State of Sales 03The Productivity Gap 17 Top Sales Teams Turn to Tech and Training While sales departments move to innovate Inefficient Processes Hinder Sales Teams and become more customer-centric, the Decreased productivity impacts the success of not only sales, but also the entire company. Among day-to-day sales process is still plagued teams who cite ineffective internal processes as their top challenge, they point to excessive by time-consuming administrative administrative tasks as the primary cause. tasks, siloed customer information, and outdated management systems. If sales Percentage of Sales Teams Who Say the Following Are Reasons Why Ineffective Internal reps aren’t armed with capabilities at Processes Is Their Sales Challenge* least as sophisticated as those of their customers, they risk continually falling Excessive administrative tasks short of customer demands. (i.e., not enough time to sell) 45% Technologies like analytics, mobile, Lack of time for face-to-face selling 22% and automation can go a long way to improving a sales rep’s daily productivity. Limited insight into issues until Analytics tracks and interprets actionable it’s too late/lack of timely insight customer data. Mobile sales apps allow into the sales process 21% reps to look at those insights instantly Lack of alignment with marketing as well as act on the information from (e.g., poor leads, ineffective content) 19% anywhere. Automation provides relief from human error, manual data entry, and cumbersome processes. It takes too long to respond to customer inquiries 18% SALES LEADER perspective “Sales productivity is one of the reasons why Zillow is as successful as it is today. And a lot of the sales efficiency came as a result of putting better sales tools and information at the fingertips of salespeople.” — TONY SMALL, VP AND GM, PREMIER AGENT, ZILLOW ** * This chart is a partial list. For the complete list, see page 47. Data reported is out of a base of respondents who selected “Ineffective Internal Processes” as the top overarching challenge in their sales process. ** Taken from Quotable’s “How to Boost Sales and Productivity by 275% with Zillow’s Tony Small” Salesforce Research