Sales Productivity Best Practices

The Beginning of a Journey

It was my second week in my new role. I woke up in the morning, followed my routine, threw something into my stomach, got into the new Volkswagen Golf issued by the company, and drove to work.

I was a 24-year-old with ambitions to become the best salesman in the company, yet I had no idea how I would achieve that.

A few years before this role, I had worked with my parents in a similar position, and the only thing I had learned was that sales are a game of numbers. The more phone calls you make, the better your chances are of not getting rejected. Still, I wasn’t 100% convinced this was true—I thought it was a hypothesis that still needed to be verified.

I walked into the office, which was located in an absolutely unremarkable building in the middle of the city’s industrial area. From the outside, you would never guess it was the office of the biggest and richest construction company in the country.

I threw my bag on the chair, did a lap around the office shaking everyone’s hands, took off my jacket, sat down, and opened my laptop. In front of me was a list of companies and contacts that I had researched earlier. My task was to call them and schedule meetings.

We were planning business visits to window and door dealers in Ireland, as we were entering a new market.

I picked up the phone, heard a few beeps, and then a tired, low voice answered:

“Middlands Construction, Josh here.”

“Hi, I’m Jeff. I’m calling because I saw on your website that you install windows, doors, and facades. I thought you might be interested in what we offer,” I said, my voice trembling.

“Hmm. What’s the name of your company?” the voice asked, sounding a bit more interested.

“[Name of the Company],” I replied.

“Do you do aluminum facades from Schuco by any chance?” the voice asked, with genuine interest.

“That’s exactly what we do!” I replied, overly excited.

That conversation led to the closure of a €1.2 million contract for the delivery of facades for the Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, Ireland.

Two weeks into the role, and everyone was curious—what secret did the freshman know that allowed him to make a sale in his first two weeks on the job?

Sales’ Game of Numbers

Sales are a game of numbers. Any business is simply a game of numbers. The more attempts you make, the higher your chances are of winning business.

When I reflected on that sale, made just two weeks into the role, I couldn’t stop thinking it was pure luck—nothing more. I made thousands of phone calls after that conversation and never again came across such a big contract so quickly.

I tried to replicate my success by implementing sales productivity tools like CRM systems, automating administrative tasks and phone calls, and getting more people into my department.

We won more business, but we never stumbled upon such big opportunities again. However, in my quest to repeat that success, I discovered many tricks to help a sales department truly excel. This eventually led me to transition into a consulting role, where I’ve worked ever since.

What I’ve learned after working with more than fifty different companies and projects is that there is no universal recipe for success. However, there is homework that most companies ignore. Those that don’t ignore it become tremendously successful.

The Power of Follow-Ups

Some other sales performance statistics from the National Association of Sales Professionals:

Whether you like it or not, follow-ups are one of the most powerful techniques for increasing sales productivity. It’s an old sales strategy, but one that is often overlooked or poorly executed by many organizations.

I enjoy surprising my prospects with one simple trick. If a lead comes my way and we have a conversation, but I can tell we’re not a good fit at that moment and they need more time, I suggest having a follow-up conversation in a year.

Reactions vary, but most people just smile, assuming I won’t actually follow up in a year and that I’ll forget about them.

What I do instead is make a note in my Salesforce CRM, carefully documenting everything we discussed—especially any personal details, since the business context may change, but the person remains the same. Then, I set a task with a due date roughly 360 days later and forget about it.

A year later, when I open my CRM, I see the task to call that person—and I do. I absolutely love the stunned reactions when they realize I remember them.

In 15 years, I’ve only succeeded once with this technique, but the reaction of hearing my voice after a year, and realizing that I remember what they said, is priceless. It makes my day every time.

I’m not saying you should do the same, but I am saying that a simple follow-up could land you more business than you might imagine.

Think about it: You’ve already spent time and money to get that lead. Isn’t it worth making a few more phone calls, which cost you almost nothing, for the chance to win their business? I doubt your competitors will do the same, which means you’ve just learned how to gain an edge with zero investment.

Record Every Lead

Going back to my early days at the construction company, I used Excel lists to make calls.

