategies in the future.

SPOTIO offers a rep location tracking feature, which will give you real-time data on where your reps are and where they’ve been. (Note: this feature can be turned off.)

SPOTIO also automatically captures sales activities for reps, which means management professionals can easily see what their reps have and haven’t done. They can then use this information to inform their sales plans.

Maintaining rep productivity

Every department wants to be more productive and field sales is no exception. In fact, one of the biggest challenges sales managers face is making sure their reps maintain peak productivity levels as often as possible.

This is easier to do with tools like SPOTIO. For example, you can use SPOTIO to track your reps movements and activities, as we mentioned in the section above. You can then analyze this information to look for areas of improvement.

Image: SPOTIO GPS rep tracking feature enables managers to track rep location.

Maybe the location data shows your reps crisscrossing their territories as they travel from lead to lead. You can suggest they use SPOTIO’s Route Planning software to make sure they hit each lead in the most logical order.

Preventing leads from falling through the cracks

Is your field sales team underperforming? It might be because your reps aren’t following up with prospects as consistently as they should be.

Fortunately, the solution is simple: help reps develop effective follow-up sales processes. We suggest using SPOTIO’s Autoplays feature for this.

With Autoplays, field sales reps can create customized sequences of events and then automate them. For instance, once a rep secures a new lead, they can create an Autoplay that looks something like this:

• Day 1: Call Prospect
• Day 2: Email Prospect
• Day 3: Visit Prospect
• Day 5: Email Prospect
• Day 7: Call Prospect

Once a sequence is created, Autoplays will do one of two things: either remind your reps to engage their leads in the specific way the sequence tells them to or, if your reps have created email and text message templates, automate the sending of emails and text messages to the lead at the predetermined time.

Tracking rep performance

Are your reps underperforming? You won’t know until you track their performance.

SPOTIO makes it easy to track rep performance. With our platform, managers can see which tasks their reps are performing and the result of each. This will help you determine if reps are underperforming due to a lack of effort or training.

Reducing turnover

The last challenge that field sales managers face is the threat of turnover. If you’ve ever hired a promising sales rep, only to have them bail on you three months later, you know this is true.

Employee turnover is an expensive problem. According to PeopleKeep, it can cost a company up to 213% of a departing team member’s annual salary to replace them.

The sales industry is known for high turnover rates. It’s a demanding job that requires a thick skin, and not everybody can do it.

Still, as a field sales manager, your job is to keep your team on your team. The best way to do this is to create an environment they enjoy participating in.

Building a Successful Field Sales Strategy

Whew, we’ve covered a lot so far. But we aren’t done yet! Let’s talk about how you can build a successful field sales strategy for your company. This is where the rubber meets the road. Let’s make sure you’re ready to ride…

Set attainable goals

First things first, define what you’re trying to achieve via field sales. Do you want to move more products? Improve your department’s close rate? Something else?

Every goal you set for your field sales team should be SMART:

• Specific: Your goals should be clear and completely unambiguous. For example, say, “We’ll boost sales by 20%” instead of “We’ll boost sales.”
• Measurable: You should know exactly how you’ll measure your goals when you set them. “We’ll boost sales by 20%” is measurable. “We’ll make our customers happier” is not, because you can’t accurately gauge happiness.
• Attainable: Your goals should challenge your field sales representatives without pushing them too hard, as this will result in low morale.
• Relevant: Every goal you set should tie back to company objectives. Wanting to “increase upsell opportunities by 15%” is great, but only if these upsell opportunities will help your company achieve its biggest aims.
• Time-Related: Finally, your goals should have set deadlines. “We’ll boost sales by 20% by the end of the fiscal year.” If your goals aren’t time-related, your reps might slack off because there’s no urgency.

Define your sales process

Have you chosen a few SMART goals? Now it’s time to define your sales process. That way you can actually, you know, meet your objectives.

Here’s the truth: when your field sales reps know what to do in each and every scenario, they’ll become much more efficient and effective. Your job, when building a field sales strategy, is to equip your reps for every situation they’ll be in.

So think about your prospects and what it takes to make a sale. Then build a field sales strategy that will help your reps turn strangers into paying customers.

Create a sales compensation plan

There are a lot of ways to compensate your field sales representatives for their efforts. We cover the 10 most popular comp plans in this article.

The right compensation plan for your field sales force will:

• Motivate Your Reps: Are your reps inspired to make more sales? If the answer is “no,” you should consider choosing a new comp plan.
• Boost Rep Performance: Motivated reps are more productive than unmotivated ones. And productive reps generally outperform their unproductive counterparts. Make sure your comp plan motivates reps to perform their best at all times.
• Decrease Rep Turnover: The right comp plan will also help you attract top sellers to your field sales team and keep them employed by your company.

Improve your entire sales department with a quality field sales representative salary and commission structure for your team.

Set and track activity-based KPIs

Field sales is all about action. The most successful field reps are always doing something to close deals and move their careers forward. Help your team out by setting and tracking activity-based KPIs, such as visiting prospects, making calls, and sending emails.

The more of these actions your reps take, the more success they’ll have. And the more success your reps have, the more money your department will generate.

Image: Managers can track sales activity metrics across reps and territories in SPOTIO.

As a sales manager, you can track field sales activities with SPOTIO. With our tool, you’ll be able to tell how many prospects your reps contact on a daily basis, the communication channels they use, and the success rate they have with each one.

You can then use this information to adjust your field sales strategy when necessary.

Prospect with ICP data

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, ICP stands for ideal customer profile. Your company’s ICPs are the people most likely to buy your products and services. These are the folks your field sales reps should spend the most time on!

Your field sales strategy should include detailed ICP data. Your reps can use it when prospecting, preventing them from wasting valuable hours on prospects who will never make a purchase.

When you know your ICPs, you can use SPOTIO’s sales intelligence tool to find ready-to-buy prospects who fit your company’s exact parameters.

Automate tedious admin tasks

In decades past, field sales teams had to manually log prospect interactions, transfer notes to CRM databases, and perform other tedious administrative tasks.

No longer! Tools like SPOTIO allow field sellers to automate many of the “shoot me now” activities that every salesperson hates. This means field reps can focus more of their time on revenue-generating tasks that help them hot and exceed quota.

Assign sales territories strategically

We’ve already discussed how SPOTIO helps field sales managers cut territories. But your field sales strategy needs to cover how territories are assigned, too.

In general, we recommend assigning the most valuable territories to your top performing reps. This will ensure your department, as a whole, closes more of the highest-value deals in its collective pipeline.

Automate sales sequences

You’re building a field sales team. But that doesn’t mean your reps can’t utilize inside sales strategies. If your field reps aren’t using phone calls, emails, and text messages to contact leads, something has gone very wrong with your strategy.

The best thing about emails and text messages is that they can be automated. Imagine how many more sales your department will make when your reps don’t have to manually type out every email and text they send. WAY MORE!

When creating your field sales strategy, build sales sequences that include every communication channel your reps use. Then look to automate your sequences with a tool like SPOTIO’s Autoplays, which will simplify the entire process.

Once your department is set up with Autoplays, your field sales representatives will be able to close more deals in less time, leading to greater success.

Use a consultative selling approach

Consultative sales is a sales strategy where reps take an advisory role rather than a traditional sales role. As such, consultative sales reps recommend solutions to potential customers based on their needs.

Consultative selling helps field reps build trust with their prospects, ultimately allowing them to close more deals.

To adopt a consultative selling approach, simply teach your reps to:

• Actively listen to their prospects’ needs
• Asked questions about their prospects’ challenges and pain points
• Focus on finding solutions for prospects rather than repping products
• Offer insight to prospects without expecting anything in return

If your field reps can learn to do these things, their sales numbers will improve.

Map efficient sales routes

Yes, we’ve already talked about route planning. But it’s so important we need to mention it again in the context of building your field sales strategy.

Windshield time is the Achilles heel of field sales teams. Productivity levels and sales numbers go down when reps spend more time in the car. To minimize this issue, plan your reps’ sales routes in the most efficient way possible.

SPOTIO’s route planning software makes this tedious task a breeze.

Create a healthy level of competition

Salespeople thrive on competition. The trick is building a competitive work environment for your reps that also fosters teamwork and camaraderie.

You can do this with SPOTIO Leaderboards, AKA a digital scoreboard of sorts that displays important metrics such as knocks made, meetings booked, and revenue generated for every field sales representative on your team.

Leaderboards allows reps to see how their efforts stack up against their peers. It can also be used by management professionals to create fun competitions that motivate field sales reps to perform their best at all times.

Align the sales and marketing teams

Sales and marketing aren’t enemies! These two departments should always work together to help propel their company to new heights.

So, when creating your field sales strategy, look for ways to align your organization’s sales and marketing teams. You can do this by increasing communication.

For example, when marketing knows what kind of prospects sales needs, they can pursue more of these leads. And when both departments communicate on goals, they can help each other achieve them rather than fighting against one another.

Track performance metrics

How are your field reps doing? Are they meeting quota? If so, what’s the secret to their success? If not, why are they underperforming? You need to be able to answer these questions! Once again, SPOTIO can help.

Our platform will enable you to track field sales activities for each rep, as we discussed earlier, and the result of each activity they perform.

Want to know which team member has the best close rate? Interested in learning which communication channels work best for your reps? Maybe you just want to make sure that your reps’ pipelines are full. SPOTIO’s new My Reports feature allows reps and managers to quickly and easily build custom reports so that you are only looking at the metrics that matter most to your business.

The information inside SPOTIO will help you adjust your field sales strategy when required, and forecast future results more accurately.

Invest in continual training

Lastly, make sure your field sales strategy prioritizes training.

Field sales training can come in the form of annual conferences, employee events, internal cross-training, job shadowing, department mentorship programs, etc.

We won’t tell you how to train your team because every team is different and should be trained in a different way. What we will say is this: the best field sales departments are always looking for ways to improve their reps’ skill sets.

Boost Field Sales Productivity and Performance

Field sales is an exciting opportunity! Companies that employ these kinds of sellers will be able to sell complex and expensive products more consistently. They’ll also benefit from the stronger client relationships and detailed data these reps dig up.

Field sales representatives have it good, too, as many field sellers make a very healthy living for themselves and their families.

If you’re looking to build a field sales team for your organization, or want to start your career as a field sales rep, you should definitely invest in SPOTIO. Our platform is the ultimate tool for field sales and has been proven to boost revenue by 23%!

Contact our team today for a free demo of our software. See you on the inside!

More companies are investing in B2B sales teams — inside and outside — across a range of industries.

The B2B buying process now has more decision-makers and touchpoints than it did just a few years ago. This growing complexity is creating longer sales cycles, which present fresh challenges for all B2B sales stakeholders.

In this article, we’ll explore B2B sales in detail, covering a range of the most effective sales methods and tools, so you can learn how to get the best results with your sales strategy.

What Is B2B (Business-to-Business) Sales?

B2B sales is the practice of one business selling products or services to another business. One sector built exclusively on the B2B sales model is software as a service (SaaS).

These are a few examples of B2B SaaS companies:

SPOTIO – This field sales acceleration platform helps outside sales teams build pipeline, increase sales, and boost productivity.

