Hazel Raoult is a freelance marketing writer and works with PRmention. She has 6+ years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing, and all things SaaS. Hazel loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.
Administrative tasks are routine action items that require a lot of time and effort. Sales teams in SaaS and IT industries are quite familiar with administrative tasks such as data entry, writing status updates, and creating quarterly reports.
These tasks, as you can imagine, require attention to detail and leave fewer resources for actual sales activities like building relationships with prospects and answering their specific questions.
In this article, let’s look at ten tips that will help you relieve this administrative burden and enable your sales team to focus more on converting leads.
Automation completes administrative tasks in a fraction of the time. Things like sending follow-ups, generating bill estimates, and writing sales reports can be done with software.
Various popular tools in the sales tech stack have been bringing automation to the workflows of businesses and enterprises. Salesforce CPQ, Google Data Studio, and Mailshake are some solutions that help partially automate tasks such as providing cost approximation, data visualization, and email communication with potential customers.
Fortunately, adopting such solutions has become easier as more and more sales software vendors are offering third-party integrations. We have talked more about this further in the article.
Having a consistent lead nurturing and conversion process across the organization eliminates confusion, enhances collaboration, and makes it easier to improve operations with time. This keeps the sales pipeline more predictable and also speeds up employee onboarding.
You can start by mapping out the overall buyer’s journey and create helpful templates and guides for each step. Checklists, standard operating procedures, and brand guidelines are some of the fundamentals you may want to cover first.
Manually cycling through dashboards in different tools to get insights is counterproductive, especially in today’s rapidly evolving marketplace. Going through the dashboards of different tools in the sales tech stack is tedious and delays decision-making.
Getting the key performance indicators (KPIs) such as revenue predictions and the number of leads in the pipeline on a single dashboard can help. Such pipeline forecasting and data visualization solutions can expedite sales decision-making.
There will always be routing things that can’t be automated or require some level of human supervision. This includes archiving, managing, and deleting sales data, maintaining the sales tech stack, and updating internal training content.
It can be beneficial for businesses and enterprises to hire external teams or have dedicated members within their organization to handle these. It can lead to a better quality of work while keeping the sales reps focused on the leads.
Accessing your sales apps via mobile can help your sales team wrap up routine tasks quickly, even when on the go. For instance, attending quick calls, replying to inquiries, checking dashboards, and creating tasks can be done faster on a handheld device.
A lot of popular sales software vendors like HubSpot and Zoho CRM already offer mobile apps for their web or desktop counterparts.
Ensure that the leads have access to different kinds of educational content that can help them learn about your offerings. This will limit the number of simple queries which can make the sales reps more productive.
Articles, whitepapers, case studies, demos, etc., are a few kinds of formats you can use to empower your prospects to evaluate your products or services well. Moreover, providing all this knowledge via a conversational chatbot can also be effective.
Sales agents use multiple tools throughout the day to perform relevant action items. Whether it is writing emails, updating lead scores, or sharing updates within the team, there is a separate tool for each.
Connecting all of the tools through integrations and APIs will reduce and possibly eliminate the duplication of effort. For instance, when a sales rep sends an outreach email, they won’t manually have to update their team.
As we briefly touched upon above, the sales workflow in the modern workplace needs to evolve with the technology and needs of the business. Auditing ensures you never miss critical areas of improvement while making your processes future-proof.
It involves looking at performance and revenue metrics such as time to conversion, average deal size, and cost per conversion. Drilling down further can provide insights for iterating the sales strategies.
Just as you constantly update the workflow, you should also update the skills and knowledge of the sales reps. Teams should foster a continuous learning and growing mindset to remain competitive in any market condition.
Businesses and enterprises in SaaS and IT sectors can build extensive knowledge bases, host Q&A sessions with experts, and organize weekly meetings to share insights. This can play a pivotal role in employee engagement and morale as well.
No one knows how efficient your sales workflow is better than the sales reps themselves. Asking them for feedback about various aspects such as operations, tools, and strategies can help companies make their sales processes leaner and more impactful.
Multiple-choice questionnaires can help get feedback quickly. It can be beneficial to ask subjective questions as well because they give deeper insights into the thought processes of the sales team members.
Administrative tasks dilute the focus and resources of sales teams, particularly in SaaS businesses and enterprises. Companies must be vigilant about such inefficiencies and try their best to avoid them or tackle them proactively.
Sales reps should constantly communicate with each other and share feedback related to strategies, workflows, and objectives. Identifying the right areas of improvement is essential for sustainable improvement.
Additionally, adopting tools that integrate well with each other, provide mobile apps, and have automation features can take care of various administrative duties. Simultaneously, building a single source of truth to monitor KPIs can enhance collaboration and speed up decision-making.
Furthermore, it is essential to build internal and external knowledge bases to enable self-service for both sales reps and the leads. Organizations can take this a step forward by providing AI chatbots to the leads and conducting learning sessions for the sales teams.
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