By N. Mraz

| 30 May 2019

Sales, Call Center

Tips from 15 + pros: How to increase sales team collaboration and productivity?

Increasing sales team collaboration and productivity isn’t the easiest nut to crack. While keeping an eye on exceptional customer service, you need to think of many things at once. We asked the same question to 15 + top-notch sales & marketing specialists from all over the world: What advice would you give to anyone who wants to boost their sales team’s efficiency?

Why does sales team collaboration matter?

This saying is old but gold: A team accomplishes much more than an individual. Why do sales collaborations matter so much?

If you are wondering why your sales team struggles to close important deals that might have seemed to be certain, there is a possibility that the problem is not with the deal itself. The issue may lie inside of your company – in inefficient sales team communication. Chaotic team leads to slow sales circles and unsatisfied customers. In the end, it’s your own disorganization that robs you of profit.

Boost productivity of your sales team

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There is plenty of disadvantages that aggravate your team’s productivity, such as:

Lack of motivation

Unmotivated people simply cannot be productive. No one can feel inspired in an environment where they feel as if they don’t matter. Where their voice is ignored and their work is constantly disrupted by lack of order. In the end, it isn’t solely money that keeps your team going. It’s a feeling that what they do actually matters, to them, to their colleagues and to the company.

Just a bit of unity and an open mind can boost sales collaboration significantly. Work can be only done effectively when everyone feels appreciated and fulfilled within their role.

Lack of communication

Your sales team most likely contains people with a similar overview of the world. Similar vision and similar goal. Yet that all goes in vain when it isn’t clearly shared. Communication is the key to success in each industry. You cannot sell the product or service when you, yourself, are getting lost in all the information.

Sharing updates with each other leads to a faster, more productive sales process. Therefore, motivate your team to follow-up with each other. We also suggest jumping on a call or demo together. You can learn from each other and improve. You can also use video email templates and share which one works for you, so it can help your colleagues. This way, you not only reduce time, but also share best practices with each other.

Lack of collaboration

It is not easy to concentrate on important deals when you are overwhelmed with uncountable administrative tasks. Not knowing what to do first leads to chaos and takes all of concentration and productivity away.

Help your team to master their time management and get some tasks off their shoulders by mastering the power of collaboration. For example, if there is a big project assigned to only one person who also needs to focus on other tasks, consider splitting this project into smaller parts. Then divide them fairly between those team members who have a free capacity.

Also, don’t forget to emphasize which tasks have bigger priority and which are not that urgent.

Pro tips to increase sales team collaboration and efficiency

Now, let’s take a look at what professionals have to add towards boosting your productivity and sales collaboration even more.

#1 Aazar Shad | Sales Hustler | UserPilot.com

Automating your sales process will boost your team productivity significantly. To be precise, you can close a deal in just 3 simple yet very effective steps. Firstly, have a conversation with the client and extract all the information you need to complete the job. Secondly, use those insights to create and send a business proposal with your terms and conditions and the ability to sign online.

The last step is following up. With modern proposal software, you can track when the proposal is open and which page your client has spent the most time on. This will enable you to know what’s important to them and what to cover in your follow-up email in order to win the business. With this simple process, your team will have more time for other important tasks and be able to generate business proposals in minutes.

#2 Petra Odak | Marketing Executive | BetterProposals

To boost both productivity and collaboration, I would suggest celebrating your wins as often as possible, as little as they may be. Sales managers tend to reward and celebrate big wins only, like signed enterprise deals, high-ticket contracts, etc. But those don’t happen every day. Celebrate and reward small victories. This will help you motivate your team and establish better grounds for communication.

#3 Mile Živković | Content Writer | Chanty

Give your team some useful tools and find a golden mean between automation and personalization. You need to automate some tasks to save time and effort, but personalization also matters, more than ever before.

By automating some processes, your sales team can focus on a business core and building relations with customers, instead of thinking about how to get over simple tasks that take time and leech the potential out of your sales crew. Needless to say, it can affect your internal communication, and without having it sorted, it can be challenging to maintain a successful external one.

#4 Dawid Tkocz | CEO | PayByShare

Collect experience from across the whole sales team. This is a crucial factor that a lot of companies miss out on.