HubSpot – This all-in-one platform helps sales and marketing teams attract more site visitors, convert more leads, and close more sales.

Salesforce – This customer relationship management (CRM) software helps businesses connect and communicate with prospective customers in a more efficient, effective way.

B2B sales is distinctly different from B2C sales, otherwise known as business-to-consumer sales, where companies sell directly to end users instead of to other businesses.

Inside vs. Outside B2B Selling

B2B sales consists of two interconnected teams — inside sales and outside sales.

Inside sales representatives sell products and services remotely, so they usually work in an office. Outside sales reps are “out in the field,” connecting with potential customers at their business premises, conferences, and trade shows.

Studies from SPOTIO indicate that outside B2B outside sales have a close rate 30% higher than inside sales. Furthermore, outside sales teams also clinch deals that are over 130% larger than inside sales deals.

The B2B Buying Process Has Changed

Digital transformation has been shaking up global business in many ways, and the B2B sales process is certainly not immune.

Here are three reasons why B2B sales have changed so much in recent times:

Number of stakeholders

You already know B2B sales involves more people. The thing is, that number is growing. In 2015, an average of 5.4 people were part of the typical decision-making unit (DMU) in the B2B sales process. Today, as many as 10 stakeholders may be involved in weighing purchase decisions.

Buyers are more educated

Research from Forrester found almost 74% of B2B buyers conduct about half of their total research online before they make an offline purchase. The B2B customers of today have greater access to information online and offline – and they’re putting it to good use.

(Source)

Alignment between sales and user intent

Understanding the customer journey is a critical aspect of B2B sales, especially in a highly competitive field. Ultimately, the companies that map their sales process to the customer journey will have more success targeting the right people, with the right offer, at the right time.

9-Step B2B Sales Process

Now let’s see how to sell B2B.

This process starts from scratch, and if you do every step comprehensively and correctly, you should be able to close with a sale. Best of all, this B2B sales process works for both for inside sales and outside sales teams.

1. Create your personas

A HubSpot study found that about 50% of prospects won’t be a good fit. In order to execute an effective B2B sales strategy, you need to know your audience. The most effective way to do this is by creating customer personas.

Just remember that with B2B sales, your customer personas should be based on decision-makers that have the authority and budget to negotiate and close deals with your company.

An example B2B customer persona may include the following details:

Demographics – Age, gender, income, education, etc.

Company role – The current position at the company, and an overview of their authority, such as, “VP of Sales, controls $500K budget for the sales department”

Goals – Such as, “Wants to increase sales by 20% in the next year”

Challenges – The problems they need help with, like, “Sales reps don’t know how to prioritize prospects”

Interests – Favorite websites, magazines, news sources, software, apps, etc., that help you understand how you connect with prospects

Note that personas are not the same as ideal customer profiles (ICPs). An ICP is a fictional company that might be interested in your product, and a persona is a fictional employee of that company.

(Source)

2. Research

Research the market to gauge demand for your products or services, determine who your competitors are, and assess your competitors’ marketing efforts.

Once you have that information, you’ll need to:

Map out the buyer journey

In the simplest terms, the buyer journey includes three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. But in B2B sales, you may need to further break down each stage. For example, buyers in the decision stage might move onward to an evaluation stage, in which they’re comparing pricing options for different solutions.

Establish lead qualification criteria

Almost 80% of leads never turn into sales.

It takes time to build trust, and for people to move through the B2B sales funnel to the point of purchase. But you can improve your B2B conversion rates with a structured approach to analyzing your leads.

Classify your prospects by how willing and ready they are to make a purchase by considering the following: need, interest, budget, timing, and role.

By devising a solid lead qualification framework, you can fill your sales pipeline with quality leads.

3. Prospect with ICP data

Based on your persona information and market research, you can develop an ICP that helps you know which businesses to target.

A sales rep could use a sales intelligence tool like SPOTIO’s Lead Machine to map a target geographic location, filter by prospects in that area using different persona data points, and then export the finished list and import it into their lead management tool. This strategy ensures reps are only working leads in target areas that meet defined ICP criteria, which can improve sales efficiency and close rates.

4. Make Initial Contact

After prospecting, you can approach potential customers to introduce yourself, and start building a relationship. Traditionally, relationship-building may have begun with a cold call to follow-up after mailing a brochure, but sales management software has transformed how reps build rapport with prospects.

Use sales software to create cohesive communication across every channel. You can automatically collect every text, email, phone call, or other communication, and sync it to your CRM for a 360-degree view of each contact. You can also define your communication cadence and get notifications when it’s time to check in with a prospect.

If you’re having trouble reaching prospects, check out this in-depth guide on how to get past the gatekeeper.

5. Assess & Qualify Your Leads

Studies show that while most B2B marketers send all their leads directly to the sales team, they only qualify 27% of them. That means sales reps may waste time chasing leads that won’t convert.

An effective way of doing this is by using the Sandler Pain Funnel.

This strategic series of questions helps you discover your lead’s real needs. Better yet, it goes beyond the pain points to reveal whether they have the budget and the decision-making authority to do business with you.

The eight questions in the Sandler Pain Funnel, in order, are:

1. “Tell me more about that…”
2. “Can you be more specific? Give me an example.”
3. “How long has that been a problem?”
4. “What have you tried to do about that?”
5. “How did that work?”
6. “How much do you think this has cost you?”
7. “How do you feel about that?”
8. “Have you given up trying to deal with the problem?”

When you size up each prospect with these qualifying questions, you’ll develop a better understanding of how your products or services can assist them. This will be instrumental in the next step.

6. Pitch

Today, you can make pitches through video content, such as a webinar, live video conference, or even in a private video meeting.

The latter is best for maximum personalization. Indeed, it’s best to tailor the pitch for every single prospect, and if possible, do it in person. If your product is quite technical, you can bring an engineer or developer to the meeting to field any technical questions.

In any case, the pitch requires considerable effort and planning, as it’s such a crucial stage in the B2B sales process. On the upside, you’ll only be doing pitches for prospects that are already qualified.

Want more inspiration? Check out these sales pitch examples.

7. Respond

It’s easy to think the B2B sales process is all about selling. However, listening to your prospects is an important part of the process.

Act as a guide, steering the conversation and letting the prospect fill in the gaps. Ideally, you should only do around 30% of the talking, so prospects feel like you’re hearing and understanding them.

Another technique is to teach rather than sell. By offering advice to help someone improve their business without any expectation of a sale, you’ll quickly earn that person’s trust.

Learning to adapt your sales process in this way takes a little practice. However, when you get it right, you’ll forge stronger relationships with prospects.

8. Follow Up

A survey of 1,000 B2B buyers shopping for complex solutions revealed that 43% preferred to not interact with salespeople.

For B2B sales professionals, that poses a dilemma:

Should you follow up?

The answer is yes. That being said, timing matters.

If you follow up too soon or too often, you may annoy your prospect and lose the sale. If you’re too nonchalant, you won’t close many sales.

The art of following up requires a delicate balance of personalization, persistence, and perception. You have to understand how your prospects like to be approached, and what they may be worried about.

9. Close

The final step in your B2B sales funnel is the close. Reps often see this as the most difficult stage of B2B selling. However, if you’ve completed the rest of the B2B sales process correctly, your close should come easily.

When you get this far, your prospects should be ready to purchase. If you get the sense that they’re still hesitant, it may be best to discuss their concerns again to address any outstanding issues.

Ultimately, if you and the prospect are aligned, the sale is much more likely. Some prospects may need a little more time, so the sale isn’t always dead if you don’t get it the first time around.

9 Strategies to Improve B2B Sales Performance

Now that you’ve got the basic steps to the B2B sales process down, here are nine B2B sales strategies to get the needle moving in the right direction.

Identify ALL Decision Makers

The sooner you identify key players in your target companies, the better.

When you start researching prospect websites, check pages like “Meet the Team” or “About Us” for information about the big players, and gather additional intel about them on LinkedIn.

Utilize PAIN-Based Selling

Almost 70% of B2B customers claim their business needs aren’t being addressed during the first contact. If you don’t meet your prospect’s needs, they aren’t likely to stick around.

By embracing solution-based selling, you can target a prospect’s pain point, then tailor your pitch to demonstrate how your product would resolve it.

Here are some example questions that can help you drill down and discover the challenges your prospect is facing:

“What are your company’s short-term and long-term goals?”
“What do you believe is your company’s greatest strength and greatest weakness?”
“What aspects do you like best about your current supplier? What don’t you like?”
“Name one thing you would change about your business.”
“What deadlines are you facing now?”
“Which resources do you want to use more?”
“How does [pain point] impact your business?”

This sales strategy is successful because it is all about the prospect and their problem, which is a more welcoming proposition than a pushy sales pitch.

Strategically Assign Sales Territories

Sales territory management means assigning prospects and geographical areas to specific salespeople depending on the industry, location, or account size. This strategy ensures that there is no overlap between your sales reps.

You can use a tool like SPOTIO’s Territory Manager to quickly map territories and assign them to different reps. Managers no longer have to spend hours reviewing physical maps and drawing out territories for assignment by hand.

Create Content to Enable the Sales Team

According to the Content Marketing Institute, in 2022, B2B content marketing teams reported successfully using content to:

• Build credibility/trust (77%)
• Grow customer loyalty (63%)
• Generate leads (67%)
• Nurture leads (54%)

At every stage of the sales funnel, content can help support your sales team. It’s little surprise that over 90% of B2B marketers use content marketing.

Videos are the most powerful type of content for sales teams, as Google found that 70% of B2B customers watch videos when they are researching products before purchase. Video content gets more engagement, and it’s shareable, which makes it great for creating brand awareness. Better yet, video content is a powerful way to convey emotion in your brand messaging, which is useful when you are trying to sell anything.

Other types of content that can enable sales include:

• Blog posts
• Educational articles
• Case studies
• e-books
• Webinars
• Whitepapers
• Courses

Done right, this strategy can reduce the B2B sales cycle, and drive more people through your sales funnel, which will increase your leads, conversions, and ultimately, your profits.

Harness the Power of Social Selling

Social selling is all about using social media to identify key decision makers and joining meaningful conversations with them at the right moment. Research from LinkedIn shows that 78% of people who engage in social selling will sell more than those who don’t use social selling.

Some great B2B sales examples of social selling on LinkedIn include IBM, which drove a 400% increase in sales, and SAP, which increased revenue by 32%.

Social selling helps you leverage omnichannel marketing in a way that establishes brand recognition quickly, so people automatically think of your brand when they are ready to buy. This means you can bypass the awkward situation of cold calling to generate warm leads.

Implement a Lead Nurturing System

The nature of B2B sales means that companies are typically considering an expensive commitment, and several decision-makers need to discuss it and agree. That explains why up to 90% of B2B leads are not ready to make a purchase.

Research from Marketo indicates that companies with a solid lead nurturing strategy generate 50% more ready-to-buy leads, with a customer acquisition cost 33% lower than non-nurtured leads. The content that marketing teams create for B2B sales enablement can usually be repurposed for lead nurturing.

Assign Sales Activities

Sales managers should assign daily, weekly, and monthly activities to reps to ensure prospects and leads are moving through the pipeline. Defining goals also helps managers compare performance among reps, identify weak points in the sales process, and ensure reps aren’t working on redundant or overlapping tasks.

