In ongoing economic uncertainty, many sales orgs struggle to meet their goals. According to Forrester, more than half of B2B sales reps aren’t achieving quota.
But even in these trying times, it is possible to grow a team of top sellers that are equipped to overcome challenges, deliver winning experiences, and close more deals.
All sales leaders understand that improving sales productivity is key to improving sales outcomes. After all, sales productivity measures how effective and efficient your sales reps are. When a sales rep improves their effectiveness and efficiency, they’ll close more deals – faster.
But many sales leaders aren’t quite sure how to best measure sales productivity. We’re here to help solve the mystery.
In this post, we’ll explore everything you need to know about measuring sales productivity – the scientific way. We’ll cover:
- How Mindtickle measures sales productivity
- The problem with how sales organizations often measure sales productivity
- How Mindtickle tracks sales productivity KPIs
- 5 scientific tips for measuring your team’s sales productivity
How Mindtickle measures sales productivity
At Mindtickle, we define sales productivity as the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales executives in hitting a variety of revenue milestones and goals. Of course, just because reps make more calls and send more emails does not necessarily mean they are progressing sales or generating revenue.
That’s why, in addition to accountability around activity tracking, measuring preparation and improving effectiveness is key.
Here, we use our Sales Readiness Index to measure which reps demonstrate the right skills, will, and in-field behaviors. With our readiness index, we cross-reference who is hitting quota with who is doing all of the other activities that make a rep successful, such as:
- Conducting effective outreach
- Engaging buyers
- Sending educational content
- Completing new product and competitor training
- Practicing via AI video role-plays
- Achieving high call scores
At the same time, we use revenue intelligence and AI forecasting software through our technical partner BoostUp to help our sellers call their numbers with higher accuracy and confidence.
Deal risk analytics give detailed signals that help reps know exactly what action they need to take when they follow up, such as better multi-threading with a higher number of senior-level contacts.
Our sales enablement function moved from a traditional approach, where most time was spent creating content and delivering training, to focusing on call and deal reviews. We call this revenue enablement and have rallied our entire organization to ensure sellers focus on closing more deals confidently.
The problem with how sales organizations measure sales productivity today
Many organizations use Salesforce to track revenue metrics and sales productivity. Yet, not long ago, sales professionals started to game the system to hit their numbers. Maybe they exaggerated prospecting or sandbagged their forecast so they could sweep in as the hero at the end of the quarter or got overly optimistic about pricing and happy ears.
Here at Mindtickle, our revenue intelligence and forecasting solution is built into our readiness platform, so our sales managers use a new workflow to gain deeper transparency into deals, calls, and buyer engagement.
You can see that workflow in our interactive sales manager product tour here.
Instead of looking at lagging indicators of success, such as who has the most pipeline or who has historically hit their numbers, we look at what our reps do holistically to prepare for the future climate. We better understand where our reps put their time and calories and have implemented accountability systems to help them uncover risks and focus on truly winnable deals.
This means our executives have real-time visibility into every call, email, and meeting, and they spend more time helping reps uncover deal blockers so they forecast more accurately and help reps deliver faster, better wins.
How Mindtickle tracks sales productivity KPIs
Sales productivity can be tracked in many ways. Here are some metrics we use to keep our sellers and BDRs on track.
With our revenue intelligence solution,every deal is scored and labeled red, yellow, or green so reps know exactly why a deal is at risk, and how to address it.
With our Call AI solution, we score every call against the winning behaviors from top reps on every team, including BDRs, account executives, sales engineers, and customer success executives
We look at not only the number of emails and dials our reps make but also the percent of those connected touchpoints that convert. This helps us understand quantity and quality.
We look at not only the number of meetings that are scheduled but also those that were completed and deemed sales-qualified or not by our reps.
By analyzing all of the calls, emails, and meetings that take place, we are able to uncover keywords associated with deal risks or positive/negative buyer sentiment. Increasingly, buyer engagement and sentiment are a really important metric for us as we look to forecast more accurately and truly assess deal health.
Our sales content management solution tracks metrics beyond just asset views and also looks at content adoption. This includes the number of times each asset has been used in the sales process, the percentage of sellers who have used each asset, and the number of times each asset has been shared in deals progressing in stages including closed/won.
This includes onboarding and ramp-up metrics for new hires like time to onboarding completion, time to first deal/revenue, average ramp time, annual number of new hires, and yearly rep attrition.
We also look at everboarding or ongoing readiness metrics like seconds of training videos watched, pages of documents read, correct answers on assessments and questions asked over time, scores on video role-plays, overall team performance on programs, certification completions, rep feedback on program efficacy, and overall engagement.
We look at whether reps, teams, and regions have enough pipeline coverage to hit their numbers.
5 scientific tips to measure sales productivity
So, how do we measure all of this vast data and make sense of it without creating a ton of work for our operations team, which is in charge of measuring sales productivity and forecasting?
1. End manual data entry
The days of relying on manually entered Salesforce data and trusting it’s correct are long dead. We implemented revenue intelligence and forecasting through our BoostUp integration to track the activities that meaningfully move deals forward (or stall them).
