Why sales efficiency is a key driver of sales growth

By Caleb Bauers, Commercial Sales, Docusign

Achieving faster growth requires streamlining processes so that your sales organization can be as efficient as possible. Sales operations teams play a central role in driving sales efficiency through analyzing sales data, supporting larger deals, and standardizing processes behind the scenes, so that sales can dedicate their time to understanding customer problems and recommending the right solution. 

Sirius Decisions surveyed sales and sales operations leaders to identify their top three strategies for achieving growth objectives, and, not surprisingly, improving sales efficiency ranked number one.

So how can sales operations teams best drive greater sales efficiency and ultimately, increase revenue? Here are 3 tips to consider.

1. Build a true partnership with Sales

This is an often overlooked but critical piece in supporting and improving your sales workflow. Sales operations managers should shadow the workflow of an entire sales cycle from prospecting to final closing of a customer contract. Participating in the complete workflow can reveal potentially unknown aspects of the process and importantly, opportunities to streamline it. 

2. Standardize repeatable steps

While every deal may be unique, each step of the process is not. Sales operations teams can add significant value by finding opportunities for automation and standardization. Creating templates that can support multiple business needs and document variations, eliminating duplicate data entry, and defining discounting policies are just a few of the ways to drive efficiency.

3. Integrate technology and tools

In order to maximize productivity, sales needs to spend more time with customers and less time on administrative work. When sales reps don’t have the right digital tools to support them, errors or delays in the contracting process can cause deals to slip or stall. This not only hurts the bottom line, it can lead to frustrated reps, employee churn, and unhappy customers.

Sales operations can help select tools to automate key steps like quote generation and contract creation and execution. Consider connecting the systems where your team already works to eliminate errors by pulling data from your CRM system into contracts and back into billing systems.

Electronic signature is an obvious technology to drive sales efficiency, especially when integrated with your CRM system.  Learn more about Docusign eSignature for Salesforce.