Why sales efficiency should be your focus

Sales efficiency is often treated as the ugly duckling of sales enablement—overlooked in favor of sales effectiveness.

Companies invest a significant amount of thought, time and money into improving sales effectiveness, and rightfully so. Strategies to improve sales effectiveness, from creating a better buyer experience to tracking the popularity of email templates, can have a huge impact on revenue.

However, bringing in more deals is only half of the equation when it comes to a company’s bottom line. Sales efficiency covers the other half.

Sales efficiency is defined as performing sales operations activities in the fastest and most streamlined way possible in order to get the highest return on sales investment.

Don’t ignore sales efficiency

When companies invest completely in sales effectiveness but ignore sales efficiency, their sales process becomes lopsided. They put effort into making sales activities have the highest impact with buyers, but those activities end up being time-consuming, expensive, disorganized and overall just plain inefficient.

Your sales reps end up spending too much time entering data into CRM, your sales managers can’t devote enough thought to hiring the right reps, newly hired reps take forever to get up to speed, your marketing content goes unused, and so on. Just one area of sales inefficiency can undo all of the effort your company puts into increasing sales effectiveness.

Sounds great, but how do I get started with sales efficiency?

We’re so glad you asked. Take a look at this sales efficiency starter guide. It covers the basics of sales efficiency, the cost of sales inefficiency, and some useful sales efficiency strategies and tools to get you moving toward improving sales efficiency in the coming year.

Sales efficiency + sales effectiveness = total sales enablement

It may seem obvious, but it’s worth stating: simply switching your efforts from sales effectiveness to sales efficiency isn’t going to get you the results you’re looking for. What will get you those results is sales enablement. By combining sales efficiency and sales effectiveness initiatives, you’re covering all of your bases—making it easy for your sales reps to do their jobs and have the highest impact at the same time.

Take a few minutes to read the sales efficiency starter guide today, then give us a call to speak with one of our sales enablement consultants. We’ll help you identify where your company is falling short on sales efficiency and what you can do to move toward total sales enablement.