The average salary and commission for a field sales representative today easily tops $75,000. (And that’s without the additional expense of benefits, office space, technology or business travel.)
With those numbers, it makes sense to keep your highly paid and talented sales team focused on what matters most to your medtech or B2B company: closing deals.
That means helping your best sales closers work efficiently and spend their valuable time on the most qualified opportunities.
However, achieving strong sales team productivity can be difficult. From routine administrative work to travel and company meetings, every day there are numerous small activities that can distract even the most diligent reps.
Divide and conquer to achieve your sales goals
Early-funnel sales activities can be particularly time-consuming for the B2B or medtech sales team.
These include:
- Making regular sales prospecting calls to generate new leads
- Keeping in touch with cooler leads until they’re ready to convert
- Quickly following up on inbound inquiries and marketing-generated leads
- Updating contact information and account details in the sales database or CRM system
- Scheduling meetings, demos and other appointments with potential buyers
Tackling these important business development activities each week is essential. Without regular effort in the market, it’s impossible to keep your sales pipeline filled to meet each quarter’s sales and revenue goals.
But, when faced with the choice of negotiating an immediate sale or cold-calling a brand-new account, most sales reps choose the hottest opportunities. Sales prospecting and lead generation suffers, creating sizable risk in your pipeline for future sales.
5 Ways to maximize productivity in sales
Finding new ways to handle lead generation, sales prospecting and other early-stage business development activities can alleviate pressure for the sales team and ensure your medtech or B2B company continues to meet its sales goals.
Here are five ways that a “divide and conquer” approach can maximize productivity with your sales team.
An outsourced contact center like Volkart May is an ideal resource to support any (or all) of these business development tasks. This frees your internal sales team to work the most qualified and important sales opportunities. Your inside sales partner operates as an extension of your in-house sales team to add capacity, increase velocity and ramp-up results.
1. Keep contact information current
It’s well known that the accuracy and quality of business data decays quickly. Customers and prospects change jobs and contact information; companies merge, move and rebrand.
Your sales team’s time is better spent talking to decision-makers than painstakingly tracking down these individuals’ names, titles and contact details. Regular attention to your prospect lists can accelerate your sales reps’ efforts, improve the ROI on your digital campaigns and reveal important demographic information—all at the same time.
2. Rigorously qualify leads
Keeping your medtech or B2B sales reps focused on high-priority opportunities is easier with clear criteria for what constitutes a “qualified” lead. A simple lead-scoring system eliminates the confusion and in-fighting that often results in dropped hand-offs and missed opportunities between marketing and sales.
Even better, it makes it possible for an inside sales team or outsourced lead generation firm to quickly sort, prioritize and qualify leads. The sales team tackles the hottest opportunities; marketing or your lead generation partner nurture the cooler leads until they’re ready for hand-off to sales.
3. Outsource cold-calling
As we’ve noted before, engaging brand new prospects is a discipline, and not every sales rep enjoys or thrives at it. Working with a professional outbound calling team like the tenacious conversationalists at Volkart May adds muscle to your business development efforts. It’s easy to scale up or down to generate the right volume of qualified leads for your internal team to nurture and close. Outsourcing also ensures consistent outreach to your market, so there’s never a risk to your pipeline or revenue goals.
4. Improve marketing and sales hand-offs
It’s common for friction to exist between these two critical departments. After all, it’s marketing’s charter to think long-term and expand brand awareness across the entire spectrum of potential customers. Sales, on the other hand, must keep a laser-focus on meeting weekly, monthly and annual targets. Marketing thrives on data for analysis, segmentation and decision-making; sales can balk at the time required to provide these important inputs.
One way to improve the relationship and inject more efficiency into sales is with clear feedback loops, particularly about the quantity and quality of leads generated. Getting buy-in from both teams to any new initiatives like outsourcing business development is also critical to success.
5. Deploy technology
Streamlining the systems and processes that support the sales team provides a final boost to sales productivity. When it comes to lead generation and sales prospecting, we recommend linking new leads and appointments directly to the sales team’s main database and their personal calendars.
If you work with an outsourced inside sales solution like Volkart May, we not only integrate with company CRM systems, but can book sales-ready appointments directly on reps’ calendars—and provide digital recordings of the initial prospecting calls. Any opportunity to eliminate data entry or reduce hunting for information will improve your sales efforts.
Inject new efficiencies into your B2B or medtech sales processes
No matter how efficient your lead generation and sales processes, there’s likely room for improvement. An outside perspective can help you identify untapped resources and new ideas to meet your marketing and sales goals. Contact us to schedule a conversation about your medtech or B2B needs. We’d love to help!
