Driving GTM efficiency was the focus of this year’s annual planning webinar series. Optimizing your GTM strategy for efficiency is essential for success, as is recognizing the impact of productivity.
Productivity is boosted when teams better anticipate buyer behaviors, streamline processes, and respond effectively to market changes. As a sales leader, it’s crucial to develop a strategy that prioritizes increasing productivity for overall success. The final webinar in the annual planning series focuses on Commercial Efficiency to Increase Productivity.
Watch the Webinar.
According to SBI research, seller productivity is flattening primarily due to increased buyer friction and hesitation. In today’s business landscape, buyers are more cautious than ever, often taking longer to make a purchase decision. This is largely because the number of stakeholders involved in deals is not only growing but they are joining and leaving the buying process at multiple stages. Deals are subjected to heightened scrutiny against the offerings, with each stakeholder wanting their requirements met.
This extended decision-making process slows down the purchase cycle, making it a challenge for sellers to operate at their desired productivity levels. Even highly skilled sales teams are finding it harder to maintain an efficient level of productivity.
Below are three ways to manage your productivity levels.
Productivity declines when sellers rely on inefficient or unproductive processes and resist adaptation. Buyers are seeking a differentiated approach to navigate their hesitations, and an outdated sales process does not fit their needs. As the buyer journey evolves and grows more complex, shifts in buyer behaviors can be unpredictable. To succeed, it is crucial to understand your position, remain flexible, and align your sales process to the buyer journey. A well-defined sales process not only accelerates deal velocity, but also significantly reduces friction points that can stall the decision making. In our recent study, we found that buyers are 43% less likely to make a purchase when buyers friction is high.
To achieve a buyer-centric sales process, steps must be taken to align with the buyers needs at each stage. Begin by leveraging your knowledge of the buyer’s pain points and decision-making process. Map out the buyer journey and equip the sales team to address concerns without losing momentum. Use these insights to build targeted messaging that anticipates and addresses the buyers’ hesitations early on.
When playbooks are tailored to the needs of your team and reflect their experiences, they serve as a roadmap to efficient performance. Sales teams often waste time trying to reinvent the wheel, or navigate unclear expectations, but clear training materials with their input will allow them to focus on high value activities that drive results.
Start by reviewing existing playbooks to identify areas of struggle and gather feedback from your sales team to understand bottlenecks in the process. Implement adjustments that directly address these pain points and ensure that sales managers are fully equipped to promote productivity through coaching and reinforcement. Providing sales teams with training that focuses on specific skills aligned with the playbook helps reps remain aligned with organizational goals. Investing in robust playbooks and management support drives momentum across your team, helping them achieve goals efficiently and with confidence.
Tech sprawl is a major challenge for organizations, especially when new technologies are introduced without proper planning. This often results in unintegrated systems and redundant processes, leaving teams unable reach their full productive potential. While CEOs are eager to leverage predictive tools, they often find them inaccurate or ineffective. This stems from a lack of visibility into the workflow, which impacts the tools’ ability to deliver relevant insights. It is essential to establish a clear baseline based on past experiences to take full advantage of predictive analytics.
Unchecked tech sprawl does not only waste resources, it fragments data, disrupts workflows, and creates inefficiencies that directly undermine productivity. To solve this, start with a thorough data cleanup, removing redundancies and ensuring high quality data is preserved. Integrate tools to create seamless data connections, allowing information to flow logically from one system to the next without manual workarounds. Equip your team with regular training will reenforce best practices and ensure adoption, enabling the tech stack to work effectively. Additionally, it is important to regularly assess the ROI of each tool, making sure to retire outdated or underused tech to keep the stack impactful. With a well-maintained tech stack, organizations gain clear insights, quick navigation, and helpful tools that streamline the process, enabling teams to reach their productive potential without unnecessary boundaries.
Increasing productivity needs to be a primary focus within your annual planning strategy for the upcoming year, especially if driving efficiency is a priority. By recognizing common productivity pitfalls and taking steps to avoid them, organizations can streamline their operations and make the most of their resources.
As you set your objectives for the year, consider how prioritizing productivity can impact your organization.
Watch the webinar here.