Every time I made a call, I almost inevitably heard, “Oh, you should talk to…” followed by a list of other people I needed to contact.

My Excel list became a mess. Next to each company name, I had comments, names, phone numbers, all filled with chaotic Excel colors and scattered dates for when I should call back.

It looked terrible, but it worked. I had the discipline to record every single interaction with a prospect.

I noted their hobbies, their children’s names, birthdays, and holiday plans. Only I knew how to navigate the chaos, but it worked. Month by month, quarter by quarter, I was making the biggest sales in a company of 5,000 people—a 24-year-old rookie, as they said.

It wasn’t because I was more talented or knew the product better. Quite the opposite. I often found myself lost in conversations when customers asked technical questions. Most of the time, I had no idea what they were asking. Worse, I wasn’t even particularly interested in the windows and doors I was selling.

But I recorded every single lead in one place, and it worked.

Now I use Salesforce, and my lists look much better. All accounts have contacts linked to them, with notes on their positions, when I should follow up with them next, and what makes each person unique.

If there’s one productivity tip I could give, it’s this: Find a way to make great notes, record every conversation, and then reuse that information effectively for better sales team productivity.

Write a Script

Do you know what a 24-year-old man is most afraid of? The shame of rejection. At least, that was true for me.

When I started making phone calls, I was rejected 9 out of 10 times, even just for trying to start a conversation. Not a very good start for sales productivity.

After making probably 500 calls, I noticed a pattern. If I asked certain questions after introducing myself, the voice on the other end wouldn’t immediately send me into short erotic trip. Instead, they would answer my question first.

So, I learned to ask questions—a lot of questions. But eventually, I turned our conversations into interrogations, and people started to get pissed by that.

That’s when I realized there needed to be a balance between questions and statements. I wrote them down and did my best to follow the script I had created.

Later, I shared this script with other top sales leaders and managers. Guess what? Their meeting scheduling rates skyrocketed.

That’s when I learned a new term: sales script.

Sales productivity is all about numbers. The more attempts you make, the more successful you are. Sales scripts reduce the number of attempts you need to succeed at sales goals by incorporating the best practices of what to say and how to say it.

Let me tell you more. Over the years in consulting, I’ve developed scripts not just for phone conversations, but for meetings as well.

My goal nowadays isn’t just to close more deals but to close deals with higher quality. When I don’t follow the script, I inevitably miss some piece of information I should have asked the client about.

But when I do follow the script, the results are surprisingly consistent. My clients love how well-structured my meetings are. The secret is simple: follow the script.

Split Responsibilities

A year after I closed that lucky deal, I became a sales lead. Unofficially, of course, since the company I worked for was ultra-conservative, and the idea that a rookie with no experience in the construction industry could lead, especially without at least 5 to 7 years in the same position, was uncomfortable for management.

Still, I built a sales team around me. The team was small but mighty. I had a lady who handled all the quotes for me and a guy who did the technical heavy lifting, like studying blueprints and gathering critical information such as the number of windows, glazing area, etc.

Officially, we were all on the same level. But what we all understood was that if we focused on what each of us did best, our performance would be greater than what we could achieve individually.

The process looked something like this:

I would make phone calls and schedule meetings with potential customers and prospects. I was on the road all the time, with my phone and laptop. Every time I met a client, I’d send photos or files with blueprints of the building sites that needed windows to Michael (that’s what we’ll call the guy who helped with the technical details).

Michael would pull all the necessary data from the blueprints and give me the most important answer—whether we were interested in the job or not. If we were, he would prepare additional questions and contact the client on my behalf.

Once he gathered all the necessary information, he would forward it to Julia (the lady handling quotes). Julia would create technical drawings, calculate the exact costs of the project, and put together a quote for me.

She would then send it back to me, and I’d close the deal with the customer. The client never knew I had a team behind me—they all thought I was some kind of fanatic who worked 20 hours a day with just a short break for sleep.

In reality, I was having the best time of my life. I traveled across the UK and Ireland, met interesting people, and did what I did best at the time—pretended that I was genuinely interested in windows and doors.

