How to Streamline Your Sales Process
What can Sales Support Help You to Eliminate Overtime?
How to Streamline Your Sales Process
The sales department, which plays an important role as the starting point of a company, always has long working hours and has to work overtime. However, to reduce costs, you must improve your performance while reducing overtime.
Here, I will introduce how to streamline your sales process and some key points to eliminate such overtime work in sales and services that support sales.
Why can’t salespeople reduce overtime?
The problem of overtime in sales is a concern for many companies, but that does not mean that many companies are successfully reducing overtime. First, I will explain the reasons for this and the key points to eliminate overtime.
Why can’t we reduce overtime?
One of the reasons why reducing overtime work in sales is difficult to achieve is there is a problem with the work cycle.
The work of the sales department is not limited to running around the office all the time. It also includes traveling to sales destinations, preparing materials after returning to the office, post-processing reports, holding meetings, and more.
Also, quota achievement and prolonged business negotiations are factors that cause us to return late to the office, and we inevitably fall into a cycle where we have to work overtime for subsequent paperwork.
Two points to eliminate overtime
It is necessary to reduce work, such as document creation and meetings, to work more efficiently in sales and reduce overtime. There are two specific points:
- Enable report writing in free time
- Enable sharing of information between departments
In sales work, there is free time such as travel time and waiting time to move around by car or train. If you can create reports on your smartphone or other devices during this free time, you can complete this work during the daytime without having to return to the office after dark to create reports.
Furthermore, unless the meeting is so important, sharing information that summarizes the meeting content will significantly save you a lot of work after returning to the office.
To get out of the overtime cycle
It’s an overtime cycle that’s difficult to get out of because you have a lot of work to do, but there’s also the idea of outsourcing a part of your work or using tools to make your work more efficient.
Use sales support
Many companies have implemented sales support to streamline their sales activities and get out of the overtime cycle. In addition to outsourcing sales activities and document creation, sales force automation (SFA) is also a sales support.
Benefits of sales support
SFA, which is a sales support system, can clear the points for no overtime work that I have already mentioned. It is a tool to support sales activities, and you can use it on devices such as smartphones.
It is equipped with functions to support sales activity recording and reporting operations, and it is a system that manages and streamlines sales activities. So, as mentioned earlier, it is possible to conduct business while waiting for a train.
Not only that, but the system is equipped with functions that allow you to set goals based on the company’s budget and past performance and manage the achievement rate of target and situation, and each case.
Therefore, by simplifying information sharing between departments and visualizing strategies, sales will also increase.
Find leverage points in the sales process
It is necessary to find leverage the points where support can work effectively to achieve significant sales increases and work efficiency.
For that purpose, it is necessary to visualize the sales process, which involves many tasks from making appointments and visits to closing the deal.
If you need to concentrate on business negotiations and new development is neglected due to appointments, you need to use an appointment agency or implementing SFA to improve sales efficiency if you want to reduce overtime.
Sales support case studies
Here is a case study of an actual successful implementation of sales support.
One company noticed that salespeople were working long overtime hours in the sales process to prepare reports after returning to the office and implemented SFA to solve this problem.
As a result, they can now create reports easily anywhere in between sales activities and no longer have to take time to prepare reports after returning to the office.
Use sales support to reduce overtime
These are some of the key points to eliminate overtime in sales and sales support.
To make your sales process more efficient, take a look at your own sales process. You may find leverage points more easily and quickly than you think.
And once you have found your leverage points, you can use the sales support that suits your company to help it grow further.