Prepare for Common Objections

B2B selling is all about presenting the opportunity for positive change. The problem is that not everyone likes change, and you’re going to encounter some tough customers that seemingly can’t be convinced.

The most common objections are related to:

• Budget – “I can’t afford it”
  
• Competitor – “I’m already using another product”
  
• Competitor at a lower price – “I see your competitor is cheaper”
  
• Timing – “Can you get back to us in Q4?”

In each of these scenarios, if you’ve prepared responses, you can turn objections around by focusing on the value your product offers.

Ideally, try to back this value up with social proof and case studies of similar B2B customers who had great results. Your prospects will see that what you’re offering is something truly unique, and they’ll realize it’s a long-term investment that delivers a great return on investment (ROI).

This guide dives deeper into some of the more common sales objections and how sales leaders overcome them.

Pursue referrals

Word-of-mouth is the cheapest form of marketing, and sometimes, the type that delivers the best bang for your buck. Research indicates that referrals close 70% quicker, and they deliver almost 60% more lifetime value.

Set up a referral program that offers an incentive, like a cash-back offer for anyone who refers a lead that converts. Then promote your program on LinkedIn and tell your customers about it.

Costly B2B Selling Mistakes to Avoid

Now that you’ve learned how to sell B2B the right way, let’s look at some common pitfalls. Here are four mistakes that can quickly derail your best-laid B2B sales strategies.

Ignoring Opportunities in the Field

Inside sales can be easier and cheaper to execute than outside sales, because there are no routes to manage, territories to monitor, or travel costs to account for. However, cheaper isn’t always better.

By ignoring outside B2B sales, companies miss out on a lot of leads and risk creating a brand identity that doesn’t have much of a personal touch. Outside sales teams, however, have more interaction with prospects and are effective at building strong customer relationships that can increase overall sales volumes, and also the customer lifetime value (CLV) of each buyer.

With savvy hiring and automated route management, you can strategically lower the cost of an outside sales team and build relationships that improve ROI.

Selling to Low-Level Buyers

Getting in front of C-suite prospects can be a challenge. While you could take the easy route to negotiate with purchasing managers, they’ll rarely have the budget or the power to sanction huge deals.

This is a common problem, with 39% of professionals in B2B sales saying the inability to reach the right people is their biggest obstacle.

B2B sales strategies that focus on low-level buyers can’t deliver the high-growth and huge ROI you may be targeting. It’s much better to seek out the top-level decision makers who have the authority to agree to bigger deals. It may take more work, but it’ll be worth it.

Focusing on Features Over Value

When it comes to B2B sales, your prospects don’t care about the fancy features or the latest buzzwords. All they want to know is whether your products or services can solve their problem.

Instead of focusing on the product, focus on your potential customer. Identify their pain points, show them you care, and prove that your product or service offers the solution they need.

Implementing a Single-Track Content Strategy

For many years, content marketers have sung the praises of using the Pareto Principle.

Also known as the 80-20 Rule, marketing experts believe that it’s best to only spend 20% of your time creating content, and the other 80% of the time marketing it.

The evidence suggests this a solid barometer, especially when you are just getting started and need to promote your online presence to attract quality traffic to your website.

Unfortunately, many marketers put all their eggs in one basket, and simply throw everything behind a single channel. While SEO is a great one to back, even it alone may not yield the B2B customers you want.

Now, omnichannel marketing is seen as the future of e-commerce.

To succeed, you must have a presence across multiple mediums, from your company blog to Facebook videos to paid ads to influencer marketing partnerships. There is a lot to explore, and the most successful companies are those who work hard to create a seamless, unified experience from one touchpoint to the next.

Not Following Up

It’s rare to close a deal with just one or two engagements, especially in B2B sales. SPOTIO research shows that 80% of B2B sales require at least five follow-up calls.

Businesses that are considering your high-ticket product will need to be nurtured through the customer journey before they decide to get the checkbook out. While they’re deliberating, you need to stay in touch.

A lot of B2B companies struggle with this, forgetting to follow-up regularly. But when you use software to automate a follow-up sequence, you’ll be able to keep leads engaged throughout the sales process.

B2B Sales Tools

Let’s take a look at three tools that can help you streamline your B2B sales.

SPOTIO

The SPOTIO platform is a go-to solution for outside sales teams. Highlights include:

Google Places Integration –This integration offers a map view and business information of every company within a territory. This feature helps reps sort and targeting leads, as quickly filter by aspects like name, email, and business type.

Route Optimization – This feature allows reps to plan the most efficient routes using many different data points, such as distance, scheduling and meeting lengths.

Territory Management — This feature lets managers assign territories by geographic boundaries or draw custom boundaries for territories.

Task Automation — SPOTIO integrates with CRM platforms and automates the timing of steps in the sales process, such as follow-up calls. It also automatically backs up field notes to the CRM, so reps don’t have to manually enter notes when they return to the office.

Performance Analytics — Sales managers can analyze sales performance based on a number of metrics, such as visits, leads created, leads won, and leads lost. This data helps managers continuously improve processes and sales techniques, as well as identify opportunities for team development.

My Reports – This feature lets users create custom reports based on the KPIs that are most important to them. Sales managers and sales reps can save their reports as templates, change the parameters, and share them anytime.

e-Contracts Web + Mobile – Reps can use the mobile CRM to manage their sales pipeline and close deals with B2B customers while they’re on-the-go.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

This is a good option for companies on a smaller budget. Sales Navigator lets you tap into the immense database of LinkedIn, which has 930 million users.

By using Sales Navigator, you can discover new leads in your market that suit your target customer profile. This tool allows you to track growing companies, keep tabs on developing trends and opportunities in the market, and gather data that enhances your outreach efforts.

The Google Chrome add-on also helps you find correct email addresses for leads, making it easier to connect. Without a doubt, this is one of the best B2B sales tools to have in your locker.

Salesforce CRM

There aren’t many lists of B2B sales apps that don’t mention Salesforce.

Setting the bar for CRM platforms, this robust system integrates with virtually every other service or app you could want in B2B sales.

Better yet, it has a vast array of cloud-based applications for marketing, sales, and customer service. These are easy to get started with, which makes Salesforce suitable for teams of all sizes.

Whether you’re creating a B2B sales funnel, managing leads or analyzing reports, this one-stop solution is perfect for inside sales teams.

Inside and outside sales teams have very different needs when it comes to CRM functionality. Sales teams already using Salesforce for their inside sales efforts can use SPOTIO to quickly bolt-on the functionality needed by field sales reps.

Ready. Set. Sell.

Now you know how to turbocharge your B2B sales process. Which sales strategy will you try first?

________

SPOTIO is the #1 field sales engagement platform to increase your revenue, maximize your profitability, and increase your team’s productivity.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.

Easier said than done, we know, but it’s possible with the right sales management software. Keep reading to learn what this software does, why it’s beneficial, and specific features to look for. Then learn about the 11 best sales management software platforms.

What Is Sales Management?

Sales management is the process of managing a sales department. That includes:

• Setting objectives
• Developing processes
• Hiring, training, and motivating sales teams
• Analyzing sales data
• Sales forecasting
• Creating reports
• Defining territories
• Troubleshooting sluggish sales

What Is Sales Management Software?

Sales management software is a platform that helps sales managers stay on top of their responsibilities and track all sales activity in one place. It also helps sales teams work more efficiently, communicate with the sales team and key contacts, and see exactly what actions are necessary from day to day.

Benefits Of Sales Management Systems

Here are five benefits of sales management software:

1. Visibility

The best sales management software makes it easy to organize and keep track of leads, prospects, and customers. Field sales reps can access a complete history for every contact, add notes, and even transfer scheduled appointments to other reps.

Sales managers can see how reps are spending their day, the results of their efforts, and easily identify underperforming reps or territories.

2. Efficiency

Sales management software makes it easy to plan the most efficient sales routes. Reps can decide who they want to visit and let the software plan the best route between each stop, then add notes about their visits that automatically sync to your CRM.

3. Automated Workflows

Did you know that the average sales rep spends less than 36% of their time selling? The rest of their on-the-clock hours go toward non-revenue-producing tasks like admin work. Fortunately, the best sales management software can bring new efficiency to your sales process.

You can build automated workflows that reduce the amount of time reps spend on inputting customer data, sending follow-up emails, and other tedious tasks.

4. Real-Time Data

Data is the lifeblood of your sales department. Without it, you won’t know what’s working, what isn’t, and how to adjust your strategies for more success.

Proper sales team management software ensures customer data is always up-to-date. Think about it: When your reps have real-time data at their disposal, they can prioritize their time to focus on the most buy-ready leads.

5. More Sales

What’s the main reason you should invest in sales management software? It helps you generate more sales, plain and simple.

A sales management tool helps you oversee your sales reps, pinpoint winning strategies, track your revenue goals, and optimize your sales process.

Key Functions To Look For In A Sales Management Platform

Sales management software sounds pretty great, right? But how do you choose between the different options available to you? You start by looking for these seven features:

1. Prospect Management

The best sales team software helps you organize prospect and lead information such as:

• Names and locations
• Occupations and titles
• Budget
• Pipeline stage
• Previous interactions with your company

The right sales management software also lets you sort and color-code contacts by specific data points.

2. Activity And Performance Tracking

How do your reps spend time in the field? Are they following your sales process? As a sales manager, you need to be able to answer these questions.

Sales tracking software provides visibility into what daily activities — calls, emails, on-site visits, etc. — reps are completing, as well as progress toward top-level sales targets.

3. Sales Process Automation

Most reps are bogged down by a mountain of administrative tasks that limit their ability to do what they do best: Sell. Because of this, you’ll want to choose a sales management software that includes automation capabilities.

When you automate key steps in the sales process, your sales team won’t have to manually track who they last talked to and when, and what the next action should be.

4. Analytics Dashboard

Different organizations need visibility into different activity and performance-based metrics. That’s why it’s important to invest in a sales team management system that lets you view only the most vital KPIs for different stakeholders in the company.

5. Route Planning

Route planning can be a time-consuming part of the sales process. The best sales management software can automate route planning, saving reps loads of time. Look for technology that also incorporates mileage tracking, which eliminates yet another manual process for sales teams.

6. Custom Reporting

If you want the ability to run reports based on a variety of metrics, custom reporting is a feature to look for. For example, some sales management software lets you run reports based on individual and team performance, sales by territory, lost opportunities, and other metrics — and you can save your custom templates for repeat use.

7. Integrations

You probably already have technology that you and your team use everyday — Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce CRM, and Netsuite ERP, for example. Make sure you choose sales management software that integrates with your critical systems. With CRM integration, reps can automatically log visits, capture prospect details, and schedule follow-up reminders.

11 Best Sales Management Software Platforms

Now that we know what sales management is, its benefits, and some specific features to look for in this kind of software, let’s talk about a few of the options available to you. Below you’ll find the 11 best sales management software tools on the market today.

1. SPOTIO

Best for: Field sales teams. SPOTIO is ranked #1 in the field sales category and was a 2023 G2 Best Software Winner.

SPOTIO’s industry-leading sales management software includes task automation, document management, and sales routing features that have been proven to boost field sales revenue by up to 23%.