Unconsciously, I had created a conveyor—a whole sales cycle conveyor. I split the process into smaller parts and assigned tasks to people with the right talents.

This is something I now recommend to my clients. Break down the sales process into different steps and let the magic of sales efficiency happen. Just like Henry Ford did almost two centuries ago with cars, you can do it with sales.

Up-sell and Cross-sell

Things were going well, but not well enough for me. I was young, ambitious, and hungry for more—ideally, everything, with a little bonus on top.

One day, I drove to see a client in Exeter, a small city in the southwest of England. As I drove, I kept thinking about how we could sell our windows at a higher price. 

What could be that magic “word” or approach that would make my client willing to pay more for the same product? And then my client did the job for me—he asked if we also did heating.

It hit me like a bolt of lightning. I shouted, “YES, OF COURSE WE DO!” I had no idea what that actually entailed, other than knowing that when you turn it on, it makes the house warmer. 

But I was so desperate to make an extra penny that I convinced the poor guy that we had started in heating systems before moving on to windows and doors.

The second I left the house, I picked up the phone and called Michael. Michael had sold heating systems at his previous job, so I asked if he could pull some strings and get me a quote for this client. Michael delivered.

Less than a week after the meeting, I forwarded a quote that included a 12% commission on top of what Michael’s former employer had provided. And that’s how I learned we could do more with a single client.

I’m not sure how the process within the company works now, but when I left, windows were on their way to becoming a secondary product. We began offering flooring, kitchens, roofing, and cladding from various vendors.

All we had to do was ask a few extra questions to find out if the client had suppliers for other parts of their house.

That’s when I learned the power of cross-selling. By offering products that complement your main product, you can increase revenue from a single client and add value by becoming a one-stop shop for multiple needs.

We also focused on upselling. We always tried to upgrade the features of the windows we offered—better trims, colors, or even materials. This strategy led to the development of a premium line of timber-aluminum windows that provided us with higher margins on every sale.

Quotas

But then we hit a glass ceiling. At some point, I realized that I couldn’t generate more revenue from a single client, and I didn’t have the capacity to visit more clients than I already did.

At that time, I was having four to six meetings a day. Just to remind you, these were pre-COVID times when very few people had ever heard of “remote” or Teams meetings. All those meetings were in person.

I started thinking about expanding my team so we could visit more clients. So, I went to my manager, laid out my thoughts, and got the green light to hire.

We opened three positions: Sales Representative, Sales Engineer, and Estimator. These were the three roles I had in my small team, so I decided to replicate the system.

Fast forward a few months, and we had set up three identical sales teams again. But they weren’t performing as expected. The reason? The cadence of the new hires was different from what we had in our original team.

To level the playing field, I realized I needed to set up specific performance plans for each role so that everyone knew their minimum expected performance and we could benchmark them against each other.

We focused on three key sales productivity metrics:

• Minimum revenue for Sales Representatives
• Maximum response time for Sales Engineers
• Minimum number of quotes for Estimators

These three metrics gave us a productivity boost because now everyone was required to meet a minimum standard. On top of that, we introduced bonuses for anything done above the minimum performance.

Lesson learned—create quotas in your sales department, even for roles that don’t directly generate revenue. This approach will help you boost sales productivity, enable the whole team to perform better and help avoid bottlenecks generating revenue elsewhere.

Close Dates

As our department evolved from a garage-like startup to a fully-fledged sales and marketing operation, more things began to slip through the cracks.

One day, I was scrolling through Salesforce Opportunities and noticed that many of them had been sitting idle for far too long.

Out of curiosity, I opened a few and saw that communication had often stalled around the time indicated in the close date field.

If you’re not familiar, every CRM system (with perhaps a few exceptions) has a field called “close date.” The purpose of this field is for your sales reps to estimate when a client is likely to make a decision—either agreeing to the deal or rejecting it. The close date gives you a deadline after which the deal is unlikely to close.

We weren’t very disciplined with that field. In fact, at the time, I didn’t fully understand the concept. I used to think, “Clients are different; how could you possibly estimate a close date?”

