“Sales is a numbers game” - it’s true, but usually the numbers suck. You work hard all day, trying to earn conversations with your next best customer, and nearly all of the attempts are wasted. People don’t pick up the phone, nobody responds to email, and everybody seems to be out of the office. Right?
Wrong! In this webinar we shared 4 hacks we use to eliminate wasted sales effort across our SDR team that you can deploy for yourself and your team. You’ll learn how to:
- Earn 2-4X more conversations every day
- Avoid the dreaded “task overwhelm”
- Keep your funnel full of the right kinds of leads
- Increase sales efficiency for your entire team
Whether you’re responsible for everyone’s sales efficiency or just your own, this is going to be full of actionable advice that will make a huge impact on your pipeline today.
Key Takeaways:
Hack #1: Write out your sales process
Writing out your entire sales process is important because it 1) gets everyone on the same page and 2) identifies weaknesses and inefficiencies. Oftentimes, members on the same team have different ideas on the next step in the sales process. This creates inconsistencies and makes it difficult to identify where weaknesses arise. For example, if you know what your meeting confirmation process should look like, but it’s not written out, it probably means your team is either 1) not doing it or 2) you’re not coaching on it. It also means that if there’s no process, it makes it nearly impossible to test variations of it in order to try to drive better results.
The best place to start is to document what your current sales process looks like. Then create a parallel process of what your ideal process looks like. Then you can align the two in order to fix your current process and make it your ideal one.
Pro Tip: Use Lucidchart to map out your sales process in a visual way. Visually seeing it mapped may even cause you to see areas that may be missing or need improvement.
Hack #2: Kill tasks
We’ve all been faced with this thought: “I have 552 tasks and I don’t know which one to do first. They’re all due today…or overdue!”. When managing prospecting via tasks, you’ll most likely 1) focus on the wrong activities and 2) you won’t do enough activities. However, when you move from task-based prospecting to list-based prospecting, it alleviates “task overwhelm” and that same overwhelming thought can look a lot different: “I have 12 prospects in Bucket 3, 107 in Bucket 2, and 433 in Bucket 1. Time to go!” (see Hack #3 to see what we mean by “buckets”).
In order to transition to list-based prospecting, follow these steps:
- Incorporate new fields in your CRM, such as “Next Contact Date” and “Next Attempt Date”. Here is the Google Sheet we shared in the recording.
- Create dynamic lists populated with common lead types for every rep.
- Update new fields as reps make attempts to reach prospects and as they engage with prospects.
- Pro Tip: Create a smart view or list view in your CRM that allows you to audit the progress. (E.g. A list of all leads with Last Activity Date of Today and Lead Status of Priority with a Next Attempt Date blank.)
- If reps are creating tasks for themselves to generate follow up, enforce the “Next Attempt Date” field and notes as a way to avoid trying to ride the task and list horses simultaneously.
Hack #3: Enable the buckets lead management process.
Our bucketing leads method is super simple and makes it easy to find the right person to talk to next. We’ve outlined it in detail here, but we put prospects into four buckets: 1) Uncontacted, 2) Working, 3) Priority, and 4) Meetings Scheduled. Then we work the buckets backwards, which produces significantly greater results and sales efficiency. Why start with meetings scheduled (bucket 4)? Prioritizing leads that are closest to revenue means you have your priorities straight, versus task overwhelm from our last hack which leads reps wondering, “Who should I try to reach next?”.
Pro Tip: Create list views in your CRM according to “buckets”. We’ve outlined how to do this in Salesforce, Outreach, and in a regular spreadsheet in our “TSD: Webinar - Eliminating Wasted Sales Effort” playbook. Get free, instant access to it by signing up for UpLevel here.
Hack #4: Build real-time channel validation into your lead flow.
The difference between a validated lead and an unvalidated lead is that when a lead is validated, we know which channel we can reach them on. This means that you can reach your prospect via email, LinkedIn, or phone. Wasted sales effort, like attempting leads in the wrong channels, adds up fast and prevents quota attainment.
When it comes to validated data, someone has to do the work. Validated data means that the email reaches the prospect and does not bounce, they are active on LinkedIn (and their title is accurate), and/or their phone reaches them live, their voicemail says their name, or their admin confirms the phone path. We’ve outlined our entire process here.
Pro Tip: We highly recommend that reps never spend their time on non-selling activities, like data validation. In order to “hack” this, you must hack your productivity. Check out freelancers on UpWork, hire interns, or go through a data vendor. You can see how we help clients with this here.
If you have questions about how to increase your sales efficiency or need help with the tools and methods utilized within these hacks, contact us here.
