The saying might be tired, but it’s true: Time is money.
And there’s a high chance that your sales reps might be wasting both.
Since their specific job function is to generate revenue for your company instead of deduct it, you might be wondering why and how this is possible.
Well, activities including administrative tasks, filling out spreadsheets, and scrolling through social media outlets are taking up time that they could spend filling up their pipelines.
Here’s how you can ensure that your sales reps save time and focus on what matters most: building better relationships to elevate your business.
How Sales Reps Can Spend Time More Wisely
According to research from InsideSales.com, sales reps spend only 37% of their time selling. Yep, you read that right: nearly two-thirds of sales reps’ time, on average, is spent on non revenue-generating activities.
So what’s that other 63% of their day-to-day comprised of, exactly?
Well, 10% of it is typically spent sifting through spreadsheets. And administrative tasks are also responsible for 14.8% of the effectiveness drain, coupled with downtime activities such as checking Facebook and chatting with their coworkers at the office.
The largest time-suck can be attributed to sales technology. Forbes claims that 62.8% of the average sales rep’s time is dedicated to sales technology, with 33.2% of that time allocated towards email for sales-related purposes. Yes, the simple task of composing and sending emails takes up a significant portion of sales reps’ time.
And are these emails reaching their intended audiences and producing their desired effects? If not, it might be time to reevaluate the sales team’s strategies.
These stats don’t lie, and it’s obvious that sales reps aren’t spending their time efficiently. And if their prospect communications are proving ineffective, it’s most likely because their outreach isn’t relationship-driven.
Selling Through Relationship Building
It’s no secret that the most successful people in your department are relationship-driven first and foremost. Between firing off emails, hitting the phones, and leaving countless voicemails, it can be easy to lose sight of this.
In general, success in the business world increasingly revolves around relationships. For example, people’s relationships are the key to career growth, and customer relationships build brands rather than the other way around. If you learn to leverage them shrewdly, your connections can be your most effective sustainable competitive advantage in growing your business.
We know that people are naturally inclined to expand the business that they do with the individuals whom they enjoy working with. In a variety of cases, people seek to create additional business opportunities for contacts whom they like.
So if sales reps are taught to take a relationship-first approach, their time may be allocated more adequately, which will result in greater revenue for your business.
The Key to Efficient Relationship Building
Since the majority of sales reps’ time is spent in sales technology, it’s clear that the biggest hurdle that they face is focusing on effectively building relationships in their initial prospect outreach.
The bonds that they seek to build don’t necessarily have to be personal. Inc. asserts that intimate relationships are limited to about five, but if they work at it, most individuals can easily handle 50 to 150 or more professional ones.
You can do the mental math: fifty or 150 professional relationships per BDR or SDR is not only more than enough connections to help them reach their quotas and generate significant revenue, but these relationships will also allow your company to stay ahead of its competition.
So how do BDRs and SDRs learn to incorporate relationship-first outreach? It starts with relationship-centric sales enablement.
The Benefits of Practicing Relationship-Centric Sales Enablement
In addition to solving the BDR and SDR epidemic of wasted time, relationship-centric sales enablement is capable of tackling two overarching company goals:
1.) Elevated ROI
If you’re questioning how more sales teams can benefit from sales enablement, overall, more than 2/3 of companies that invested in sales learning and development realized a positive ROI.
Companies that increased their investment in sales enablement saw 11% improvement in win rates compared to those who decided to pass on this critical, and often overlooked, business function.
Sales enablement can assist everyone on a sales team. Specifically, practicing relationship-centric sales enablement will shift your sales reps’ mindsets so that they view their prospects as people instead of targets.
In order to make sure that the methods taught in your sales enablement remain enforced, it’s important to commit to the trainings and ensure that they receive executive buy-in.
2.) Enhanced Employee Training
It’s no secret that onboarding for new sales employees could use some TLC. On average, new sales hires spend 10 weeks in training and development and only become productive after 11.2 months. So with current training techniques, it essentially takes a sales rep a full year to begin yielding results.
Pairing sales enablement with sales reps’ employee training can help shorten this timeframe. Companies with a dedicated sales enablement function improved their total sales training effectiveness by 29%.
By including relationship-centric sales enablement in the beginning of a sales rep’s employee onboarding, their employee training program will become enhanced, and they’ll also inherently assume a relationship-first approach when reaching out to their prospects.
Saving Time to Generate More Revenue
It’s time for sales reps to start spending their work hours more wisely. Restructuring how they conduct their outreach and instructing them to make connections with the intent of building real relationships will escalate your organization’s bottom line by helping them hit their quotas and gain a greater amount of opportunities.
Thnks can help your sales reps focus on what matters most: building relationships. Within seconds, they can send their prospects, clients, or customers gestures of appreciation by searching for a gift, personalizing a note, and sending it off via SMS or email. Interested in learning more? Sign up for a demo!
To learn more tactics to help improve your sales game, download our ebook, 7 Tactics to Move Prospects Through Your Pipeline Faster with Gratitude, and see how Pure Storage used Thnks as their most powerful sales tool. Interested in learning more? Sign up for a demo, or click here to learn more about expressing gratitude in business!
