It’s no secret that potential customers today want fast responses to their sales and support queries. When every imaginable convenience is available through a few taps on a keyboard or swipes on a smartphone, waiting for hours – or days! – to get a response can be hugely disappointing. For companies that rely on the strength of their inbound sales team to drive revenue, slow response times to leads can be devastating. Research has found that the odds of connecting and qualifying a lead drops by 80% after only five minutes (depending on the sector).
If you don’t respond quickly enough, at least 30% of your prospects will likely opt for a competitor instead.
Now consider this: responding to a lead within the first minute increases conversions by 391%. That’s right: being ultra-responsive to inbound leads will improve your sales success nearly five-fold.
What do you need to do to achieve this level of revenue growth? A good place to start is to improve your inbound sales team’s performance.
Sales team performance measures your inbound sales team’s activity and the resulting outcomes compared to your sales targets and expectations.
Improving your inbound sales team’s lead response performance will help them close more deals more quickly, driving revenue growth…
In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at why inbound sales team performance is important, how you can improve your inbound sales team performance, and what common metrics you should track to stay at the pulse of your inbound sales team’s success.
Want to know why you should even care about improving your inbound sales team’s performance? Doing so can unlock amazing benefits for your business and help you:
The first reason to improve your inbound sales team performance is perhaps also the most obvious. The better your inbound sales team performance, the more sales you’ll close.
It’s important to take time to understand your inbound sales team’s performance and seek insight into areas of improvement. Implementing tools and technologies that improve the running of your inbound sales teams can supercharge your sales efforts and help ensure that every lead is nurtured effectively and has the highest possible chance of conversion.
Once you close more sales, the expectation is that you’ll drive revenue growth too, correct? Definitely! By converting more leads into sales, you will boost revenue and drive the growth of the business.
However, there’s another dimension to improving your inbound sales performance to help the business earn more. As you unlock greater efficiency within your inbound sales team, you can drive down operational costs while still achieving gains in sales conversions and revenue.
Here, technology tools can be an invaluable asset. By using data-driven insights and automation, teams can optimise their internal processes and deliver great results quicker and more effectively.
High-performance inbound sales teams respond quickly, remain attentive to the needs of potential customers, and take effort to nurture every lead to maximise chances at success. It is inevitable that potential customers will notice.
Delivering a consistently great experience to every person that enquires about your products or services will help you build a strong reputation. And since there’s nothing as powerful as word-of-mouth for building trust in a business, you’ll soon have more people knocking at your door wishing to become one of your well-looked-after customers.
Closing more inbound sales is a great motivator for teams and helps build a healthy sense of competitiveness. As leads are consistently converted, revenue ticks up and your business becomes known as one that truly cares for every potential customer, you start instilling a culture of high performance.
This culture is often what separates great companies from ones that are simply good. And as your business scales, that high-performance culture becomes an invaluable asset to your growth ambitions.
Now that it’s clear why you should improve your inbound sales team’s performance, let’s look at how to do that. The tips below should inspire you to take steps to boost the performance of your inbound sales team and supercharge your sales success.
A strong strategy will give your inbound sales teams a blueprint for how to improve their conversion rates and boost your overall sales team performance. However, too often organisations develop a strong strategy but then fail to update it during the course of the year despite changes in their operating environment.
Be more agile in how you meet the needs of prospects and help ensure your teams are using the latest and most relevant sales strategies.
‘Trust your gut’ may have been sage advice in the past, but it’s not ideal for enabling a modern high-performance sales team.
Instead, the best inbound sales teams use data tools to gain insight into a broad range of metrics that may help them sell more effectively or better understand their customers.
Tools such as timetoreply Ignite empower inbound sales teams with accurate data about first reply times, average lead response times, follow-up cadence, closing rates, peak hours, and more. By using this data to eliminate bottlenecks and improve inbound sales processes, teams can boost their performance and consistently convert more leads.
Sometimes all that’s needed to boost team performance is to create healthy competition. High-performance inbound sales teams often use sales leaderboards to track who the top performers are in terms of reply times, deal closure, lead nurturing and more.
Using timetoreply Ignite, inbound sales teams boost their performance by tracking key metrics & behaviours that reveal which team members are sales superstars. The same metrics can also help lower-performing team members identify where they need to improve to climb up the leaderboard.
Over time, this can boost the overall performance of the inbound sales team and help you unlock greater sales success.
As much as we all want our teams to work at 110% all the time, at some point, people may feel tired, overwhelmed or even face burnout. It is critical that organisations look after their teams, especially during times of heightened stress or disruption. Unhappy employees are unlikely to be sales superstars.
Use a technology tool that can bring transparency to individual and team workloads and reveal when one or more of the sales teams are drowning in unanswered emails or struggling with slow responses.
With a properly motivated inbound sales team and up-to-date policies and processes to support them, you should start seeing some marked improvements in their performance.
But to really bring your sales capabilities alive, you need to track and measure team performance. And for that, you need a tool like timetoreply Ignite, which helps companies:
Using timetoreply Ignite, organisations can gain accurate insights into average reply times, peak hours for inbound lead volume, follow-up cadence by team members, conversion rates, alignment with lead reply time goals and more. Having this data helps managers remove bottlenecks to ensure the inbound sales team is running as smoothly as possible.
Use customisable reports for deeper analysis of your inbound sales teams’ productivity, strengths and weaknesses. By delving deeper into key metrics and tracking those metrics over time, managers can start seeing trends that will help them optimise their sales strategies to provide another welcome boost to the inbound sales team’s success.
Not every sale will follow the exact same process. Some potential customers may want more information or additional calls before they make their decision to purchase. Or the nature of a specific product or service may mean that you need more – or less – time or different tactics to close that sale.
Use a tool that allows you to set and track custom lead reply time goals. The best tools will also provide real-time alerts when a reply time threshold is being approached, allowing you to quickly rectify the situation before you lose out on a precious sale.
timetoreply Ignite is a tool for sales teams handling inbound email and web form leads. timetoreply Ignite empowers teams with real-time visibility of their first reply time, reply rate, number of follow-ups per lead, and cadence/time between each follow-up. With this kind of visibility, teams can optimise their performance against set benchmarks and track their improvement over time.
A typical prospect complaint is that sales teams appear disinterested. If a potential customer needs to nudge the sales team for a response, they will likely believe they are not crucial to your business. That is why timetoreply Ignite specifically tracks how often a prospect is nudging sales reps. This lets managers see which sales reps need more support to meet their reply time goals.
timetoreply Ignite is specifically built for inbound sales teams. It is quick and easy to install and requires no change to normal workflows. With simple integrations to Microsoft Outlook and Google Workspaces, timetoreply Ignite is one of the best ways for companies to boost inbound sales revenue by beating competitors to the sales deal.
Sales teams that want to offer a responsive experience and optimise how they deal with inbound leads on email should use timetoreply Ignite. Team managers can gain instant visibility over deal stages to identify potential bottlenecks, while team members can optimise their performance in real-time, including the number and cadence of customer touchpoints to drive more revenue. And since timetoreply Ignite works with any business email platform, any high-performance team can deploy timetoreply Ignite to respond more quickly and more effectively to inbound leads.
timetoreply Ignite offers a range of benefits and features to supercharge how your inbound sales teams handle leads. Access timetoreply Ignite’s detailed dashboard to:
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