How to Increase Sales Time Management More Effectively
Time is your most valuable resource. Understanding how to spend your time to drive revenue can be the difference between hitting your sales goals and burning out with a packed calendar but not the sales numbers to back it up. If you want to know how to increase sales, you need to know how to evaluate and start eliminating or automating low-value tasks for better time management.
McKinsey recently reported that high-performing sales professionals spend 22% more time with their customers than low-performing reps. They call this time “external interactions.”
This study was one in a wave of recent studies that showed that B2B customers (your customers) now behave and have similar expectations to B2C customers. One facet of this is a strong preference to interact remotely and digitally rather than face-to-face. According to McKinsey, B2B customers prefer to have 70-80 their sales interactions digitally.
This raises 2 questions.
How do you find that 22% of extra time to interact with customers when you’re already busy?
How do you make the most of the time you do have with your customers to increase sales?
How to find that 22% of Extra Time
To address the first question, consider how sales time management can be optimized through automation. Sales reps can tap into the power of pre-built reports, automatically triggered workflows, and targeted marketing messaging to cut down manual administrative tasks, speed up the sales process, and spend more time selling.
How to Make the Most of Your Time
To answer the second question about maximizing the time you do have with your customers, we will discuss bringing together your Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM), where you’re managing your accounts, tasks, activity history, and opportunity pipeline, with your Business Intelligence solution (BI), where you’re pulling data from your systems together to gain actionable insights. From there, you will be able to make decisions about the most valuable ways to spend your time to improve the entire sales process and drive revenue.
If you already have a BI tool, you’re likely no stranger to your bill-to-customer report, which shows your historical activities and bookings. In this simplified view, you can see the number of sales activities your team has made with each customer, the number of bookings made per customer, and a calculation of how much revenue you’ve generated per activity.
Activities vs Bookings Dashboard
Your CRM and BI can serve as effective time management tools, and the Activities vs. Bookings Dashboard can give you a great view of things at a glance. The built-in data analysis gives you the opportunity to then investigate further, which is exactly what you want to get out of BI: letting your data show you where you should be spending your time and where you should be asking questions so you can focus on revenue-generating tasks.
Now, you might have a customer like YourSet Tobacco (in the above image) that has only two logged activities but made over 200,000 bookings, including a faithfully large reorder. That’s fantastic but will not always (or often) be the case for your customers.
In other cases, you may have a customer that’s always a real pain in the neck that forces you to take lots of time out of your day, and while they’re reordering quite a bit, it’s more of a time drain than you’re always willing to dedicate. In our report example, Joel Baker, Inc. is an example of that. While they have made the most bookings of all of those customers, they’re also had 14 unique activities to get there. In situations like this, you should take a step back to acknowledge not just the quantity of activities but the quality of the sales activities, and if those “important tasks” are really crucial to add to your to-do list.
We’re all very good at being busy and can fill our calendars fast, but is what we’re spending our time on really moving the needle toward our goals?
Remember the numbers mentioned initially. To adopt more efficient time management strategies, think about how you can utilize tools like your CRM and BI to streamline repeatable tasks, reduce manual data entry, get your sales team on the same page, and ultimately boost sales productivity.
More meaningful (and lucrative) customer relationships start when your sales teams meet them where they’re at, deliver messages in a way they want to consume them, and make personal interactions more effective. This will result in a less cluttered calendar and a more productive time management strategy, so your sales reps spend more time doing what they’re good at: selling.
See it in Action: Manage Your Time to Maximize Sales Using Your CRM and BI Tools
To see this in action, check out this 12-minute webinar recording that Director of Product Management Kristen Thom did on how to Manage Your Time to Maximize Sales. In it, she walks through the importance of evaluating and improving the quality of your sales activities, not just the quantity. She demonstrates step by step how to combine the power of White Cup BI and White Cup CRM to boost sales performance.
About White Cup
White Cup turns a distributor’s sales pains into profit gains. Our CRM, Business Intelligence (BI), and Pricing software make it easier for you to sell more, keep more profit, and beat the competition. With over 20 years of experience, White Cup is trusted by more than 1,000 customers globally.
