We’ll get to tools in a bit.
First, what does sales productivity even mean?
Sara Leander-Pehrson, a Sales Enablement Leader, defined it as the convergence of sales efficiency and sales effectiveness.
In her words:
“Sales efficiency relates to improving the way a sales rep spends their time. For instance, an efficient sales rep will spend most of their time on high-impact versus low-impact tasks. On the other hand, sales effectiveness is all about a rep’s ability to drive revenue… Ultimately, to achieve high sales productivity, sales reps must prioritize high-impact activities with the right leads at the right times.”
This illustrated definition begs a crucial question:
As a salesperson using Salesforce, are you prioritizing high-impact activities needed to achieve higher sales productivity?
For most salespeople, the answer’s no. In short, research by Salesforce themselves found reps spend about 64% of their time on non-selling activities:
As you’d agree, an excellent way to prioritize high-impact sales activities and increase your chances of hitting quota is by freeing up more time for selling.
And that’s where sales productivity tools come in.
Why Reps & Account Executives Need Sales Productivity Tools
We all have the same 24 hours per day.
But as a salesperson, how and where you spend those 24 hours determines how much sales productivity you’d unlock. In other words, cut off time wasted on tiring administrative tasks, and you’d have more time for selling.
Sales productivity tools make this possible, especially for reps using Salesforce.
Say you want to save 10-20 hours a week from creating or updating Salesforce records. With a tool like PeopleGlass, you can join other Account Executives who are achieving that easily:
6 Best Tools for Reps to Boost Sales Productivity
As stated earlier, sales productivity tools help you reduce the time wasted on redundant tasks to focus more on high-impact selling activities.
Again, research by Salesforce confirms this.
Their study of over 2,300 sales leaders found that “high-performing sales teams use nearly 3x more sales tech than underperforming teams, freeing them from process-heavy tasks and giving them more time to actually sell.”
But it’s not enough to have just about any tool.
You need the right ones across the various selling activities.
So below are six tools reps using Salesforce can rely on to improve sales productivity, manage pipeline better, and focus on hitting quota:
Prospecting: DataMiner & PeopleGlass
Sales start by getting the right contacts into your CRM.
But getting those contacts, otherwise called prospecting, takes reps significant amounts of time. In short, a HubSpot study found over 40% of salespeople acknowledge prospecting as the most difficult part of the sales process.
You can leverage tools to improve your productivity in this area.
Dataminer helps you scrape contact information in less time. Plug in a list of URLs or profile pages of companies or people you’re targeting, and it’d crawl and scrape vital contact information into a spreadsheet for you:
However, you’d still need to sort and upload those contact information into Salesforce, which takes extra effort. What if you could get target buyers’ info from LinkedIn profile pages straight into Salesforce?
That’s where PeopleGlass comes in.
Outreach: MailShake
Once you get the right contacts, outreach follows.
MailShake works well for this.
This product brings cold calls and cold email outreach under one roof. It also has an AI email writing assistant to reduce the time spent on sales email copywriting. More importantly, MailShake integrates natively with Salesforce, making it easy to get records of your entire cold outreach into the CRM:
Managing Salesforce Deal Pipelines: PeopleGlass
It’s one thing to get contacts into the CRM and start outreach.
For most reps, it’s another beast managing deal pipelines by updating myriads of records while dealing with Salesforce’s clunky UI. This process usually results in unnecessary busywork. And for the average salesperson, this busywork results in completing just 40% of sales updates, per RingLead’s report.
PeopleGlass knows “The Path to Quota Isn’t Paved with BusyWork.”
So we built a tool that boots sales productivity for reps by making it seamless to create and update Salesforce records from one spreadsheet-like view:
Say you wanted to update a pipeline record to closed-won.
With PeopleGlass, it takes a few clicks from one view to do just that, and the records get updated in Salesforce in real-time.
This ease of managing deal pipelines in Salesforce is one of many reasons why sales teams choose PeopleGlass for boosting sales productivity.
Take Kelly M., an Account Executive:
Booking Calls with Prospects: MixMax
MixMax saves you the back and forth of booking calls with prospects.
You can share a calendar for prospects to book calls with you directly from a sales email. Also, you can embed polls & surveys, track replies, and schedule email sequences.
And as a rep using Salesforce, you can rest assured knowing it works natively with your CRM. This workflow means you’d get records of booked calls into Salesforce, automating some busywork in the process:
Sending Video Pitches: Vidyard
Videos can help you stand out in your prospects’ inboxes.
In short, VidYard reports that having videos in your sales emails can lead to 3x higher response rates than text-only emails. This finding aligns with a HubSpot study that highlighted video prospecting among the top 10 skills sales development reps must master.
Does all that sound interesting?
Then consider boosting your sales process outcomes by using a tool like VidYard to create and include videos in your sales pitches easily:
Contracts Signing: HelloSign
This one’s straightforward.
Sales productivity isn’t productive until all efforts produce closed-won deals faster. But for this to happen, prospects must make commitments in signing contracts.
You don’t want to make things difficult at this final stage.
So a tool that removes the hassle of signing contracts is a must-have in your sales productivity arsenal. And since Salesforce is your CRM, you need something that works well with it.
Enter HelloSign:
What to Check Before Using a Salesforce Productivity Tool
Reps don’t like the busywork that comes with using Salesforce.
However, most companies (and yours is no exception) choose it over other CRMs because of its strict measures towards securing customers’ data.
So before you jump on any tool that claims to boost sales productivity on Salesforce, it’s crucial to check if it meets certain security compliance.
Specifically, four things to look out for are:
- Secure sign-on,
- SOC 2 Type 1 compliance,
- Owning your data, and
- Keeping your Salesforce permission as-is.
PeopleGlass meets all these requirements:
Start Boosting Your Salesforce Productivity Today
If you already manage Accounts and Opportunities on Salesforce, you can start boosting sales productivity by improving how you manage deal pipelines.
PeopleGlass makes the entire process a breeze.
Instead of opening countless Salesforce tabs to create or update records, you get one spreadsheet-like view to do that seamlessly. This workflow saves you hours per day updating Salesforce, leading to optimal sales productivity.
Again, Account Executives like PeopleGlass for this:
