In this Expert Insight Interview, Joel Stevenson discusses the most common errors in sales business structures that keep you from being more efficient. Joel Stevenson is the CEO of Yesware, a leader in sales productivity software.
This Expert Insight Interview discusses:
- The importance of efficiency during difficult times
- The different ways to improve efficiency
- The way adversity forces businesses to go back to the basics
Efficiency
Efficiency is increasingly becoming a mantra among businesses. In better times, people get lazy and allow inefficiency to creep in because they can throw bodies or money at it. But when we enter periods like this, inefficiency can destroy a business.
If you think about how you can grow your revenue, there are two basic ways: you can either put more stuff into the top of your funnel, or you can have your funnel convert more effectively. In the good times, we tend to emphasize putting more in the funnel, spending more on marketing, opening up new channels, hiring more reps, and so on. However, when times become a bit leaner, we tend to focus on making our funnels more effective.
Making the Most of Your Funnel
The upside of living in difficult times is that they force you to take a closer look at your sales process. If you have fewer prospects in your funnel, you better have a higher rate of closing those prospects. This means spending the time to do higher-quality outreach to a more qualified set of people.
You can achieve efficiency in multiple different ways. If you’re doing a good job qualifying and spending more time on the right set of customers, that’s one way to drive efficiency. Another way would be to save more time by not doing the same activities repeatedly but using technology to help you automate some of them to spend more time on the right set of actions.
Back to Basics
When times are good, we begin to forget about the fundamentals; we get a little lazy and ignore doing everything as well as we could.
Times like this force you to refocus and perhaps go back to the fundamentals, making sure you’re walking through all the steps and preparing correctly because each opportunity that comes your way is like gold right now.
Our Host
John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.
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