Key Sales Management Features:

• CRM Mapping: Outside sales teams need to visually organize customer and prospect data on a map to stay organized and find new deals faster. With SPOTIO, you can import your existing sales data, quickly search through Google Maps, and seamlessly sync data to your CRM.
• Activity Management: Do you know how many visits have your field reps made this week? How about calls, emails, or SMS messages? SPOTIO tracks all of these details so you can properly evaluate your reps’ performance and provide additional coaching, where needed.
• Autoplays: SPOTIO lets you create automated messaging strategies so reps are following the right processes and using the right tactics to engage contacts.
• Rep Tracking: Your reps spend most of their time in the field, away from their desks. But with SPOTIO, you can still keep a close eye on them. View their travel histories and learn if poor performance is due to a lack of effort or a need to retrain. Note: You can turn off GPS tracking if it makes your reps feel uncomfortable.
• Territory Management: Use SPOTIO to cut territories by geographic boundaries, types of opportunities, potential account value, or other data.
• Sales Tracking: SPOTIO gives sales managers an accurate view of their team’s performance so they can easily determine who’s on track to meet quota and where potential gaps in their sales process might be.
• Custom Reporting: SPOTIO’s My Reports feature enables admins, managers, and reps to quickly create custom reports that they can save, re-run, and view on any device.

2. Veloxy

Best For: Salesforce power-users

Veloxy is an AI sales assistant software that’s specifically for Salesforce users. The software automates non-selling activities inside Salesforce so sellers can become more productive and spend more of their time closing deals.

Key Sales Management Features:

• AI Sales Assistant: Veloxy’s AI assistant automates tedious tasks so reps can spend more time building relationships with prospects.
• Email Marketing: Email is one of the best ways to meet and engage with potential customers. Veloxy simplifies email for sales reps by personalizing messages and automating them to send at ideal times, then tracking the results.
• Analytics: Use Veloxy to get the data you need, when you need it. Then sync that data with your Salesforce account so your records are always up-to-date.

3. Pipedrive

Best for: Small sales teams

Pipedrive is a sales management software that helps small teams stay focused on the right deals at the right times. Use this tool to communicate with leads, automate tasks, and manage deals in a productive way.

Key Sales Management Features:

• Chatbots and Web Forms: Pipedrive includes live chat, chatbots, and custom web form features.
• AI-Powered Sales Mentor: Let Pipedrive’s AI sales assistant give you personalized performance tips to boost your results and compact data graphs to keep you on track.
• Plenty of Integrations: Does your sales team use Google? How about Microsoft, Xero, Slack, or Asana? Integrate them with Pipedrive with just one click.

4. Freshsales (formerly Freshworks CRM)

Best for: Integrated sales and marketing teams

The Freshsales sales management system combines contact management, deal management, sales sequences, and plenty of marketing features in one package.

Key Sales Management Features:

• Automation: Freshsales automatically assigns leads to specific reps based on custom lead-routing rules. It can also automate sequences in the sales process, manage intelligent workflows, and deliver notifications so nothing slips through the cracks.
• Communication: From within Freshsales, sales reps can communicate with leads by phone call, email, text, WhatsApp, or web chat.
• Marketing: This sales management software isn’t just for sales departments. Marketing teams can get in on the action, too, and take advantage of Freshsales web forms, email and landing page builder, and segmentation capabilities.

5. Nutshell

Best for: Small sales teams looking to grow

Nutshell is an easy-to-use sales and marketing tool. It includes contact management and sales automation features, as well as an email sequencer and free live customer support. It’s perfect for small teams with big ambitions for the future.

Key Sales Management Features:

• Contact Management: At the core of Nutshell is its CRM capabilities. Store all important contact details, from call notes to email conversations, in one location.
• Sales Automation: Wasted time is the enemy of effective sales teams. Eliminate tedious tasks with automated sales processes and communication workflows.
• Email Marketing: Stay in touch with your contacts and move them closer to the sale with Nutshell’s customizable email templates and automated sending features.

6. HubSpot

Best for: Large corporations

HubSpot is full-stack sales management software that includes contact management, call recording and tracking, email marketing, document management, and automation features. It can be difficult (and expensive) to adopt, but it’s a great tool for companies with a substantial budget. There’s also a free CRM with limited features.

Key Sales Management Features:

• Call Tracking: From within HubSpot, you can make, record, and log all sales calls.
• Automation: Keep leads from falling through the cracks and put time back into your day with HubSpot’s automated follow-ups, personalization, and workflows.
• Sales Analytics: Are your prospects progressing through the pipeline? How is each rep on your team performing? And how much revenue do you expect to bring in this quarter? HubSpot’s sales analytics dashboard can tell you.

7. Gong

Best for: Data-focused sellers

Gong is all about the data. Use this sales management software to access deep insights into your team’s performance so you can improve it in the future.

Key Sales Management Features:

• Deal Intelligence: Gong automatically captures the interactions between your sellers and customers to give you deep insights that boost retention.
• People Intelligence: Do you know why some of your reps outperform others? Gong analyzes the data to pinpoint what your sales stars do differently.
• Market Intelligence: To succeed at sales, you need to have your thumb on the pulse of your whole industry. Gong helps you understand what’s working right now.

8. Outreach

Best for: Outbound sales

If you need new leads and have cash to spare, Outreach is solid sales management software. Just be prepared for a steeper price tag than other tools.

Key Sales Management Features:

• Sales Sequences: Give your sales team a reliable tool to help plan when and how they interact with leads, then automate their emails, social posts, and more.
• AI Sales Assistant: The machine learning tech inside Outreach uncovers key customer insights and uses them to guide sales reps to preferable actions.
• Team Tracking: Take a look at Outreach’s analytics dashboards to discover what sales strategies your reps are deploying and the success levels of each.

9. SalesRabbit

Best for: Team communication

SalesRabbit is another tool for field sales teams. Whether you need to drum up more leads, cut territories, or create leaderboards, SalesRabbit can help. But its best feature is Team Messaging, which keeps your entire department on the same page.

Key Sales Management Features:

• Team Management: SalesRabbit has multiple features to simplify the sales process, including territory mapping, rep tracking, and team messaging.
• Lead Management: Lost leads are nothing new. SalesRabbit wants to make them a thing of the past via lead organization and route planning tools.
• Forms and Contracts: It’s not official until your lead signs on the dotted line. SalesRabbit allows users to create custom contracts that can be signed digitally.

10. Ambition

Best for: Coaching enterprise sales teams

Do you manage a sales team at an enterprise company? Then take a look at Ambition, a sales management tool that includes gamification to get the most out of your reps.

Key Sales Management Features:

• Sales Coaching: With Ambition, you can run 1:1 coaching sessions and give private notes and team training meetups, then implement action plans with ease.
• Gamification: Sales teams are competitive. Use this to your advantage with Ambition’s gamification tools that let you run competitions, display leaderboards, etc.
• Goal Tracking: To achieve your goals, you need to set and track them. Automate this process with Ambition and reach your objectives more consistently.

11. Solo

Best for: Solar sales teams

Solo is sales management software for solar sales teams. Its intuitive mobile interface lets field sales reps generate instant proposals, collect signatures, and even help customers access financing.

Key Sales Management Features:

• SPOTIO Integration: Access SPOTIO’s powerful lead-management features from within the Solo app.
• Sun Path Simulation: With Solo’s SunPixel feature, you can show customers how their solar powers align with the sun throughout the day.
• Integrated Document Management: Access, customize, and share contracts, installation agreements, and more from your mobile device.

Which Sales Management System Is Right For You?

Once you implement your sales management software into your workflow, you and your team become more productive, work together more effectively, and generate more sales.

So what are you waiting for? Choose a tool that has each of the must-have features listed above — prospect management, sales rep tracking, process automation, and an analytics dashboard. Then start using it and getting results.

Manage an outside sales team? Then you can’t go wrong with SPOTIO, the best solution for field sellers. Request a free demo today to see SPOTIO in action.

Latest figures suggest that sales performance management is a “must-have” system for sales teams in today’s fast-paced market.

According to OpenSymmetry:

• Companies yet to embrace SPM typically see only 25% of their reps achieve their sales quota goals.
• In contrast, sales organizations that apply sales performance management, over 81% of sales reps achieve their annual quota. Plus, these companies have 3x higher annual revenue growth compared to others.

In this guide, you’ll learn what sales performance management is, why it’s important for both inside and outside sales teams, and how to implement a sales performance management process in your organization.

What is Sales Performance Management?

Sales performance management is the practice of overseeing and guiding sales professionals to achieve organizational goals and objectives. A robust sales performance management process includes training and development, and monitoring a sales rep’s progress so that they can plan and set their own goals.

Sales performance management should not be confused with incentive compensation management (ICM), which allows you to automate and improve your incentive compensation management and processes. Structuring your incentives and compensation is only one (important) part of the entire SPM system.

Other parts of SPM use data to optimize planning, improve processes, and align stakeholders across all of your sales functions, such as capacity planning, territory mapping, and sales forecasting.

Why is SPM Important for Inside and Outside Sales?

Sales performance management ensures everyone is on the same page.

For instance, a sales team wants leaderboards, competitions, and gamification to ensure they hit their quotas. But the finance and sales operations teams want a planning process that rewards reps and grows company revenue. Using the right software to implement SPM gives your sales team and back-office administrators the tools they need to do their jobs effectively.

1. Sales planning and administration

Sales planning and administration covers creating, balancing, and assigning sales territories.

Without a sales performance management system, companies have to manually create territories. Naturally, this is an error-prone and laborious process. Territories may be unbalanced or unclear, which can have a negative impact on sales and employee morale.

With a centralized and connected SPM system, you can create optimized territories and quotas based on combined geographic data, ZIP Code, or historical sales performance. This data-informed approach helps balance territories and quotas, which, in turn, leads to happier sales reps and better sales performance.

2. Compensation planning and administration

Planning and administering sales compensation plans is complicated.

Administrators have to get the balance just right — compensating reps too much can damage the bottom line, but paying them too little can demotivate them. A single, connected SPM system gives managers and admins a complete, up-to-date view to analyze sales compensation plan performance.

Administrators can quickly see which compensation plan components are costing the business, but failing to generate revenue. If they need to change things, administrators can use bonuses or sales competitions to get sales back on track.

3. Sales distribution and execution

Sales distribution and execution are critical front-office components of sales performance management that rely on the back-office planning to be in place. Think about it:

• How long does it take your company to plan and administer sales compensation plans?
• Are your sales territories balanced and assigned appropriately?
• Are quotas aligned to achievable targets and accepted by sales reps?

If sales reps are waiting for their territories or questioning their quotas, they’re usually not focused on selling, which means they have more to do later.

An SPM system with review and approval workflows means sales leaders can collaborate with finance and sales operations to speed up the planning process. For example, an experienced sales manager can suggest external factors that might impact a territory so the planning teams can investigate and make any necessary adjustments.

A sales performance management system enables a business to make informed, data-driven decisions to meet its sales and revenue goals.

Benefits of sales performance management

We already mentioned that companies who’ve embraced SPM get 3x more revenue than other companies. But what are the other benefits of SPM?

Improved sales forecasting accuracy

SPM tracking provides essential data that lets your company forecast future sales trends.

