7 PROVEN Ways to Increase Sales Productivity

Eventually in your sales career, you’re going to hit a maximum effectiveness at winning business. “You can’t squeeze blood from a stone,” as the old saying goes. But that doesn’t mean you’re stuck where you’re at.

If you want to drive more deals now, you’ve got to increase your throughput of sales leads. And that takes boosting your sales productivity using these 7 techniques.

1. Reverse Engineering

Reverse engineering your goals, mainly your financial goals.

What are you shooting for? Is it your dream house? Sending your kids to college? A ridiculously fancy new watch? What is it that you want?

Take your goals, jot them down, and then it’s time to work backward.

Start with how much extra income you need to afford those goals in a specific amount of time. So say you want to bring in enough to put a 20% down payment on a $500,000 house in 3 years.

What you’ll do is break down the extra amount you’ll need to earn $100k each year, or $33,000. Then break that down into quarterly, monthly, and weekly commission goals.

But the work isn’t done yet. Now you have to take your sales success rate and work backward to determine how much outreach you need to do every week. So if you have a close rate of 5% and each deal nets you an extra $1000, you’ll have to find 660 prospects a year to achieve your financial goals. And that boils down to 13 prospects a week, totally manageable.

And best of all, you’ll always know when you’re on track to that brand new house and when you need to make up for lost time.

2. Measuring Progress

Now number two is measuring progress.

If you aren’t keeping track of everything, you’ll have no idea if you’re 1) being productive and 2) becoming more productive. You’ll be going on feel alone and have no real data to show for it.

So what should you do?

Measure your stats relentlessly.

At a bare minimum, and I’m emphasizing the minimum here, you need to be keeping track of the following on a weekly basis.

* Prospects added to your list

* Emails and sales cadences started

* Meetings booked

* Demos completed

* Sales closed

* Your average deal length

With these numbers at your fingertips, you can keep track of larger trends, see how you’re improving, and even spot shifts in the industry before they become a problem.

It’s simple to do. And it’s a game-changer.

3. Time Blocking

Number three, time blocking religiously.

This one takes some practice. But the productivity payoff is substantial.

For every one of your important tasks, you need to assign them a time block on your calendar. Prospecting, two hours a day, 8 to 10. Lead follow-up, one hour a day, 1 to 2. Demos, 3:30 to 5. Whatever it is, make a specific start and end time. And focus on it and it alone during that time window.

Now the tricky part is not wavering. Answering emails during the prospecting window, making calls during follow-ups, any sort of multitasking or shifting that time window will make the entire system fall apart.

Instead, be single-minded. Be focused. And only work on that task and that task alone. It’ll take some adjustment. But you’re going to be 10X more productive once you do.

4. Leveraging Parkinson’s Law

Number four is leveraging Parkinson’s Law.

Have you ever heard the saying that a goldfish grows as big as its tank allows it to? Well the same is true for the time you spend on tasks.

If you give yourself three hours to finish something, say a new email sequence, it’s going to take you three hours to do, even if it only should have taken two. Humans are great at following the path of least resistance. And if you’re spending more time than you should on something, it’s probably because the deadline is off.

That’s Parkinson’s Law – “the time required to perform a task tends to extend to all the time available to perform it.