Spend More Time Selling: 5 Time Management Tips for Sales Leaders
Spend More Time Selling With a Virtual Assistant Service.
2Use a Time Management System
Larsen’s research found that salespeople that use a time management system spend more time selling. Findings include:
- 22.9 percent of reps use a time management system
- Those reps spend 19 percent more times selling
What’s a time management system? There are many of them, including:
You can find a summary of these time management systems here.
3Keep Your CRM Clean
Larsen’s subjects spend 17 percent of their time in the CRM, with most of that time devoted to spreadsheets trying to reconcile inconsistent data. CRMs’ value soars when all contact, deal, and pipeline data are consistent and complete—everyone enters data the same way and as immediately as possible. Messy CRMs slow reps down when the following information is entered inconsistently:
- Contact info
- Segmentation
- Communications with reps
- Lead stages
- Lead qualification criteria
- Deal size
- Time to a decision
Manually updating this data is tedious and time-consuming. Getting your CRM clean can make teams and reps far more efficient. Learn more about proper CRM implementation here.
4Follow Up Faster
Response time is key to turning leads into opportunities. If someone contacts you for information, they are likely contacting your competitors as well. And guess what?
- 78 percent of customers buy from the first responder.
- Sales conversions are 391 percent higher in the first minute after a request is made.
- After five minutes, conversion rates decline by 80 percent.
- Most companies take five or more days to respond.
Lead response time is critical to sales success. If your leads are going cold, it may be because you took too long to respond, and they’ve moved on. This should be a salesperson’s first priority.
5Outsource the Admin Work
The chief distractions, according to Larsen, are as follows:
- 14 percent on admin work
- 11 percent on research
- 11 percent following up on leads
- 10 percent on prospecting
Other culprits are internal (8 percent) and external (14 percent) meetings. But let’s look at the list above. One could argue that research, following up on leads, and prospecting are all administrative tasks. A salesperson with a $100,000 base salary is earning about $50 per hour. Outsourcing those tasks to a virtual assistant can give you the twin benefits of more selling time for reps and lower admin costs for sales ops.
Let’s look at typical uses of virtual assistants by sales teams and the percent of the time they can offload based on Larson’s research:
- Admin (scheduling meetings, filing expenses, travel planning) – 14%
- Researching opportunities – 11%
- Sales follow up by email and phone – 11%
- Prospecting based on your lead criteria – 10%
- CRM data entry, cleanup, and management – 17%
You’ll still want to know how your salespeople spend their time and adopt tools and systems to help them manage their time. But getting 63 percent more time to sell will make that time much more productive.
To learn more about how a virtual assistant can give you and your team more time to sell, download the ebook, “How to Spend More Time Selling with a Virtual Assistant.”