For example, if the data shows that your reps average six closed deals for every 15 prospects, then you can more accurately gauge future revenue based on the number of prospects your reps are working.

Better trained sales reps

Whether you have experienced or new reps in your sales team, employee development is a significant benefit of having a sales performance management process. Successful sales performance management adds structure and accountability to your sales training.

For instance, you could include these elements in a sales rep development plan:

• Complete mandatory training for sales enablement tools.
• Interview company sales leaders to understand operational scope.
• Read additional thought leadership material by sales professionals.
• Attend an upcoming sales seminar or conference.

Better territory management

Sales performance management data helps you assign each territory to a sales rep based on their skill set and experience level. For example, you can make sure that your top-performing sales reps work the most valuable accounts.

Better compensation structures

Sales reps should get credit for not only closing deals, but also for retaining clients and growing accounts. A sales performance management system lets you uncover key metrics about who’s nurturing those long-term relationships and compensate them accordingly.

Increased sales and revenue

When reps are well trained, well compensated, and working the territories that most closely align with their skill set, you’ll see an increase in sales and revenue.

How to Implement a Sales Performance Management Process

Now you know why SPM is important for sales teams, let’s take a look at how to implement a sales performance management process that gets results.

Identify sales performance metrics

The first step is to identify your sales performance metrics. These metrics must align with your business objectives so reps understand how their actions contribute to the success of the business.

Here are some sales performance metrics to consider using for your sales reps:

1. Lead-to-opportunity conversion rate

This standard metric is the number of leads your sales reps convert into customers. At the end of the day, you want paying customers on your books, so this performance metric is definitely aligned with your business metrics.

If you find the conversion rate is not as high as expected, you can look into the reasons why. Perhaps the offer isn’t attractive, or maybe the sales rep is not selling the benefits.

2. Sales quota attainment

Looking at your conversion rates can give you an insight into how many deals you need to close to reach your targets.

But sales quota attainment shows you how close you’re coming to those targets. Tracking this metric is an essential part of sales performance management strategy as it shows you how well your sales team is performing as a whole and on an individual level.

You can also compare it with other metrics, like lead to close rate, to see if the quotas are realistic or if they need to be modified to keep sales reps motivated.

3. Sales productivity metrics

Sales productivity metrics record the speed at which your sales reps reach their quota and which activities they spend time on.

Examples of sales productivity metrics include the percentage of:

• Total hours spent prospecting.
• Total hours spent on data entry.
• Closed-won deals (how many closed deals resulted in a sale over a specific sales period).

Communicate goals with the sales team

Once you’ve identified what sales performance metrics you’re going to use, you need to inform your team. This communication process allows your sales reps to digest the information and provide their feedback.

At this stage, you need to have an open dialog to make sure your sales team is on board. If they have genuine concerns, you can make the necessary adjustments. On the other hand, you can also explain the reasoning behind the goals and how you’ll use them to reward top performers.

Provide training and feedback

Identify the training resources and tools each sales rep requires.

It’s important to allocate time in their schedule for both formal classroom training and individual learning. You’ll also need to assign any mentors or SMEs who can provide mentoring and training.

Create a performance plan that includes learning and development targets as well as sales performance quotas.

You’ll need to schedule regular performance reviews to:

• Review documented goals.
• Share relevant feedback on successful projects.
• Offer constructive feedback on areas to improve.
• Provide an overall performance summary and rating.

Cut and assign territories

The next step is to divide and assign territories to maximize sales team efficiency.

It’s important to make sure your reps don’t step on each other’s toes, that they all have enough prospects to work, and that top-performers are working the most valuable accounts.

Image: Mapping sales territories with SPOTIO.

You’ll also want to view performance by territories to ensure your resource allocation is appropriate.

Implement A Hybrid Sales Process

Support your sales reps by providing the right technology. For example, SPOTIO offers both a web and mobile interface that reps can use to communicate via text, email, or phone. With all communication contained in a single platform, hybrid sales reps can quickly pivot between conversations and see a history of their interaction with every client and lead.

Create a healthy level of competition

Sales reps thrive off competition, and there’s nothing better to keep them motivated than a sales leaderboard. You can create various leaderboards based on your performance metrics, such as appointments, wins, conversions, or revenue. Plus, you can run separate competitions and performance incentives.

Whatever you choose, leaderboards give reps real-time figures on how they stack up against teammates.

Monitor rep productivity

Finally, you need to monitor your reps’ daily performance to see exactly what they’re doing. By tracking their activity, you’ll know when to train them based on skills, rather than effort.

Are they getting around their territory, making the expected number of visits but failing to close the deal? Or are they taking too long to reach appointments and missing out on sales?

Monitoring sales rep productivity increases accountability in the field.

What to Look for in Sales Performance Management Software

If you’re going to manage and optimize the sales performance in your organization, then you need the right tools.

Sales performance management software automates and integrates sales processes with other operational and financial data to improve performance and efficiency across the organization.

Here are some features to look for when selecting your sales performance management software.

Sales rep visibility

Tracking your sales reps in the field lets you judge whether you need to coach them based on skills rather than effort.

For example, if they’re not closing many deals but are getting to all their appointments on time, you know they’re putting in the effort but may need a little coaching to help close more deals.

Sales compensation management

You want an accurate compensation system that allows you to manage and pay your sales reps fairly based on their performance against their goals, and also lets them track their own progress toward goals.

Sales quota management

You need a way to forecast future quota targets based on relevant and accurate data from one system rather than disparate platforms.

Sales territory management

Your sales territory management software should allow you to divide territories strategically to maximize sales team efficiency. You’ll want the ability to create territories and allocate the best sales rep to each territory so you can generate the most revenue.

For example, SPOTIO’s territory mapping feature helps reps squeeze the most value from each sales territory. Managers are able to cut and assign territories by geographic boundaries (state, county, city, etc.), or by drawing on a map.

Sales Process Automation

The challenge of working multiple leads is keeping track of where each one is in the sales process. With SPOTIO’s AutoPlays feature, you’ll never have to worry about leads falling through the cracks — just define your sequence of touchpoints, and SPOTIO will notify reps when it’s time to check in with their leads and customers.

Colorized pins also make it easy for reps and managers to spot new and existing customers on the map. Pins can then be sorted by status – no answer, contacted, call back and not qualified – to best fit the desired workflow for the day.

Sales leaderboards

Sales leaderboards are an essential gamification feature, as they motivate your sales reps to out-perform their colleagues. To add gamification to your sales performance management strategy, e sure your software can:

• Create leaderboards for the metrics you want to improve, such as calls, appointments, wins, or revenue.
• Give sales reps real-time tracking into how they’re performing against teammates.
• Run competitions and incentivize performance.

Sales performance analytics

It’s important to have a clear, accurate view of your sales performance metrics. Otherwise, you’re just taking a “best guess” approach.

Sales performance analytics provide clear insights so you can make informed decisions and hit your targets. You can also use the data to forecast future campaigns so quotas and targets are more realistic and achievable.

With SPOTIO’s My Reports feature, you can set the parameters for your reports to include only the data that’s most relevant and save each report as a template, so you can quickly reproduce it at any time.

Image: Pipeline dashboard inside SPOTIO.

Improve Your Sales Performance Management Today

Sales performance management increases revenue for those companies that embrace it.

Using modern, integrated sales performance management software allows you to optimize planning and improve processes across all of your sales functions, including forecasting, territory mapping, quota setting, and compensation.

Try SPOTIO to manage and improve the performance of your outside sales team.

In this post, we’ll talk about how Salesforce Territory Management can help your sales team operate with greater efficiency and close more deals. We’ll also explain how SPOTIO enhances the functionality of territory management software. Using Salesforce Territory Management and SPOTIO will help you create a solid foundation for your sales reps.

About Salesforce

Founded in 1999, Salesforce was the first cloud-based SaaS customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Over the years, Salesforce has expanded its product offerings and features to help sales teams work more effectively.

What is Salesforce Territory Management?

Available in both Classic and Lightning Experience, Salesforce Territory Management creates territories based on rules you define. It’s a scalable solution that lets you easily add, remove, or reconfigure sales territories, see detailed analytics, and filter data by a wide range of options.

For a guided tour of how this works, click here.

Salesforce territory modeling lets you compare performance projections for new assignments and management hierarchies. It also provides management and sales team leaders a range of other tools to effectively collaborate and close more deals.

Salesforce Enterprise Territory Management Features

Let’s take a look at Salesforce Territory Management features for outside sales teams.

Customize Salesforce Territory Settings

Once you’re ready to build out your sales territory management system, simply follow the instructions in Setup under Territory Settings.

If your Salesforce instance already has a role hierarchy in place, all you have to do is assign users to territories based on the predetermined structure.

Clone And Test Sales Territories

Setting up territories is part science, part guesswork, and sometimes territories don’t work out as anticipated. With Salesforce Territory Management, you can create a sales territory, clone it, and test it in the Planning stage before moving it to the Active stage.

Create Reports By Territory

Enterprise Territory Management comes with plenty of custom report types to accommodate your needs, such as:

• Accounts by sales territory
• Territories without accounts
• Users not assigned to territories
• Sales territories per user
• Account fields, such as annual revenue

Set Up Territory Forecasts

Using the Collaborative Forecasts feature, you can access a page that includes forecasting data based on:

• Sales territories assigned to each opportunity
• Sales territories you’re assigned to
• Opportunities in each sales territory

Users can also share forecasts for their own territories within Salesforce.

Advanced Segmentation Across Salesforce Territories

You can divvy up territories in a variety of ways with Salesforce Territory Management:

• Geography – city, state, Zip Code
• Customer type – whether they’re new or existing
• Customer industry – pharma, food and beverage, home improvement, solar, etc.
• Customer revenue – allocate the appropriate resources/personnel
• Product requirements – which of your product offerings suits best
• Sales type – B2B, B2C, distributor, etc.

Salesforce Territory Management Best Practices

Use territory hierarchies

Establishing territory hierarchy helps sales reps understand the “big picture” and establish boundaries. For example, in the image below, it’s easy to see the delineation of sales territories.

Once you’ve created your parent-child hierarchies, you can assign roles to users.

Define User Roles

Setting up roles ensures that everyone on your sales team sees only the information that’s directly relevant to them. Here’s an example of how that would work, based on the hierarchy image above:

Bill is head of sales for the western division. Mary covers “West 1,” and James covers “West 2.” Bill can see all sales data for the western division and its child hierarchies. James and Mary can see only the data for their individual territories.

Use lead assignment rules

You can use Salesforce Territory Management to assign prospects to the best-suited sales rep. As an example: If Shauna has really dialed-in her pitch and is able to resonate with a certain type of prospect, Salesforce Territory Management makes it easy to assign her leads that she’s likely to have success with.

With SPOTIO’s Salesforce integration, you can create custom account assignment rules, set unique pin colors for each rule, and automatically distribute leads to your reps.

Assign Forecast Managers

To successfully establish a fruitful territory management strategy, you need forecast managers.

Assigning someone as a forecast manager means that all forecasts from users below that user in the forecast hierarchy roll up to that person.

For example, an executive and executive assistant can have the same roles in Salesforce, but the executive is the assigned forecast manager in the forecast hierarchy. Both the executive and executive assistant can create forecasts, but only the executive can access forecasts from other users.

