Every organization wants their sales people to be more effective - which means closing more sales in shorter time. But in most organizations, sales reps have to spend significant time doing administrative activities - valuable hours which could have been better spent selling to customers. Sales reps are understandably not too happy about all these administrative tasks and information that they have to fill in different applications.

What can organizations do to make the life of reps better so that they can focus more on the core selling activities? Well, many things. Here are some of the ways that you can embrace:

1. Have an easy to use CRM system A good CRM system can help a sales force to stay focused and organised. With features such as lead prioritization, automatic reminders, lead nurturing and notes, you can expect to see an increase in your sales team’s closing ratio and improved productivity. However, many CRMs today have become overly complicated. Which makes it cumbersome to accomplish even simple tasks. Choose your CRM system wisely and if necessary, create customized workflows that suit your needs and are intuitive to use.

2. Make your salesforce mobile-ready Give mobile device based access to all the key systems that reps use to sell. Help your sales reps to get access to all relevant information even when they are on the move. Create easy-to-use mobile device based applications that connect to your base CRM systems. Again, the goal should be not to provide all functionality on the mobile, but to expose the most used and needed features.

3. Use technology to help reps with their selling strategy Don’t let your sales reps go out and shoot in the dark. Give them a complete understanding of the customer profile. Use technology to build a system that will house all key customer data - their preferences, interests, maturity levels and past engagement experience. Devise a selling model to help sales reps understand customer-specific selling strategy that they must undertake to make a successful sell.

4. Make all marketing collaterals instantly available to the sales reps Sales reps must have access to all the latest marketing collaterals, competitor information and any other published information that help them to sell. It is even better if they have all this information available to them on their mobile devices so that they can prepare on the road before meetings, as well as show it to the customer while they sell

5. Create intuitive applications for sales reps for data collection Data is important for senior management to monitor sales and take actions. But sales reps often don’t like to input data in the systems because the systems are too complicated. Make it easy for the reps to enter data into your applications by designing them as extremely easy to use and intuitive. You have to give the feeling to the reps that using the applications is much easier than the existing process that they are following.

6. Create a gamified competitive environment Sales reps are competitive by nature. Use leaderboards to publish monthly, quarterly and yearly sales data. You can also choose to publish this information by region or country. The inherent competitiveness of sales reps will motivate them to climb to the top of the leaderboard.

7. Arrange for regular trainings/coachings for their development No sales rep is highly effective from day 1. It is important for the sales manager to invest time and coach the reps and help them become more effective. You first-line managers can start by identifying areas of strengths and areas of improvements and help the rep to focus on these areas. They can participate jointly with the rep and commit to improve the rep’s performance.

Want to gamify your training? Check out the below articles which explain how to best gamify your training

Improve Employee Engagement of your Remote Teams with Gamification

30 60 90 Days Gamified Sales Training Plan

‘Work from Home Warriors’: Sales Training Game for Remote Sales Teams

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