When you hire a call center agent, the most important thing you want them to do is close deals or service customers. That sounds obvious, but when you look at how the average call agent spends their time, it becomes obvious that there are many processes that prevent them from selling, leading to an increase in the cost of inefficiency on sale.
Quite surprisingly, the key obstacle to their sales & service effectiveness is not marketing, or even competition. It’s internal processes and paperwork. Ouch!
YOUR OPERATIONS MAY BE CHOKING YOUR SALES FUNNEL
Salespeople spend the majority of their time on back office tasks instead of focusing the majority of their efforts on closing the deal. According to a study done by Pace Productivity:
“less than 20% of their [salesperson’s] time was being spent directly on customer-related activities.”
What’s more,
“sales reps are basically spending one day a week selling and four days doing anything else!”.
Sound concerning to you? Yes, me too.
Assuming your sales organization is about average, your sales team is losing both significant time and opportunities to close deals and target their customers due to the distraction of paperwork.
These back-office tasks are killing your team’s prospecting and closing time. Instead of maximizing their time with customers, salespeople are bogged down in unproductive, back office tasks, not only impeding sales, but also leading to sales frustration and unwanted sales team turnover.
OPERATIONS CAN SLASH INEFFICIENCIES AND PAPERWORK
From filing and finding customer information to printing, signing, and exchanging documents, these tasks, while extremely important, are however unnecessarily time consuming and distracting. Although they may not appear to be labor-intensive, their repeated action amounts to a great deal of time spent away from the actual sale. Administrative tasks as such are dominating the workplace. According to a Forbes Time Management study:
“14.8% of an average week is spent on these [administrative] tasks.”
Another study by Quota Factory explains how sales reps spend the same amount of time completing sales as they do filling out paperwork. If your company’s sales reps could limit the amount of time spent on tedious non-revenue generating tasks such as paperwork and instead spend more time closing deals with ease, they would increase their overall sales dramatically.
HOW OPERATIONS CAN ACCELERATE SALES & SERVICE
Call agents understand the need for signing documentation and receiving proper identification; these factors play a crucial role in advancing any sales deal. However, these necessities can be consolidated into more simplified processes using modern technology. These customized solutions eliminate overhead and countless back-and-forth conversations with prospects.
THE IMMEDIATE IMPACT OF EFFICIENT OPERATIONS
Removing operational friction typically leads to four immediate benefits:
Improved closure rates - reducing the time it takes to complete sales cycles improves the likelihood deals will close.
Increased deal flow - eliminating back-office activities frees sales time for further prospecting and better customer care.
Improved service resolution - customer issues are resolved in the first call, boosting FCR and customer NPS in parallel.
Improved sales team performance - removing non-core activities improves sales team performance and morale and reduces unwanted sales team turnover.
To unleash your team’s full potential, learn about technologies that accelerate sales processes and remove the need for paperwork altogether.
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