To do this, we started by tracking buyer engagement across every call, email, and meeting – all of which we transcribe and tag when we uncover an important voice of customer insight, such as a competitor or product mention, next step, or strong instance of buyer hesitation.
We use this information to score every deal and proactively uncover risks. At the same time, we improved the way we manage opportunities by pulling together a rich visualization of all of the activity that has taken place—including what emails buyers and sellers have sent, what calls have taken place, what meaningful sales themes have been mentioned, and even whether or not our sellers have created a Digital Sales Room to engage customers with educational content.
This helps us offer reps self-coaching by nudging them with activities we know will move a deal forward, such as follow-up content they might want to send or battle cards they should review before their next call.
Our enterprise team takes a more account-based approach. We track the number and percentage of accounts in each rep’s territory that haven’t had activity logged in the last 30 days.
To ensure our enterprise and commercial teams are multi-threaded, we track the number of personas engaged in an opportunity and whether we’ve reached the VP+ level.
Content analytics are also important to us. This year, we launched our Digital Sales Rooms, a digital buyer experience that helps reps share content, understand what content customers and prospects are engaging with, link to call recordings, and manage the next steps.
Digital sales rooms have helped our sellers better multi-thread and improve engagement with our content by 300%.
2. Cut meetings in half, and reserve more time for practice & coaching
One invaluable tool for sales productivity is Call AI – our conversation intelligence technology that records, transcribes, and analyzes every call while making calls easily shareable with other departments, such as product or marketing.
Now that our sellers can listen to calls on 2X that they weren’t a part of and don’t have to spend time on internal updates calls and hand-offs, it’s faster and easier for every relevant person here at Mindtickle, such as our CSMs, to get the deep details on every deal or account while attending fewer but more valuable meetings.
Where did we reinvest those hours of precious extra time each week?
Into practicing via AI video role-plays and data-driven call coaching.
3. Create better buyer experiences
Sales productivity has never been about drowning customers in emails and cold calls. It’s been about connecting with the right person, at the right time, with meaningful information that helps them solve significant business challenges.
That’s why we started using Databook to provide our sales reps with better information on how their accounts are doing financially and their “big bets.”. This enables reps to provide hyper-personalized outreach and follow-ups.
At the same time, we regularly share call recordings with our customers so that they can include others who may have missed a meeting without slowing the sales cycle down.
4. Leverage AI for more accurate pipeline & sales forecasting
Earlier in this blog, we discussed how sales productivity is a better leading indicator to drive scalable, repeatable sales and enable fact-based forecasting.
Perhaps no group in our organization is better at reaping the rewards of our newfound focus on sales productivity than our operations organization.
Whereas before, reps and regional vice presidents would manually call their number, we now use revenue intelligence and forecasting software to analyze that number and how realistic it is with AI. Then, we uncover pipeline trends and risks that may prevent us from hitting it.
We can also examine week-over-week and month-over-month waterfall charts to analyze where our pipeline is growing and decreasing and better address issues with enablement programs.
This saves our revenue operations more than 30 hours previously spent on manual reporting a week.
5. Consolidate redundant sales technologies
In this economic moment, it’s common for sales teams to be asked to reduce their sales technology budgets by 30-50%, or even more. That’s a lofty challenge, but it’s also a painful reminder that too many teams are using bloated, expensive sales tech stacks that aren’t helping improve their ability to hit their number.
Our 2024-2025 Chief Revenue Officer + Sales Leader Outlook Report found that 66% of respondents indicate there are 10 or more tools to support their tech stack.
However, investing in a sales tool doesn’t necessarily mean the sales team will use it. The same analysis found a consistent pattern: the percentage of tools in the tech stack is often higher than the percentage of tools used daily.
Here are some solutions we use at Mindtickle:
- Our platform, through which we run enablement, manage content, and operate all of our conversation intelligence, revenue intelligence, and forecasting solutions, including enabling our reps to update Salesforce
- Outreach.IO for BDR prospecting
- Databook to uncover personalized account-based insights
- LinkedIn Navigator & ZoomInfo to find prospects and contacts across our accounts
Supercharge your sales productivity with Mindtickle
Every sales leader out there wants to boost quota attainment. However, focusing solely on what number will or won’t be hit has never helped sales leaders hit quota. Often, numbers are settled well before you enter the quarter. And in this economy, even deals that once looked highly winnable may be lost.
Instead, focus on leading indicators – like sales productivity. Doing so provides a better way to understand how prepared your reps are to sell and how quickly your team is improving. By using the tips we shared in this blog, you can start measuring sales productivity – in a scientific way.
Increasing sales productivity doesn’t happen by chance. Instead, you must equip your sales reps with the right tools, training, information, and sales content they need to be effective, efficient sellers.
Better sales productivity with Mindtickle
The world’s best revenue organizations depend on Mindtickle to ensure their teams have everything they need to increase sales productivity – all in one platform.
Request a DemoThis post was originally published in December 2022 and was updated in June 2024.
By Helen Waite
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