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Join nowSeventy-two percent of sellers’ time is wasted on non-selling tasks, according to our Trends in Sales Ops report, a survey of more than 7,700 sales professionals. The good news? There are straightforward ways to refocus reps on the things that matter the most.
Start here. We share how to avoid eight common productivity pitfalls that eat into revenue and hold sellers back — along with worksheets and resources to help.
Discover how Sales Cloud uses data and AI to help you build relationships and close deals fast.
Sales teams use an average of 10 sales productivity tools — from reporting to contact management to forecasting — according to our State of Sales report. Many of these tools come on different platforms, creating a disjointed patchwork of different data, fields, and dashboards.
Sellers are feeling the pain. Two thirds said they feel overwhelmed. It’s hard to be productive when you’re toggling back and forth between point solutions to get the job done, and all that time spent in tools means less time spent with customers.
Consolidate your tools to lower your costs and give your reps time back to spend with customers.
You’ll be joining the 94% of sales ops teams who plan to simplify their tech stack in the next 12 months.
Here’s how to do it:
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“Don’t be afraid to pull the plug on a tool, even when you’ve invested a lot of time and money in it. Reps shouldn’t have to constantly change systems to work the same record. The simpler we make selling, the bigger our gains.” Dain Rasmussen, SVP, Sales, Inspirato
A sales pipeline without clearly defined stages makes it difficult to know when to move deals forward. “Without structure, reps don’t know what their next actions should be,” said Richard Harris, Founder of the Harris Consulting Group. “That fuzziness in your pipeline data will create inaccuracies in your forecast.”
For example, if sellers don’t have guidance for when a deal is ready to advance down the pipeline, then qualified and unqualified opportunities may end up assigned to the same stage — creating confusion and muddy pipeline data.
Define each stage in your sales pipeline with clear exit criteria, so your sellers always know the next step to take.
Here’s how to begin:
Next Step: See how Revenue Intelligence helps you manage your pipeline and create more accurate sales forecasts
Sixty-nine percent of sales professionals told us their job is harder now, according to the State of Sales Report. “Reps often feel like they don’t know where to act or when,” said Dave Borrelli, Senior Vice President of Sales at Salesforce. “Throughout my career, I’ve seen this feeling come on as sellers try to make sense of their territories.”
You have a productivity problem if your sellers get assigned to their area, but they don’t know which opportunities to prioritize or how to uncover new leads.
Give your sellers visibility into the hottest opportunities in their territories by setting criteria for big-win accounts.
Here’s how to help your sellers:
Next Step: Learn how to do account planning with Quip, a sales collaboration tool.
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Creating quotes and getting approvals takes up the most time of any other nonselling task in a rep's week, according to our Trends in Sales Ops report — time that could be spent building relationships and working on deals.
“Quoting should be easy,” said Meredith Schmidt, Executive Vice President of Revenue Cloud at Salesforce. “But all of a sudden, you go to submit the quote for approval, and you need four different groups to approve the same special term for different reasons. So the deal slows down because of an outside business leader who’s not in sales.”
Speed up quoting by auditing the approval process and cutting redundancies. Get there in three steps:Here’s how to begin:
Next Step: See how revenue cloud can automate approvals and speed up revenue.
Eighty-one percent of sales reps say team selling helps them close. But roughly the same number of them (82%) say that aligning with other sellers is at least somewhat challenging.
Part of the challenge is overcoming the traditional competitive nature of sales in favor of collaboration. But successful alignment is also hampered by hybrid selling that creates multiple tracks and channels for team conversations.
Sales leaders told us that cross-functional alignment is the number one tactic for growth. Here’s how sales ops can help break down silos across the organization and make it easier to sell as a team:
Next Step: Watch how Slack helps teams sell better together
We break down silos, so sales teams can work together on deals from anywhere.
We break down silos, so sales teams can work together on deals from anywhere.
Only 26% of sales professionals receive one-on-one coaching at least weekly, according to our State of Sales report. That means managers likely have a lot to cover when they sit down with reps — probably too much to digest at one time.
More frequent coaching may seem like an easy solution, but a recent study found that managers have consistently spent 20% of their time coaching, year after year, for the past decade. This suggests that increasing coaching quantity might not be possible.
Combine call coaching software that surfaces key sales call insights with productive coaching time that identifies high-impact areas of improvement. Here’s how to find those areas:
Next Step: Use our coaching workbook to have more impactful conversations and boost seller productivity
Seventy-two percent of sellers do not expect to hit their quota in the coming year, according to our State of Sales report. Sales leaders are stepping in to help with more impactful training and enablement.
But unless you have a reliable way to measure the value of your sales enablement, “it’s doomed to be a black box,” said Jessica Holt Ware, Assistant Vice President of Sales at Salesforce. “Training goes in, but you’re not sure what comes out.”
To measure and show the impact of your sales enablement, start with the outcomes you want to achieve, and build training and milestones to get there. Here’s how:
Next Step: See how Salesforce enablement helps reps achieve the right outcomes with targeted milestones and training.
Below we share the steps of our latest enablement program, refreshed last year. Read more about our enablement approach in this blog post.
Sixty percent of salespeople said their performance was poor because of mental health issues, according to this 2021 survey conducted by an alliance of sales influencers. That’s more than half of sellers struggling.
One reason is that sellers are “gluttons for punishment,” brooding when they don’t hit their numbers. “Sellers remember every deal that doesn’t happen,” said Jen Lagaly, Executive Vice President of Sales at Salesforce.
Sellers are also prone to doom-scrolling because they spend so much time online. “They read about layoffs and politics and everything else,” said Lindsey Boggs, Global Director of Sales Development at Quantum Metric. “They start to worry about what they can’t control.”
Sellers should track and talk about negative feelings, remove digital distractions, and seek professional help if they need it. "It all comes down to accountability," said Alexine Mudawar, CEO of Women in Sales. "When we create a weekly record of wins, losses, and sentiment, we can plan to overcome the areas that are holding us back."
Here are the steps to take.
Next Step: Find support in the Trailblazer Community Cove, a virtual community gathering space.
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