Do you ever get tired of repeating yourself? Do you ever get tired of repeating yourself? Think about how frustrating it was to even read that sentence twice. Now imagine that you spend all day talking to prospective clients in sales conversations, where you have to be on your A-game. At the end of that day, you now have 15 conversations that you manually have to record what was said into CRM software. I’ve done it, and from first-hand experience, it’s madness. I always thought, there has to be a better way, and guess what, there is-HubSpot Sales CRM. Before I get into how to approach this in a better way, I want to talk more about the reasons we need to avoid this for sales teams.
The first case would be burnout. According to Cience, more than 67% of employees in sales are close to experiencing burnout. Burnout can be caused by a variety of different areas and reasons in a sales organization, but wouldn’t you want to limit those as a manager? Burnout for salespeople in my opinion is usually caused by frustration. Frustration with process, management, unrealistic expectations, and duties, along with others. Burnout can be bad for any employee at your organization, but burnout for your sales team isn’t a good thing. Your salespeople are the face of your company, and when they are burned out, they may not be representing you the way you would like. Make an effort to make sure your team isn’t burnt out, and make sure your internal processes aren’t contributing to it. I suggest meeting to discuss their daily duties, and asking them, how could I save you more time?
Hrdailyadvisor.com says that the typical cost to hire a new salesperson is about $15,000 in hiring costs, plus $20,000 in training, plus an average first-year salary and incentives at $75,000. That’s a lot of dough.
Salespeople are one of the most expensive people in an organization, and in my opinion, that’s often deserved. Salespeople are expensive because they are your profit producers and the face of your company. With the cost of attracting, and training a salesperson being so high, I think it would be wise advice to limit the amount of frustration, as well as friction when it comes to their daily duties. If you’ve made the investment to attract and employ great salespeople, you’ll want to ensure that you retain them. Removing barriers in their day-to-day, and increasing their ability to sell, or earn more, is certainly a space I would recommend spending some time in.
When building a successful sales-focused organization, the main focus should be just that, selling. According to insidesales.com, revenue-generating activities only make up 36.6% percent of sales reps’ activities. Over half (63.4%) of their time is spent on non-revenue generating activities. That’s crazy. Not only for your team's peace of mind but for your own wallet, make sure your sales team is doing what they are hired to do, sell. They’ll make more money, you’ll make more money, and both of you will be quite a bit happier.
Whew! Finally, he’s getting to the point. Sorry for the long wind about why, but I felt I couldn’t accurately paint the picture until I covered some of those points. So back to the regularly scheduled programming, double entry for data. Double-entry for sales teams, or any team member for that matter is a flat-out waste of time. Why waste time writing the same things you’ve either written or said over again? A lot of organizations have made this a requirement in the initial years of being exposed to a CRM, it was a shiny new tool and if we got our sales teams to input this info, we could see a bit better into their world. Flash forward to today, and CRM’s and capabilities have outpaced the original thinking.
The best experience I’ve had with software that helps do this has been HubSpot. Part of the reason our team loves HubSpot so much is because of the massive reduction in the double-entry for our team. From our sales users to our account managers, and service personnel, our team doesn’t have to retype a thing. HubSpot captures all of this information through our email extension. All I have to do is send the email, wait a few moments, and bang, the entire contents of that email are logged into our CRM where anyone on our team can view it. Talk about reducing admin tasks, and reducing headaches. Aside from it benefiting my psyche as a salesperson, it starts to build serious equity in the software for our entire team. An organization suddenly will become much better aligned for conversations with clients. That in turn, translates to improved customer experience and gives our team the ability to provide exceptional service through better-informed conversations.
Removing double entry by utilizing HubSpot’s CRM sales tools is just one of the tiny benefits of using this platform. However, it is shocking to me how many sales teams are still in the stone age. If you would like to schedule some time in the near future to review the magic of HubSpot and how it can reduce the amount of administrative time your sales team spends entering data, and the dozens of additional benefits, please feel free to schedule a time for a demo, or join us on April 20th, 2022 for our seminar on how to Accelerate and Enhance Sales Productivity with HubSpot Sales CRM. I’ll be happy to explain how HubSpot made me a believer, and why you and your team should experience its benefits.