In 2022, only 26% of sales reps reached 90% or more of their quota. That’s not a very successful win rate, especially when you consider the immense amount of money many sales organizations invest in tools that are meant to improve sales productivity. In fact, 28% of sales organizations use 10 or more sales tools to help reps get the job done. So the question is, what types of sales productivity tools actually drive a return and successfully help sales teams reach their quotas?

What is sales productivity?

Simply put, sales productivity is how efficient and effective your sales executives are at hitting various 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.

At Mindtickle, we define a sales productivity tool as anything that improves and measures the skills, will, and in-field behaviors demonstrated by reps.

That might include tools that hold reps accountable, such as email and call activity tracking; those that empower reps to better prepare for meetings and follow-up, such as Content Management Systems (CMS); and solutions that arm reps with insights that help them drive specific deals and accounts forward more effectively.

After reading this post, you’ll be able to understand:

• The advantages the right sales productivity tools can provide to your company
• The essential solutions and features to look out for when improving sales productivity at your company
• The top five sales productivity tool “must haves”
• Our recommendations and best practices

Why are sales productivity tools important for your business?

The most powerful benefit of sales productivity tools is that they help reps win more business by holding reps accountable, saving them time, and helping them deliver a better, faster customer experience.

This has a butterfly effect that improves revenue metrics like quota attainment, pipeline coverage, number of at bats, average contract value, average cycle time, and even the lifetime value of your customers.

At the same time, these tools align cross-functional members of revenue teams by providing a high degree of transparency and visibility while centralizing access to things like content, training, and insights.

With sales productivity tools, your team can do things like:

• Search for potential buyers to set meetings with them
• Grow, develop, and convert sales opportunities throughout the sales cycle
• Understand areas of opportunity to improve their performance
• Do more with less time and facilitate better hand-offs or deal collaboration
• Access content and insights that can help move deals forward faster and personalize the customer experience
• Learn from the winning attitudes and skills of top peers
• Keep up-to-date on new strategies, product launches, competitors, and market approaches
• Keep track of activity, pipeline, and progress toward goals

Modern sales productivity tools make your entire sales process more simple, measurable, and effective. This can result in benefits like:

• Faster onboarding and revenue contribution
• More opportunities in the pipeline
• Higher conversion and win rates
• Improved performance against competitors
• Better understanding of winning playbook
• Increased renewal rates
• Improved rep performance and retention
• Improved forecasting
• Tighter alignment around customer needs

And now, here are the top five sales productivity tool benefits:

1. Manual data entry & note-taking is eliminated

In 2023, the days of manually inputting deal data into Salesforce and trusting it’s correct are dead. This not only wastes a lot of time and often results in a complete, inaccurate view of your sales pipeline, but it also gravely reduces your organization’s ability to compete by limiting access to voice of customer insights.

It’s critical to invest in tools like revenue and conversation intelligence that automatically transcribe every call, email, and meeting while scoring deal health. In fact, a report from the Sales Enablement Society showed that teams that use conversation intelligence drive a 9% improvement in churn rates and close 4% more net new deals.

These tools also help reps self-coach by proactively flagging any deal risks, issues with buyer sentiment, or competitor mentions that need to be addressed to move deals forward faster. As reps move into new roles or leave the company, it’s much easier to ensure no deal or account falls through the cracks by facilitating best-in-class hand-offs.

2. Personalized customer experience

To improve sales productivity, it’s critical that reps can quickly find relevant content to nurture leads, follow up with prospects in a timely manner, and convince important decision-makers of the value your products provide.

Today, half of all customer engagement only comes from only 10% of content created. That’s why investing in a sales content management system, or CMS, that helps reps know what content is new, suggested, and preferred by peers is key to boosting customer engagement and wins. The ideal content management system to improve sales productivity helps reps know what content they can use to drive a deal forward without even thinking.

Ideally, it will be integrated with your conversation and revenue intelligence solutions so that the system can suggest valuable assets to reps based on what was said in previous emails and calls, such as a competitor mention.