Hence, every rep is losing time for trial and error, discovering best practices for himself. Take two days out of your life to sit down with all your reps and draft out a sales process based on market research and best practices.

Collect insights from your business contacts and friends, feedback from your customers, etc. Build these pieces of advice into an everyday sales process with common tools used by your whole team. Only then you can actually scale sales, improve the process through collected data and give your reps a sense of team collaboration in building something together that benefits them, as well as the company.

Revisit the process together recurrently to update and improve to allow for mutual team learning based on real-life case studies.

Just think about the time saved if now only one rep has to make a mistake for the others to learn. Instead of all of them having to go through the same mistake individually.

#5 Jan Antoniewicz | Head of Global Sales | Senuto

Product development and sales/marketing teams should collaborate as one, so that there is synergy between them. Most of the time, sales and marketing teams have no idea what is going on with the product and what is happening next. If both teams work as one, the sales team will always know what features and improvements are planned. They are then able to structure their marketing and sales plan accordingly.

#6 Muhammad Bilal Azhar | CEO | InvoiceQuickly

Improve engagement by defining and communicating a powerful vision for your company. Empower your team by providing the right support, training or resources to help foster an emotional investment & build great teams.

Hiring based on attitude and developing talent helps to make sure the right people are in the right seat in the bus. With a strength-based approach, employees can focus on developing their natural talents and do more of what they do best every day. After all, companies exist so that employees can combine their strengths to overcome individual weaknesses.

#7 Graham Richardson | Senior Business Development Manager | Livespace

Share learnings from every sales conversation you have with your prospects or leads. Ask what worked, what didn’t work and build a playbook to scale your sales team knowledge.

#8 Juraj Zamborsky | VP of Sales | Kontentino

Connect with the right person and half of your sale is already done. Linkedin is the best source of fully qualified leads.

#9 Gonzalo Sierra | Business Developer | SalesQL

When thinking about training, don’t forget that your own people probably know best how to sell. Embed standardized, structured, peer to peer coaching in your daily routine and accelerate the pace of learning almost overnight.

#10 Andreas Brenner | CEO & Founder | Avrios

Create a team and individual vision board on a daily basis. It may sound too simplistic, but you can’t overstate its impact. Only include what could be considered aspiring but still realistic. It could include closure, demo’s done or even number of phone calls. This will create better discipline and streamline the entire operation. In the end, it’ll improve the overall ROI of your sales operations.

#11 Jayakrishnan Jayasanker | Digital Head | Livprop

First and foremost, you need to understand who your customer is, their pain points, and where they are. It’s important to set S.M.A.R.T goals and metrics. You need to understand how many outbound connections, calls, emails, etc. you need to make per day, week, month, or quarter. You need to know what your conversion rate is so you can hit the sales target.

Keeping a simple daily journal will help you to identify and improve patterns in behavior. It’s also important to have a bigger “why”. If it’s just about hitting sales quotas, motivation might not be enough. Understanding your role within the organization and how your work impacts it – that’s much more powerful.

#12 Tres West | LinkedIn Lead Generation | LinkedRocket

Team collaboration is one of the things that’s easier said than done. I would suggest trying to implement Agile sales techniques to improve your sales team collaboration. Practice shows that weekly sprints, daily quick meetings, and ongoing iteration result in increased team collaboration and effectiveness.

Try to focus on short-term goals and constantly analyze the productivity of your work. Be flexible and always make changes to come up with an ideal strategy for your business.

#13 Anna Kuzma | Marketing Manager | UseResponse Inc

Don’t accept the first no. Measure your sales rate, the average sales should be in increasing order. Think positively.

#14 Tejas Tambekar | Co-Founder | Zaperp

Measure everything you can. The key is to be consistent. “Breaking” conclusions won’t appear in a day or a week – it always takes time. But without that data, you won’t be able to improve. Some time ago, I read that revenue is the ultimate performance indicator. But that is only an answer to “what”. The Key is to know “why”.

#15 Sam Carr | Marketing Manager | PPC Protect

Mastering your customer relationship management (CRM) tool is essential. I’m always amazed at how many businesses don’t use half of the essential CRM features, or just don’t have a CRM tool at all. By teaching all of your sales staff how to use it effectively, opens up a whole new world of team collaboration and increased productivity.