Oh boy, was I wrong. After working with reports for a few evenings, I built a pivot table and calculated the median opportunity close date. Median means I excluded opportunities with very short cycles, like a few days, as well as those that took way too long. I ended up with an average of 43 days.

One phone call to the system administrator and one internal meeting later—boom! Every new opportunity automatically had a close date set 43 days after its creation by default. Sales reps could modify it, but now we had a standard.

I started pulling reports called “Closing This Week” every Monday, and soon we had zero opportunities falling through the cracks. All of them were under scrutiny.

Nowadays, every lead or opportunity we encounter has strict deadlines. We either mark it closed and lost, or we follow up. We don’t waste time on deals that don’t progress. This approach has given a huge boost to improve sales productivity and pipeline transparency.

A 100 Prospect Trick

The department kept growing. What started with just three of us had now expanded to a productive sales team of fifteen employees. But even that wasn’t enough.

The problem became apparent when I noticed, almost every week, that we were missing 50 to 70 new opportunities. We simply weren’t getting back to the clients. So, I started digging.

I discovered that, on average, a sales rep could handle about 57 opportunities before they stopped taking on new ones. I wondered how we could increase sales productivity beyond that number.

I considered increasing sales rep productivity by splitting our process further. What if one group of sales managers worked with new clients and another group focused on existing ones? However, each sale required a lot of knowledge about the specific building site, and that knowledge wasn’t easily transferable.

Then I thought, maybe we’re just a bit disorganized. What if we carefully planned our work on each opportunity? This led me to discover a simple yet extremely effective strategy that I call the “100 Prospect Trick.”

My hypothesis is that if you don’t set a task with the next step on your opportunity, you end up working on your pipeline chaotically, which is a huge waste of time.

I told my team, “From now on, we’re planning a task for each opportunity in the future.” Every time someone worked on an opportunity, it was their duty to plan the next step and set a date for when they would complete the task.

This simple trick enabled the team to handle almost twice the number of opportunities we had before.

I still can’t pinpoint the exact reason why this works so well. In theory, nothing should change, but simply assigning one task per opportunity and maintaining the discipline to follow through on repetitive tasks saves so much time that team productivity nearly doubles.

However, it wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns. Not all employees were disciplined enough to plan the task and complete it. I enforced that rule up until I left the company, and I believe the new manager is still struggling to make this rule work 100% of the time.

Hiring Standards

But then something happened. I got phone call another morning, it was one of our partners – local distributor of windows and doors who would bring us customers on the affiliate basis.

His voice was angry and the whole conversation was around one person. It was their account manager, they were unhappy with. 

While I was busy closing bigger deals, I’ve missed the fact that some other sales reps were not doing their job as they should. 

Our partner, had pointed out nine cases were sales rep has made a promise and never got back to client, which resulted in lost business, and I didn’t know that because…the opportunity was no in Salesforce.

And this is were my world has collapsed. I thought that we have everything in Salesforce, I thought we have great closing rates, but all of a sudden I discover that it’s like that simply because half of the team enter Opportunity into the system only when it’s almost sold. 

What I also discovered, that people learned how to “trick” the system and make their statistics even better, by updating close dates and moving stages even when there were not interaction with the client.

It was dark time for me, because my whole world has collapsed, I’ve lost trust in people. Thankfully, I had other part of the team who didn’t do that, and their numbers, that seemed worse, apparently were simply truthful. 

Gradually, I’ve got rid of sales reps who were lying by moving them to different positions, or they simply left the company. But since then, I’ve learned last, probably the most important lesson.

If you hire wrong people, not a single tool or technique will work well. These are people and only people who make the whole system work like swiss watch.

Raise your hiring standard, hire slowly, prioritise discipline over mastery of your sales people and sales team’s productivity will folllow.

Thank you reading my story, I hope it was helpful and interesting. I run small Salesforce consultancy and we help companies to get sales tools, structure their sales processes and boost their sales producitivy.

Go ahead and leave your contact details in contact us area and let’s talk. First consultation is always on us and you don’t have any obligations. 

Cheers,

J.