At the same time, your CMS should include a feature like Digital Sales Rooms to help reps personalize the buyer experience and understand which assets buyers viewed or shared. Since improving pipeline is critical to sales productivity, DSRs automatically identify new potential leads who visit and automatically upload them to your CRM so they can be nurtured through marketing programs.

3. Valuable voice of the market and financial insights

Since it’s a given that today’s inside sales teams must use a tool to email and call prospects en masse, such as Outreach.IO, we’re not going to put that on our list of must-haves. But sending emails and making calls is not enough in 2023. Every interaction must provide value and be highly personalized.

There are lots of ways to do this at scale. The first is to use a tool like Databook to uncover market and financial insights that will truly help your reps know which accounts to prioritize and what business challenges your solution will need to solve for them. These insights can help you write emails that inspire urgency, build better proposals, and make ROI-driven business cases.

When paired with tools like conversation and revenue intelligence that summarize key themes discussed in calls and emails that you can reference in follow-ups, as well as suggest next steps or action items, reps can quickly ensure they’re doing the right things to drive deals home.
Insights on buyer engagement, such as whether reps have the right volume and title of prospects accepting their meetings and responding to emails, are also crucial to ensuring reps focus on truly winnable deals and don’t waste time.

4. Opportunities to practice and self-coach

In today’s highly dynamic and competitive markets, a traditional approach to enablement does not drive sales productivity on its own. Reps need to be able to quickly learn best practices from peers, practice, and improve on their own.

Another way conversation intelligence solutions can improve sales productivity is by providing reps with access to call snippets and playlists of best practice calls. Organizations can build playlists around key competencies such as discovery calls, objection handling, how to lead the perfect demo, competitor smackdowns, pricing/negotiation, and more. They also share examples of what top reps do and say on calls about new products and services.

At the same time, these tools provide immediate feedback to reps on how they compare to peers. Some of the best conversation intelligence insights reps can use to self-coach include understanding if they’re driving a customer monologue of a minute or more, measuring if they’re getting customers to ask or answer 12-14 questions, and trying to maintain a balanced talk time where reps speak 60% of the time or less.

5. Scale and measure coaching

Last but certainly not least, it’s critical that you not only provide sales productivity tools for reps, but also for your front-line managers. One of the biggest challenges they face is they cannot find the time to coach and get pulled into too many different directions. When they do have time to show up for 1-to-1s and offer coaching, they do not often have valuable, highly relevant data on how to help each rep and simply resort to doing deal reviews on the fly.

This is not productive, and it does not scale.

Instead, managers need sales productivity tools to run an end-to-end coaching workflow and measure performance improvement over time.

At Mindtickle, our coaching workflow starts with conversation and revenue intelligence. Every day, our managers can see exactly which deals are healthy or not, as well as a detailed snapshot of all of the calls, emails, and meetings associated with that deal. They can then show up to 1-to-1s more prepared to have a conversation about how healthy a rep’s pipeline really is, and where they might be able to offer deal-specific support.

At the same time, our enablement team provides managers with a detailed report on which skills and competencies their team and individual reps need to develop each quarter. This data is provided via our Sales Readiness Index, which is a comprehensive way to benchmark which reps have the skills, will, and demonstrated in-field behaviors they need to drive deals home – or not.

Based on data like the Sales Readiness Index, our managers can see how reps compare to their peers on a wide range of competencies, such as buyer engagement, outreach activity, objection handling, competitor win rates, and more. By comparing how reps perform on various competencies to the ideal rep profile we’ve created for each role on our revenue team, managers can know exactly who to coach on what topics without much thinking.

They can then immediately create and track the coaching was complete. Or, they can sort and filter through a list of recent calls to provide more comprehensive feedback on specific interactions with call scorecards.

At the same time, they can closely collaborate with our enablement and revenue operations teams by helping them understand which reps are ready to hit quota or not, and where they can provide cross-functional support.