What percentage of your reps are meeting their quota each month?
If you’re like most sales leaders, your answer is around 50%. And since those quotas are usually based on higher-level business goals, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re missing your own revenue targets.
So, what can you do to boost sales productivity and get your sales reps working to their full potential?
In this guide, we’ll explore nine powerful strategies for improving productivity, from tech-focused solutions to carefully designed commission plans and more.
Scroll 👇 for everything you need to know about sales team productivity!
Sales productivity is about how efficiently a sales department uses its time and resources to meet or beat its revenue goals.
More productive teams aren’t just those that make more sales calls or send more cold emails (though volume is an important contributor); they’re the ones that generate more revenue per touchpoint initiated or hour spent selling.
It’s a question every sales manager wants to know.
The answer is yes - productivity directly impacts results.
Here’s how:
Sales productivity is about increasing output (e.g., closing deals or generating revenue) without proportionally increasing the input (e.g., hours worked).
High productivity means that sales reps:
When reps spend more time selling and less on manual tasks like searching for prospect phone numbers, they close more deals and hit quota faster.
This translates to higher average revenue and better margins.
Productive sales teams are more effective at moving deals through the pipeline, dropping sales cycle lengths, and driving up win rates.
This means that SDRs can add new potential customers to the top of the pipeline faster, accelerating pipeline velocity.
When productivity systems such as automated lead routing, integrated tools, and data enrichment are in place, results become more predictable and scalable across the team.
Sales tools are the key to improving sales management and productivity - more on this later!
Productive reps hit their targets more often, and guess what? Reps like hitting their targets.
Sales professionals do the job for a reason: they like the thrill of winning. The commission they earn from hitting quota ain’t half bad either.
When teams are more productive, reps hit their targets more often, boosting confidence, satisfaction, and morale.
The good news? These are all key contributors to employee retention.
Ready to turn your underperforming revenue team into a deal-closing powerhouse?
Here are nine strategies you can implement right now to drive productivity through the roof.
First of all, set your reps up for success with a fast, integrated tech stack.
There are a few obvious boxes to check here, like a well-organised CRM, a decent outbound calling set up, and a solid sales automation tool for faster email sequencing, sending email templates at scale, and orchestrating social touchpoints.
This three-pronged starting point will build you a solid foundation. From there, you’ll need to level up your sales data with a platform like Cognism.
Start by using Cognism’s data enrichment to make sure your reps have access to the details they need, like:
Then, program scheduled updates to your CRM data. This stops reps from having to fix out-of-date and stale data, ensuring they have the time to pick up the phone and do what they do best.
Once you’ve covered those bases, you’ll want to use Sales Companion to double down on rep productivity gains.
Sales Companion gives your team:
And all this at your fingertips in a dedicated dashboard or browser extension!
Meet Sales Companion, your 1+ for faster, easier sales - take an interactive tour below 👇
A lot of the time, what gets in the way of reps being productive is time wasted on leads that are never going to close.
Just as you would’ve designed qualification criteria to determine which accounts you want to sell to, you must determine what criteria disqualify a given lead, such as a lack of a viable use case or headcount below a certain level.
Tap into your churn data to help guide this. Customers that don’t stick around for long probably aren’t a good fit in the first place, so any trends you see here are good to note while you define your lead qualification system.
When sales and marketing chase different goals, productivity drops through the floor.
For example:
If marketing’s success is measured using MQLs, it typically optimises for volume, rather than lead quality. Reps end up wasting time on disqualifying bad leads.
That’s why it’s important to align both teams on:
You must also align both teams on the key metrics used to measure success, such as pipeline generated or revenue closed.
This is a smart move as it prevents competing interests from emerging.
A strong lead scoring system can help reps prioritise their outreach and spend less time following up on prospects who aren’t close to buying.
Build a decent lead scoring model by:
There are many ways to give your reps more time to sell, from implementing automated sales outreach to providing accurate sales data.
But one of the best moves you can make is just to get them out of meetings they don’t need to be in.
Take a look at your reps’ calendars. Sit down with your team. Ask them which meetings they think are truly useful and which ones are just wasted time.
You might be able to find some quick wins by looking at:
A major problem contributing to low productivity in even busy sales teams is a set of poorly aligned incentives.
Many reps are incentivised based on the number of meetings they book. This inevitably leads them to focus on quantity over quality. Then, AEs end up with calendars stacked with low-quality leads that will never close.
At Cognism, we witnessed this first-hand, and so we switched up our incentive plan. Now, our SDRs are measured (and paid) based on outcomes that align with overall business goals.
Our SDR compensation plan now considers three variables:
Turnover is a real thing, which means you may not always have a fully trained and quota-attaining team.
Getting new reps up to speed quickly and shortening their ramp time is an important factor in increasing sales productivity.
Here are a few strategies to reduce ramp time:
⚠️ Teach your reps new skills and best practices! Check out Cognism’s SDR Zone.
Sales teams are more productive when everyone follows best practices.
Conversational intelligence tools like Gong can be super-useful here. They can give you AI-powered insights into what kinds of word tracks or questions work for high-performing reps. Then, you can relay these learnings to the entire team.
At Cognism, we realised that when SDRs used traditional frameworks like BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing), they rarely got very far.
We noticed that the reps who focused on uncovering and emphasising the need booked more meetings. Now, all our SDRs focus their conversations on need.
The bottom line is:
Analyse what’s working (or not working!), document it, then distribute those playbooks, or use them as a starting point for ongoing training.
Speaking of which... 👇
Good salespeople are hungry to improve, but often we neglect to invest in ongoing development and instead focus on “the grind.”
We can hear what you’re saying:
Staff development and training take time away from your reps!
In the short-term, yes. But in the long-term?
While taking a couple of hours out of calling time each week might seem like a productivity loss, what’s really happening is you’re losing a bit of input, but upskilling your reps to deliver more output each week.
This kind of additional training doesn’t have to be very structured.
You might, for example, examine Gong insights each week and use that to inform what areas your team needs to focus on.
You might spend one week on improving sales pitches and another on identifying decision-makers.
There’s an old saying that floats around the world of marketing and sales:
“What gets measured gets optimised.”
So, if you want to optimise for sales productivity, you need to first define how you measure it.
Activities like dials made or emails sent might be a good starting point, though it’s generally a better idea to think about productivity measurement as monitoring outputs, not inputs.
At Cognism, we measure SDR productivity using:
Here are some other key metrics for measuring productivity from an outcome perspective:
Sales productivity isn’t just about putting in more hours or calling more prospects.
In fact, the teams that focus on working smarter, not harder, tend to be the most productive.
If you’re wondering how your sales reps can work smarter, look no further than Cognism Sales Companion.
With real-time sales intelligence, accurate and verified contact data, and personalised prospect recommendations, Sales Companion helps reps become more productive without working overtime.