How SPOTIO Helps Sales Managers Succeed With Salesforce

So you know how to use Salesforce Territory Management, but what if you need even more specificity when it comes to sales records on the go?

SPOTIO is designed to keep your field data and CRM working as a synchronized unit.

Two-way integration with Salesforce syncs your information in real time, allowing reps to leverage the power of historical territory data and enriched lead information no matter where they are. And SPOTIO will automatically update your CRM with any notes your sales team adds to accounts while in the field.

Assign territories as granularly as you want with SPOTIO, even down to multiple child territories for each parent territory.

SPOTIO’s flexible integration includes field-mapping, as well as task sequences. When you complete an activity or update a pin within SPOTIO, a new task is created in Salesforce, ready for when you get back to the office.

Here are just a few of the powerful features and benefits SPOTIO offers:

Visual customer mapping for logical routes

The ability to see data from your CRM on a map gives you an easy way to see the performance of each sales territory and sales rep.

Leveraging colorization, you can sort and filter the map to reflect any of the data points you associated with your pins. Do you want to see all current opportunities? How about pipeline stage or last activity with a customer? Simply select the criteria and filter the map view accordingly.

Real-time outside sales tracking

SPOTIO’s Sales Tracking feature helps you see what’s happening in the field so you can coach, train, and help reps be more successful.

Get field sales tracking insights and see detailed location activity of sales reps for better management:

• Monitor and find reps with GPS-verified location tracking.
• With Sales Leaderboards, measure and monitor the sales performance for each rep.
• Create customized activity reports so you can track sales activities that matter most to your business.
• Gain a holistic understanding of how leads are moving through the pipeline.

Real-time performance metrics

It’s easy to optimize your sales engine when you have visibility into a variety of activity metrics and access to performance reports. Pull metrics by sales territory or rep so you can spot any underproductive territories or fix any bottlenecks in your sales cadence.

Custom maps of territories and assignments

Our integration allows you to sync to either the lead or account object. Leads and accounts created in SPOTIO are automatically created in Salesforce with the field mapping criteria you established.

Create Sales Processes By Territory

Depending on the structure of your sales territory hierarchy, your sales process may be unique in each territory. With SPOTIO AutoPlay, you can define each step in the process and automate reminders for your sales team members.

Reps can add notes explaining the results of each step, and that information will sync to Salesforce Territory Management.

Sell More With SPOTIO

Statistics show that sales reps spend just a third of their time selling, and only 65% hit their sales quotas. Managing territories effectively can help reps stay focused on their goals.

No matter how good your reps may be, there’s always a need to find better ways to improve sales accountability. Re-evaluating and optimizing sales territory management is essential to meeting your core goals and quotas.

With the intuitive integration of SPOTIO’s sales support and Salesforce’s Enterprise Territory Management, your reps and teams will reach peak sales performance.

______

SPOTIO is the #1 field sales engagement and performance management software that will increase revenue, maximize profitability, and boost sales productivity.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.

___

Sales metrics might answer that question, but too often, sales managers look at metrics that are outside of their control. A Harvard Business Review study found that of 306 metrics sales managers track, only 17% are sales activities. The key to effective sales activity management is focusing on the metrics that matter — the ones you can actually influence.

In this guide, we’re going to look at:

What is Sales Activity Management? 
Why You Should Track Sales Activities
8 Ways to Implement Sales Activity Management For Your Sales Team

Let’s dive in.

What is Sales Activity Management?

Sales activity management is defining the sales activities that will help your sales reps meet their goals, tracking associated metrics, and optimizing activities that aren’t producing the right outcomes.

Let’s get this out of the way: Sales activity management is not an excuse for team leaders to micromanage their sales reps. Instead, it’s a way to find leaks in a sales pipeline and reflect on a rep’s sales activities to sell smarter and close more deals.  

As Salesforce found, the majority of sales leaders are now looking to technology to help them enhance sales activity management. As selling activities become more intertwined with tech, it makes sense that team leaders are seeking out ways to digitally track, monitor, and motivate their team on the ground.

Why You Should Track Sales Activities

The main reason to track sales activities is that they directly impact your profits. But profits don’t happen without people, so effective sales activity management means focusing on how you can support reps in their work. 

Visibility

If you’re using software for sales activity management, you can slice-and-dice data to look for trends. For example, if you notice sales are lagging in a specific territory, you can check to see whether the rep covering that area is spending too much time getting from one appointment to the next. If that’s the case, route optimization could improve that rep’s efficiency and help them close more deals.

Goal Setting

Sales reps may have a quota, but they may need a little guidance on their way to that goal. Here’s an example that illustrates that concept:

Without Sales Activity Tracking
Sam knows he needs to close $20,000 in sales in Q1. His sales manager hasn’t defined which activities he should focus on to achieve that goal. As a result, Sam neglects to follow up with several leads and misses his sales goal.

With Sales Activity Tracking
Sam’s manager reviews sales data in the company sales management platform. Based on the past three quarters, Sam’s manager sees that to hit $20,000, a rep will need to make X number of sales calls and set X number of appointments. A rep will also need to follow up with leads at least twice before they convert. The sales manager then uses the software to automate these steps; Sam follows them and makes his quarterly sales goal.

Retention and Growth

By regularly analyzing sales team performance, you can see who your top performers are and who needs additional training. You can use that information to recognize your stars and grow talent from within. And you can even create incentive programs based on sales activity achievements

8 Ways to Implement Sales Activity Management for Your Sales Team

1. Discover Which Sales Activities Matter Most to Your Business

To take full advantage of sales activity management, it’s essential to look at key selling activities that are actually helping your sales team close deals.

• How are your sales reps contacting prospects?
• How many touchpoints did they need to move the prospect along in the pipeline?
• How many leads are they hitting in their assigned territories?
• How many demos are they booking?

By analyzing the numbers and results of your failed deals, it’s easier to spot where your team has gone wrong. Sales activity management can pinpoint when a deal stopped progressing, what the obstacle was, and how your sales rep tried to overcome it.

Using software takes the pain out of figuring out what these roadblocks were, and when they appeared.  For example, sales managers can use SPOTIO’s lead management capabilities to track and manage leads by tagging them as:

• A “Not Interested” lead: If a lead isn’t interested, sales leaders can run a report six months or so down the road and create a list of prospects to re-engage.
  
• A “Future” lead: This helps sales reps flag “hot” prospects to come back to in a particular territory.
  
• A “Re-assigned” lead: Sales leaders can re-assign a lead from one rep to another based on their territories or lead management strategy.

All of this happens inside SPOTIO’s lead management software and its dedicated app, so reps have access to lead-specific information even when they’re out pounding the pavement.

2. Assign “Balanced” Sales Territories 

Maximizing sales productivity means having your field reps selling in the right places. Building a sales territory plan assigning reps a balanced workload can help boost your team’s sales activity.

Sales territories segment customers for each rep using clear cut boundaries. Territories can be based on geography and other factors such as sales potential, referral source, or product type.

An example of a sales territory in SPOTIO

With clearly defined territories, sales leaders can spread the workload across their sales team structure while strategically addressing the needs of their assigned markets.

3. Track Your Field Reps in Real-Time

Have you ever been in the office while your reps are out selling and wondered if they’re making progress?

Sales activity management can help team leaders track their reps in the field in real time. Location verification tags — or pins — show each of your sales reps’ locations on a map, so you know where they are.

Tracking sales activity in real time makes it easier to schedule and plan what areas reps should target, and you can change up their strategy from afar.

Using SPOTIO, sales leaders can track the exact position of a sales rep in the field and access other information such as their:

• Location: Is the rep in the correct territory?
  
• Status: Are they interacting with a prospect or en-route to meet another lead?
  
• Date and time-stamped data: Who did they visit yesterday, and when?

An example of field rep tracking using SPOTIO. Tracking a field rep’s activity allows sales managers to make smarter decisions in real-time.

Between prospecting, meetings, and closing deals, sales teams have a lot to juggle when they leave the office. Using software like SPOTIO gives field sales reps and managers the information they need to make decisions about where the rep should be and what move they should make next.

4. Empower Reps to Sign Contracts While In The Field

Equipping your sales reps in the field with sales activity management software allows them to close contracts anywhere, even at a prospect’s door.

Emailing back-and-forth to get a contract signed can take up a lot of time. Instead, specialized software gives your reps immediate access to the files they need to close a deal on the spot. Using e-Contract functionality, reps can access files like product spec sheets and presentations and even collect signatures right from their mobile devices.

Cutting out the paperwork allows your reps to instantly move deals along in their sales pipelines without having to wait until they’re back in the office to prepare and send out contracts.

5. Use a Leaderboard to Track Performance (and Motivate Reps)

Every sales rep on your team is eager to hit their quota.

However, some sales leaders are now using leaderboards to encourage healthy competition in their teams and reward sales reps who hit their goals.

Using a leaderboard means when a metric does fall behind, a sales manager can help refocus a rep’s efforts to get them back on track.

For example, if your reps are falling behind on their number of monthly door knocks, try running a team contest to help unite your team and boost the number for the following month.

Using SPOTIO, teams can build customer leaderboards and measure performance against each other to push towards mutual goals and targets.

Having a team leaderboard that’s visible to the entire team is the perfect way to create some healthy in-house competition amongst your sales reps.

6. Stay in Contact with Your Field Reps

We all know communication is key when it comes to closing deals, especially when you’ve got sales reps out in the field.

Having a team leaderboard that’s visible to the entire team is the perfect way to create some healthy in-house competition among your sales reps.

Creating channels for reps to communicate with each other and the main office while out in the field is vital to keeping everyone on the same page.

A group messaging platform is the easiest solution for dispersed teams, and even better if it’s connected to your sales activity management platform.

For example, using SPOTIO’s in-app chat feature, sales managers can split reps into teams (i.e. Chicago southside team), which makes it easier to send information to specific sales territories.

Think of it as a Slack #channel inside your sales activity management software!

7. Use Sales Activity Data to See Where Your Reps Underperform

Without data, it’s almost impossible to plug holes in your sales funnels and pinpoint underperforming reps.

Collecting and analyzing sales activity data makes it easier for sales managers to find where their reps are struggling and identify whether a team member needs help.

More importantly, it gives managers the numbers they need to see which sales reps on their team aren’t getting their activities done.

Let’s imagine a sales rep isn’t booking the number of demos they should be. Are they finding it hard to qualify leads? Or are they struggling to turn prospects into demo opportunities?

By tracking sales activity and data, it’s easier for managers to see where the rep is struggling and come up with a solution to solve the problem. Once again, software makes this process a lot easier (not to mention saving a ton of time for sales managers.)

Using SPOTIO, sales managers can create pipeline and activity benchmarks and view custom dashboard reports to measure team performance and pinpoint funnel leaks.

At the click of a button, sales managers can use SPOTIO to track how many leads a sales rep has created or how many territories they’ve visited.

8. Forecast Growth

Last but not least, sales activity management makes it easier for teams to forecast. Sales forecasting is vital for finding potential problems before they ever arise.

Forecasting is only successful when sales activities are monitored along a pipeline from start to finish. It’s crucial sales managers know the details of every deal, from prospecting to demo to how long it took to sign the deal. The only way to keep track of everything is to feed every piece of data back into a CRM or sales activity management software.

