Planning for the work-week.

Your sales reps need to be more productive than ever. There are fewer companies with purchasing budgets. You likely have fewer sales reps. Therefore, each deal is more crucial. Every deal matters. How do you want them to prioritize their time? 

How do you ensure that your reps don’t spend time: 

  1. Working deals that aren’t qualified?
  2. Working only deals where prospects are responsive and ignoring the rest? 
  3. Wasting time entering information in the CRM? 
  4. Staying single-threaded on deals?

Instead of: 

  1. Proactively planning the deals based on risk and buying intent. 
  2. Focusing time on the deals that are most likely to close.
  3. Working effectively with managers and other peers to drive a deal forward. 
  4.  Spending time preparing for meetings.
 

While that might have worked years ago, will not work now that almost everything is done digitally and remotely. There is less time – more accounts, more dis-engaged buyers, less budget, and even more competition. Expecting reps to waste 20% of their time updating CRM (nearly 10 hours a week!) – is just plain wrong. Expecting reps to change their habits and become proactive about their time suddenly without providing them the tools to help manage their large number of accounts and opportunities – is wishful thinking. Expecting managers to know how to coach reps differently without full opportunity context – not going to be as effective as it could be.

Meanwhile, your competitor’s reps: 

  1. Are not wasting time manually updating their CRM. It’s updated automatically.
  2. Are proactively focusing on deals that are at risk based on risk, sentiment, and engagement measures.
  3. Know when to walk away, when to pull in internal stakeholders, and don’t fixate on one contact and “work” the entire buying team.
 

You need to drive a formal process and invest in the right tools and training to reinforce that process so that you arm for reps and managers to “truly” be effective.

Again, who is more likely to be more productive? Your competitor or your sales reps? 

Arm your sales team with a proactive planner.

Planning on a week to week basis is critical for sales success. Time management skills and proper planning are several of the top priorities when sales leaders are looking for new reps.

I spoke with the VP of Sales at a mid-market sales organization earlier this week, and he said:

"The absolute most critical thing for the success of my team is proper planning. I would do anything if I could give my team a leg up on the competition and arm my sales team with a tool to help them manage their time better. A tool that could help them plan their week, which some intelligence built-in, so they know which deals to focus their attention on." - VP of Sales, Americas

He is looking for an intelligent, data-driven, recommendation-based planner for each rep. Sales reps need a complete view of all their accounts and opportunities. They need to have complete visibility into which leads are most likely to close and which ones they need to work proactively. At the quarter close, they will want to focus on those deals that have high engagement and positive sentiment. 

Reps should also know when to abandon an opportunity if they have proactively worked the deal, have little to no engagement, and the engagement they have had has negative sentiment. Reps who manage a large number of accounts and opportunities need to have a tool that helps them prioritize their focus on a week to week basis and arm them to be as successful as possible.

Effective sales planning week-to-week.

You may not be aware, but the technology exists today. Enter BoostUp. BoostUp is designed to capture all contacts, all communications, all engagements, and the context and sentiments from all touchpoints across all the sales tools you use today. Then it leverages that information to “recommend” or prescribe each sales team focus for the week by providing visual dashboards and visuals that help them prioritize their week by engagement and sentiment risk and likelihood to close measures.

Arm yourself with BoostUp to help your sales team be more productive and focus on the “right” touchpoints to make each week. If your sales team could leverage technology like this to improve overall sales effectiveness, don’t hesitate to reach out. Start the conversation by emailing us at demo@boostup.ai.