Time Management: The Top 4 Tools to Enhance Inside-Sales Efficiency

We all know the typical time management advice given to sales professionals: eliminate administrative tasks, focus on one task at a time, reduce distractions, and so on. But, let’s not rehash another listicle of time management tips. Instead, this article will offer tangible solutions engineered to make sales teams more efficient and help you maintain peak selling performance at your organization.

The Top 4 Tools for More Effective Sales Time Management

The last thing you need is another calendar app or a new reminder extension for Chrome. Instead, here is a specific set of solutions you may not have considered that directly address the major time management challenges being faced by modern sales professionals.

1. Snapshot Report

Most experts recommend that salespeople should spend between 30 percent to 40 percent of their working week on prospecting related activities. This ensures that sales pipelines don’t dry up over time. But, In reality, most of this time is being used inefficiently. A study conducted by MarketingProfs found that B2B sales reps spend half of that time deploying unproductive prospecting tactics.

Tools like Vendasta’s award-winning Snapshot Report give salespeople time back in their working days by automating the prospecting and needs assessment processes to ensure that they’re always pursuing the best possible candidates within their market.

Here’s how this powerful tool works:

1. Marketing generated leads are auto-created within the Vendasta platform and can then be assigned to sales reps.
2. In one click, reps can trigger the creation of a Snapshot Report.
3. Within 24 hours, Snapshot will scrape the web and aggregate a consolidated report on any business’s online performance, based on listing accuracy, review scores, social media presence, website quality, digital advertising, SEO, and ecommerce capabilities/effectiveness.
4. Reps can not only learn from these reports, but they can share them with prospects to highlight gaps and spark a more prescriptive sales conversation.

2. Meeting Scheduler

Inside sales reps manage some of the busiest calendars this side of anywhere. We all know those reps that have most of their days so booked-up that they have to schedule time just to grab a cup of Joe. In fact, studies have shown that the average inside sales professional has 39 separate engagements per week. That’s almost exactly one meeting per working hour.

Meeting software is a necessity for all inside sales organizations, but not all meeting software is created equal. 

Here’s what makes Meeting Scheduler unique:

• It’s completely free. Meeting Scheduler integrates directly with Google Meet and Zoom, so as long as you have not exhausted limitations enforced by those providers, then you have unlimited access to Meeting Scheduler.
• You can white label it. The reality is that every business needs Meeting Software more than ever. If you sell to other businesses, then you can spread the love and offer Meeting Scheduler to your clients as well.
• Customizable URLs and meeting types allow best-in-class personalization and flexibility for the booking process.

3. The Loop

Reinforcing strong performance is critical to the survival of your sales organization. This is best done by recognizing those ideal behaviors in order to motivate top performers to repeat them and to also encourage other reps to emulate them.

To help address these needs, The Loop was created. Simply put, The Loop is what happens when you combine an activity feed with a data center. In essence, it’s an aggregate feed of all sales and marketing related activities happening within your business.

Here’s why your organization needs The Loop:

• Competition. In the sales world, a little friendly competition is always a good thing. The Loop creates a centralized hub where every sales and marketing activity can be tracked in real-time by your entire sales organization. This keeps reps accountable and allows them to easily gauge their performance against others in the organization.
• Team building. With the ability to follow, like, and comment on other activities, The Loop creates a virtual environment where reps can acknowledge and celebrate each other's achievements.
• Training. The more complex your offering, the more difficult it is to onboard new reps. The Loop is a great way to model desirable sales behavior and help reinforce the actions that new reps are expected to be taking on a daily basis.

4. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is essential for all inside sales organizations. CRMs allow reps to easily track and log information, plan/manage time, organize their sales pipelines, prioritize tasks, track contacts, and reduce administrative toil. 

Here are a few facts to reinforce the need for a sales CRM:

• Administrative tasks dominate the use of sales time, with 14.8 percent of the average week being spent on these various tasks.
• Inside sales reps spend 11.6 percent of their time researching prospects and target accounts.
• The average return on investment with a CRM is $8.71 for every dollar spent.
• CRM applications serve to increase sales by up to 29 percent, sales productivity by 34 percent, and forecasting accuracy by 42 percent.

Great CRMs enable sales organizations to transform administrative toil and research efforts into productive and profitable selling time. Unlike other CRMs and sales/marketing automation solutions, our CRM is built for the salesperson—it’s not a marketing platform that’s been adapted to meet sales needs.

Here are some of the key features of Vendasta's CRM:

• Artificial intelligence (AI). Our CRM uses AI for advanced behavioral analysis to determine the exact moment that your prospects are ready to buy. This allows your reps to dial the right prospects at the right time, have the right conversations, and improve their win rates.
• Smarter pipeline management. Tracking leads as they progress through the sales funnel can be one of the most complex components when it comes to sales forecasting. Our CRM makes it easy with an interactive pipeline that automatically calculates percent-close rates and overall revenue opportunities (see image below).
• Snapshot Report, Meeting Scheduler, The Loop, and more great products like the ones mentioned in this list are integrated directly into the CRM.

Conclusion

These are four solutions that can empower sales reps to become masterful time managers. The unique thing about all of these solutions is that they are all baked right into the Vendasta platform which was recently recognized as The Best Marketing Automation Platform of 2020. 

If you’re ready to elevate your inside sales performance and want access to the four best tools available to modern sales professionals, then create your free Vendasta account today.