At the end of every month, quarter, or year, sales managers can then access the data quickly to produce accurate sales forecasts and work backwards from their initial goals.

Wrapping Up

The selling game for field reps has changed — for the better.

The days of door knocking with a clipboard and briefcase are over. Thanks to the rise of tech for field reps, it’s never been easier for sales teams to work together and communicate when they’re on the move. Team leaders can use sales activity management software to assign sales territories, track their reps, and even help them sign contracts on the go.

It’s clear that the majority of sales leaders see sales activity management software as the way of the future. How would a sales management platform improve your bottom line?

______

Questions or comments? Contact SPOTIO at info@spotio.com or comment below.

SPOTIO is the #1 field sales acceleration and performance management software that will increase revenue, maximize profitability, and boost sales productivity.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.

To build a consistent pipeline that fuels ongoing results, sales reps and sales managers need to know that they’re executing the right activities every single day. With the help of intelligent technology and data-driven insights, reps and managers can understand where and how they can allocate their time, energy, and resources for the highest return.

In this post, we’ll look at 11 data-backed sales activities that build pipeline and drive predictable sales results. We’ll also cover how to use technology to analyze and improve your sales processes.

What are sales activities? 

Sales activities are the day-to-day actions, tactics, or practices that reps and sales managers execute. These activities usually focus on results, like winning a big opportunity or exceeding a sales quota. However, without the right processes and technology, reps may spend a lot of time on tasks that don’t move the needle.

Sales activities can be divided into two categories: qualitative and quantitative

Qualitative Sales Activities

Although qualitative activities can’t be measured by data, they do provide insight into how your sales team is doing, provide a way to motivate, give insight into customer satisfaction, and illustrate the overall picture of sales performance.

Examples of qualitative sales activities include:

• Contacting new prospects or existing customers
• Presenting your product or service
• Nurturing strong client relationships
• Following up diligently
• Ensuring customer satisfaction
• Fostering brand awareness

Quantitative Sales Activities

Quantitative activities give you raw numbers that help you understand the efficiency of your sales team. You’re able to see the number of new opportunities, new leads, amount of revenue last quarter, etc. These insights help you assess your sales team, coach reps who need help in a certain area of the sales cycle, and model future growth based on past performance data.

Examples of quantitative sales activities include:

First Stage to Won:

Visits to Next Stage (Average Number of Visits):

Visits to Next Stage (Total Efforts):

Leads Created by User:

Pipeline Status:

Value of Pipeline:

Leads Created by Territories:

Loss Reasons:

By understanding which sales activities yield the strongest results, sales teams can make the most of their time.

11 Sales Activities That Will Move The Needle In 2023

Monitoring and tracking key sales activities lets you know where the sales team is at as a whole — you can identify what’s working, what’s not working, who needs coaching, and so on and so forth.

Having a grasp on the following 11 activities will set your organization up to increase sales.

1. Manage your daily sales activities with a CRM

Lack of tracking is a problem sales managers face when trying to identify the most important sales activities. CRMs fill this gap by helping a sales team keep track of contacts, accounts, deals and activities.

CRMs fill this gap by helping sales teams keep track of contacts, accounts, deals and activities.

SPOTIO’s Field Sales CRM gives sales leaders visibility into how top outside reps are making it happen and where leads are falling off in the sales process, with features like:

• Sales pipeline visibility
• Next best action to take
• Simplified and automated prospecting
• Reporting and KPIs
• Leads won and win rate

SPOTIO also lets reps access sales material and contracts from their mobile devices, with support for:

• PDF
• MP4
• Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
• PNG, JPG, GIF

That means reps don’t have to return to the office to access critical files and can keep conversations moving forward.

2. Strategically assign sales territories

Sales territory management is the process of using data to segment customers and prospects to better track sales, streamline prospecting, map visits, and enhance productivity in the field.

In addition to cutting out the noise of low-return accounts, thoughtful sales territory management aligns salespeople with the most appropriate customer base — whether that’s by geography, vertical, expertise, or past relationship. It allows a sales team to focus on viable accounts and spend more time in the field making face-to-face contact.

SPOTIO’s territory management software enables managers to create custom maps of different territories for assignment to sales reps. The user-friendly mobile app lets reps see and manage their territories, add notes about each lead, and share information with other reps.

3. Close more deals in less time with smart routing 

Sales reps have the potential to waste hours of valuable time wandering aimlessly without a strategic plan for how they’ll structure their day. Smart route planning is an essential activity to ensure each member of your sales team is making the best use of their time.

Route planning software, such as SPOTIO Routing enables reps to see exactly where to go, what to do, and the most efficient way to get there. Sales professionals can set up meetings, update notes in real-time, and prospect new accounts in between meetings.

4. Examine your sales data for insights 

These days, there’s copious amounts of data available to sales teams for tracking the activities that produce the best results. Most organizations have data at their fingertips, but only the best teams put motions in place to use that data to augment activity and improve results.

Some useful activities to measure include the volume and timing of email, sales calls, meetings, marketing campaigns, and phone calls. By monitoring your data, you’ll be able to track the activities that lead up to a sale.

Some examples of tracking data:

• Pipeline activity inside territories
• Historical prospect, contact, and opportunity data
• Real-time insights of rep activity and performance
• Performance tracking
• GPS-verified location tracking
• Colorized data views
• Real-time rep visibility

Smart CRM solutions like SPOTIO field CRM go beyond aiding the sales team by tracking and organizing data so sales leadership can easily analyze it.

5. Automate Follow-Up Activities

Sales reps are almost always juggling tasks and priorities. Between prospecting, nurturing, working a deal, or closing there’s a lot to be done. To ensure the pipeline flows smoothly, sales reps can automate important tasks to make sure nothing falls off the radar.

SPOTIO’s appointment setting functionality syncs with Google and Outlook calendars and lets users create appointments for themselves and other team members. It gives users the ability to see busy and available times for anyone on the team and book appointments accordingly.

6. Focus on the best prospects

One way to optimize time in sales is to focus on the most qualified prospects in your pipeline. Specifically, you want to focus on those prospects who have shown interest in your product or solution — the ones who just need a little push.

When you’ve identified your best prospects, your role is to keep them engaged. One example of a sales activity you can perform is sending an email with a link to an article your prospect would find useful. Another thing you can do is stay active on social media where prospects can see the way you interact with happy customers.

7. Pursue Cold Leads

Sales managers may want to assign someone the task of checking in with cold leads. Situations change, and a cold lead that wasn’t ready to buy six months ago might now be working with a bigger budget or encountering a new pain point they need to solve.

This sales strategy is a good one for the end of the year, when businesses are firming up the next year’s budget.

8. Segment Lead Management Activities

One way to make your lead management activities more efficient is to segment your leads. For example, you could segment leads by where they are in the sales process, their annual revenue, or other attributes.

With SPOTIO Lead Machine, you get instant access to lead demographics and can filter leads by more than 200 data points. You can also color-code leads in a map view, for quick reference when in the field.

By segmenting your leads and lead management activities, you can organize your time to focus on certain types of activities in bulk. You can use templates and repeatable behavior to be efficient and stay focused

9. Use a sales tracker to pinpoint bottlenecks

Instead of monitoring every move a sales rep makes outside the office, you can use SPOTIO sales tracking technology to see sales data. A sales activity tracker will help your team identify which activities are driving results, as well as which ones are not, so you can improve the sales process.

If performance is down, you can go straight to the source of the problem and correct it. Likewise, if you notice certain activities are driving a lot of sales, you can dedicate more resources to them and scale. Tracking and acting on sales activity data is one of the few ways sales teams can control their outcomes.

Sales management should be tracking both quantitative and qualitative data. Qualitative data helps you paint a bigger picture of how customers view your company. Quantitative data can be used for more concrete things.

For example, you can create clear sales goals like increasing your lead generation by a certain percentage over the next quarter. After the quarter is up, you’ll have some data on what part of your sales funnel is generating the most leads, and what parts need work.

10. Nurture customer relationships

The most successful teams focus on nurturing their customer relationships to fuel repeat and ongoing sales. In fact, a Bain study cites that repeat customers are known to spend more than 60% more than new customers.

The best way to nurture customer relationships is to learn about their business, understand their biggest challenges and goals, and focus on how your product or service can help them reach their potential. You can do this by ensuring you celebrate their successes, either via social media or with an acknowledgment phone call.

You can also keep them engaged by ensuring they’re the first to know about any new product releases, services or company news.

11. Communicate with your team

All great relationships hinge on the quality and consistency of your communication habits. Great communication ensures that everyone involved is clear on expectations, marching toward the same outcome, and familiar with where they stand. Poor communication, on the other hand, often leads to mismatched expectations and disappointment.

Clear communication defines desired outcomes, maximizes productivity, minimizes churn, and perhaps most importantly, prevents frustration and failure. For sales teams that spend the bulk of their time on the road, clear communication is critical.

To get the best results, effective sales managers use a mix of communication tools — in-app chat, email, team meetings, dashboards, and one-to-one conversations — to keep the lines of communication active.

Some sales enablement solutions like SPOTIO include a team chat feature that encourages sales rep engagement and creates an open feedback loop with managers. With the ability to talk with individuals 1-on-1 or chat with a specific group, these tools improve communication across the team.

Which Sales Activities Add Value For You?

Successful sales organizations know that the secret to success is to work smarter, not harder.

Nobody has more than 24 hours in a day, so the key is to find ways to make the most out of your time with a focus on the sales activities that add value and accelerate sales.

With CRM capabilities designed for reps in the field, territory management functionality, route planning, scheduling, sales tracking and more, SPOTIO is the perfect tool for improving the efficiency and visibility of all sales activities.

______

Questions or comments? Contact SPOTIO at info@spotio.com or comment below.

SPOTIO is the #1 field sales acceleration platform designed specifically for outside sales managers and reps to squeeze every drop out of their field sales efforts.

Want to see a product demonstration? Click here to see how SPOTIO can take your sales game to the next level.

S&OP is typically conducted by executive-level management professionals on a monthly basis and allows them to better align their plans with company-wide objectives.

One of the most common organizational issues is misalignment between sales and operations teams. Fortunately, this problem is easily fixed via sales and operations planning that is profit-centered and focused on building relationships between company departments.

What Is Sales And Operations Planning?

Sales and operations planning is the process of managing a business’s key components, such as sales, finance, and the supply chain. Small companies with only a few business processes may not need robust sales and operation planning, but as businesses grow, leadership should implement S&OP, in order to:

• Gauge whether staffing levels are adequate
• Define short- and long-term goals
• Evaluate whether sales territories are performing as expected
• Determine whether to allocate budget for new priorities
• Improve resource planning

The sales and operations planning process relies heavily on data and the ability to analyze it in different ways. S&OP software makes it easy for managers to find data and set up reports that help them evaluate key business functions and employee performance.

Methods Of Sales And Operations Planning

Sales and operations planning is crucial to the financial well-being of most companies. As such, it’s important to have all stakeholders present for S&OP process meetings, including sales reps, production, human resources, engineering, marketing, new product development (NPD), inventory/backlog, strategic initiatives, and financial teams.

