What if you’re told that your sales reps are spending the majority of their time on activities other than sales?

A robust study surveying 720 sales representatives found that sales reps are spending only 35.3% of their time selling, while the rest of the time is spent on administrative tasks, and downtime activities, among others. The problem lies more in how organizations allocate work within their sales teams.

Sales leaders often fill their sales rep’s time with non-selling activities, making them spend less time at what they should be doing – selling. This highlights the problem of sub-optimal levels of performance especially for those at the bottom of the pyramid.

Let’s consider the example of Alex and Kate, the two sales reps at Morgan Bank. While Alex works diligently to achieve quotas and targets, Kate underperforms, losing the potential targets. The sales manager at the Morgan Bank observed that the key reasons include: lack of proper coaching, time spent on repetitive manual tasks, lack of a sales playbook, nudges and winning behavior, and lack of opportunities to learn from star performers. The revenue losses due to underperformance of the lower rungs like Kate stresses the bank manager.

The manager wants to turn around the revenue upside and is looking for avenues to engage the sales team more productively. Using a Sales Engagement Platform like Vymo empowers the bottom of the pyramid and provides best solutions for optimum productivity and interactions. Vymo offers a single pane of glass view into the data, provides actionable insights, along with the next-best actions that are most relevant for the seller at any moment in time.

Efficiency of Sales Engagement Platform to turn Laggards into Leaders:

• Adopt data-driven approachSales engagement solutions such as Vymo provide insights-driven data to sales and marketing teams, leverage tools, and help adopt AI technologies that enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of revenue development reps (RDRs) and sellers. An embedded AI allows users to understand preferred engagement channels, identify missing contacts, and surface important account, contact, and opportunity insights.According to The Bridge Group’s 2021 Sales Development Study, 76% of high-growth companies have a sales engagement solution, compared to 43% for laggards. These tools also serve as a central repository for interactions across both sales and marketing. Interaction insights aggregated through a single source of truth, combined with efficient execution, enable sales engagement solutions to utilize cadences and next best actions to align with buyer needs and improve outcomes.
• Build omnichannel capabilitiesEngagement solutions can help sales, marketing, and post-sales personnel to understand and manage their omnichannel touch points across the buying cycle. By automating and orchestrating manual, repetitive tasks, Vymo delivers insights and tools that improve efficiency and effectiveness. Revenue Collective’s State of Sales Development study found that 97% of sales development rep teams that hit quota used three or more channels (e.g., email, voice, LinkedIn), and companies using four to five channels hit quota most consistently.
  
• Focus on ‘in-the-moment’ customer engagement optimizationWith the all-digital approach, it takes a lot more than training and coaching to lead sales teams effectively. Managers have to keep pace with their customers’ needs. Passing up on identifying potential opportunities and risks and not intervening at the right time can lead to multiple deal failures.
• Contextual Intelligence (Vymo Nudge)Vymo Nudge bumps the right actions to the right users at the right time. A right nudge can turn an average seller into a super seller. Vymo Nudge is built on the premise of Contextual Intelligence, mapping positive behavioral shifts by sales reps who deliver better sales metrics. Vymo Nudge understands your sales context and suggests the best course of action at the moment on whom, when, and how to engage.Vymo has a playbook mechanism where engagement rules can be set up. These playbooks are fine-tuned for different industry scenarios. The playbooks are then floated up to frontline sales users in the form of nudges on the app. Thus, Vymo focuses on shifting the behaviors of salespeople.
• Timely coaching
  Vymo Coach empowers managers to intervene at the moment and coach sales teams proactively. It allows swinging into action by enabling sales managers to fast-track the pipeline and improve team performance visibility with reduced TAT on customer conversion.
  Benefits of Vymo Coach:
  1. Allocate activities at scale, based on intelligent parameters, to the most relevant salespeople.
  2. Provide summary cards on lead and partner interactions with engagement history.
  3. View sales pipeline and forecast numbers basis activities against opportunities and probability of closure.
  4. Provide event-based nudges to managers for timely intervention, with identification of potential risks or opportunities.
  5. Help prioritize accounts based on business needs and assign engagement frequencies accordingly.

For an in-depth insight on how Sales Laggards can become Sales Leaders, read this interview with our financial expert,  Sumanar Kar.