The sales and operations planning process can be handled in one of two ways, depending on the unique situation your organization finds itself in:

Top-Down Planning: This approach to sales and operations planning focuses on a single sales prediction, upon which management professionals base their strategy and allocate their resources as needed.

Bottom-Up Planning: This approach to S&OP is often used in situations where manufacturing timetables are inconsistent. Rather than basing plans on a specific sales forecast, a strategy is built from the bottom up by assessing what’s needed to produce specific products and/or services within a reasonable timeframe.

Whichever approach your company decides to take, ensure the representatives present for each department have the authority to make on-the-spot decisions. If they don’t, your S&OP process flow will quickly grow stagnant and unproductive.

7 Benefits of Sales and Operations Planning

Now that we know what is sales and operations planning, we can discuss why it’s advantageous. Here are seven benefits to the S&OP process:

1. Eliminate Departmental Silos

The real value of S&OP lies in the collaboration opportunities it creates. By eliminating departmental silos, every facet of a company is able to align using common data points, which often leads to increased accuracy, better efficiency, and lower costs.

Organizational collaboration is a hot-button topic in 2023. But unless every department is aligned via a single S&OP process, it’s nearly impossible to achieve.

2. Improved Inventory Management

Inventory management can make or break a business. If your team doesn’t produce enough products, customers will grow impatient and angry as they wait for their orders and your brand’s reputation will suffer. But producing too many products is equally hazardous. A warehouse full of unsold goods can quickly lead to cash flow issues.

Because an S&OP plan analyzes consumer buying habits, as well as a company’s ability to meet potential demand, inventory management greatly improves.

3. Increased Throughput

Throughput, if you’re not familiar with the term, is defined as “the rate of production or the rate at which something is processed.”

Solid sales and operations planning will allow your company to create more products in less time because the processes for doing so will be more efficient and the necessary amount of resources will always be allocated to the right tasks.

Additionally, this increase in productivity will lead to financial savings. After all, the less time your team spends creating products, the less costly said products will be to produce.

4. Higher Product Quality

Fortunately, increasing throughput does not impact product quality. In fact, a sales operations plan should actually lead to better products than your company was able to previously produce.

Why? It all has to do with efficiency. An efficient process will naturally minimize mistakes, thus allowing your organization to quickly pump out higher quality goods. Furthermore, better products lead to business savings. Every flawed product your company produces must be remade, resulting in wasted materials and/or employee resources.

5. Reduced Lead Times

We touched on it briefly, but it bears repeating: sales and operations planning will shorten lead times, thus improving customer satisfaction in the process.

We live in a microwave society. When your customers order a product, they want it now, not later. By improving inventory accuracy and making sure your organization always has the proper amount of products in stock, your customer will receive their orders in a timely fashion.

Fair or not, Amazon set the bar with its two-day (sometimes even quicker!) shipping policy. S&OP will ensure your company is able to reduce lead times and come closer to meeting customer expectations in this regard.

6. Better Customer Service

Exceptional customer service is a staple of successful business. By producing better products and delivering them to customers in a timely manner, you’ll be able to elevate your brand in the eyes of its target market.

Happy customers are generally life-long buyers. Since it costs five times less to keep a customer than it does to generate a new one, it’s important to ensure customer satisfaction. Additionally, happy customers have the potential to become brand advocates, which can turn into a valuable marketing channel for businesses.

Both customer retention and advocacy are more easily achieved when an effective sales and operations planning process is in place.

7. Higher Profitability

Higher profitability is a result of the six other sales and operations planning benefits we just discussed. If your company is able to eliminate organizational silos, predict inventory requirements more accurately, boost throughput and product quality, and better serve its customers, higher profitability is almost inevitable.

Greater efficiency is always beneficial to businesses. S&OP allows companies to intelligently streamline operations in order to boost profit numbers.

Challenges of Sales And Operations Planning

Implementing S&OP does come with some challenges. The primary challenge is getting buy-in from leadership — the manager who sees a need for S&OP may need to convince financial decision-makers that the benefits of S&OP outweigh any expenses.

Depending on the size of a business, several people may need to be involved in the development and implementation of S&OP. To avoid the challenges of miscommunication and a prolonged implementation, it’s helpful for one person to spearhead the S&OP initiative, set agenda for discussions, and define a timeline for launching any new processes.

Common Steps in the S&OP Process

The S&OP process can be broken down into six essential steps: data gathering and forecasting, demand planning, production planning, pre-SOP meeting, executive S&OP meeting, and the S&OP strategy implementation.

Let’s take a look at each of these steps in greater detail:

1. Data Gathering: The sales and operations planning process consists of a series of meetings, the first of which is designed to gather data in order to accurately forecast the future. During this meeting, information from previous sales and industry trends are assessed and future predictions are made.

2. Demand Planning: This step requires collaboration between multiple departments to complete properly. Executives from sales, operations, marketing, etc. come together to adjust inventory levels, marketing and sales strategies, and customer service policies to match the data gathered in the previous step.

3. Production Planning: Next, company leadership analyzes their company’s supply chain in regards to capacity. They’ll decide if the current set up — manpower, machinery, suppliers, etc. — are adequate for their forecasted needs. A supply plan is then crafted on the decision they reach.

4. Pre-SOP Meeting: This stage of the S&OP process requires leadership personnel from multiple departments to meet, collaborate, and evaluate the financial ramifications of the forecasted demand and supply plans.

6. Exec S&OP Meeting: Next, leaders from finance, sales, operations, marketing, and other relevant departments meet once again to discuss all data previously gathered and develop a viable sales operation plan to implement.

7. Finalize and Implement S&OP: Finally, once the S&OP plan is finalized and approved, it’s implemented and monitored for effectiveness. 

By conducting each of the meetings above, you’ll be able to implement a winning sales and operations plan for your organization.

Key S&OP Metrics

Sales and operations planning isn’t a one time event. Your S&OP plan must be monitored and evaluated on a regular basis, as we mentioned. To do so, pay attention to the following metrics:

Demand Forecast Accuracy: Did you accurately forecast demand, or were your projections off? Continually assess how on-target your forecasts are.

Inventory Turnover: Related to demand forecast accuracy, how quickly are you turning over inventory? As quickly as you thought you would?

On-Time Delivery: It’s important to analyze your supply chain and ensure your team is delivering products on time. If not, you likely have a supply chain issue that needs fixing.

Order Accuracy: Similarly, it would also behoove you to monitor your S&OP plan for order accuracy. Speed is great, but not if you’re quickly producing subpar work.

Total Sales: Moving on to financial S&OP metrics, total sales numbers will help key you in to how healthy your organization is in the monetary department.

Gross Margin: Hopefully, your total sales meet your projected targets. Equally as important, ensure your gross margin is hitting company projections too.

Working Capital Projections: Does your company have as much working capital in the bank as your team forecasted? If not, it’s time to evaluate why and adjust projections.

There are plenty of other key S&OP metrics you could measure as well. But the seven listed above are important and will get your evaluation efforts started off on the right foot.

Tips for Improving Your S&OP Process

At this point, your sales and operations planning process should be in place. Congratulations! But your work is far from over. 

To ensure the S&OP plan is as effective as it possibly can be, keep these sales and operations planning best practices in mind:

1. S&OP Should Start at the Top

Your sales and operations planning efforts will only be successful if company leaders buy-in and lead the charge. Without executives, the process will get bogged down as lower-level employees continually seek approvals.

Plus, upper management sets the tone and mentality for the entire company. When every day team members see their bosses making a point to prioritize the S&OP process, they’ll naturally learn to prioritize it too.

2. Clearly Define the End Goal

What is your organization trying to achieve by implementing a sales and operations planning process? Inventory optimization? Reduced supply chain costs? Maybe you want to improve demand forecasting accuracy.

Whatever your objective, make sure it’s clear to all at the beginning of your S&OP process flow. That way everyone involved knows what they’re aiming for and can collaborate cross-functionally to achieve it.

3. Know Your Sales Numbers

It’s common knowledge that sales are hard to forecast. There are just too many variables to effectively predict the number of sales a company will make within a given time frame. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t even try.

By studying your sales numbers from months and years past, you can work out future sales projections with reasonable accuracy.

Image: SPOTIO Executive Insights report.

This information can then be used during the sales and operations planning process to better predict supply and demand needs.

A tool like SPOTIO will give you accurate, real-time information regarding your team’s sales numbers, which can be used to improve your forecasting efforts.

4. Plan for the Unknown

Nothing in life—or business— is guaranteed. As such, it’s vital that you plan for the unknown. Have contingency strategies for multiple scenarios. If you lose your biggest client, how will your company pivot? If you land a new mega-account, how can you meet the new demand?

You can’t plan for everything, nor should you try. But having a few backup strategies in place is just smart business and should become a part of your sales and operations plan.

5. Understand the Impact of Supply and Demand Changes

If you don’t understand how supply and demand changes will affect your organization, you’ll likely run into problems—problems that could easily be avoided with a deeper understanding of the chain and time spent modeling different scenarios.

For example, were you to land a new account and increase production to meet heightened demand over the next six weeks, modeling will be able to tell you what kind of short-term financial setbacks you’re likely to incur, as well as long-term benefits. Management can then use this information to make more informed decisions.

Do your company a favor and study your supply chain by modeling different scenarios and understanding how certain changes affect your company as a whole.

S&OP Software

The good news is, there are great S&OP software solutions to help you implement and monitor everything we’ve covered in this article. Here are a few top options:

SAP Integrated Business Planning

SAP Integrated Business Planning is a popular solution for S&OP purposes. The tool features scenario planning and simulations, social collaboration, and powerful predictive analytics. When combined together, these capabilities ensure organizations are able to plan their resources effectively and monitor their results with ease. 

SAP Integrated Business Planning is available for purchase as a monthly subscription, though pricing details are not listed on its website. Contact a SAP representative for more information.

Infor Sales and Operations Planning

Infor Sales and Operations Planning is another great tool for S&OP purposes. Like its competitor, SAP, the Infor solution allows users to easily monitor sales and operations.

A few specific features include the ability to synchronize supply and demand imbalances, evaluate “what if?” scenarios to master the connected value chain, and visualize data to quickly compare to multiple statistical forecast models. Infor also comes with 24/7 elite support.

Pricing information is not available on the Infor website. Contact the team for cost details.

SPOTIO Field Sales Engagement Platform

Lastly, we have SPOTIO, wish is not a traditional S&OP software. But it does have valuable tools, which companies can use to better manage outside sales reps, plan sales strategies, forecast future results, and measure sales team success. This is important information to have when sales and operations planning.

From lead generation solutions to appointment setting options to CRM integrations, SPOTIO is packed with the features you need to both sell and make solid business decisions. Request a free demo today and see the software in action for yourself.

The Value of S&OP

Business leaders may recognize the value of sales and operations planning, yet not know how to implement it. With the right software — like SPOTIO — companies can begin the S&OP process immediately, focusing on essential business functions, then expanding S&OP to other areas over time.

SPOTIO gives you the real-time data you need to make better business decisions, improve your forecasting, and troubleshoot underperforming territories. It also helps sales reps work more efficiently, eliminating the need for tedious administrative tasks.

Let SPOTIO help you with your S&OP.