Recent Posts from Kyle Parrish

As a B2B sales leader, your main objective is to ensure that your entire revenue team succeeds.

Aside from coaching, motivating, and honing your team’s sales skills, there’s another factor that plays a major role in determining success.

Your B2B sales tech stack.  

According to InsideSales.com, small companies spend, on average, ~$4,600 per rep annually on sales technology, followed by ~$5,200 per rep for medium-sized companies and ~$3,100 per rep for large organizations.

If your entire revenue team consists of 30 employees (including SDRs, AEs, CSRs, and RevOps), you’re looking at roughly $140,000 in sales tech stack spend annually.

That’s not nothing. That’s huge.

So how do you choose sales technology tools that are aligned with your company’s sales and growth strategy?

And how on earth do you ensure a high adoption rate of said tools?

Boosting sales productivity isn’t about helping salespeople do more of the same thing—but freeing reps up to do the higher value tasks that can’t be automated: like building relationships and talking to customers.  

Increasing productivity means salespeople have more customer-facing time to do what they do best: sell. 

We sell to salespeople, so we know sales productivity results from a strong sales acceleration process. But, how do you increase sales productivity and where do you start?

There’s nothing worse than investing in a new sales engagement solution only to find your reps don’t use half the features it offers. 

Sound familiar, Salesloft user? 

Let’s get one thing straight: Salesloft is an amazing product. Nothing but love over here. 

But it’s not for everyone. 

And it don’t come cheap, either.

If you’re looking for something that’s a better fit for your revenue teams–with the specific functionalities that enable them to achieve true engagement right across the sales cycle—you’ve come to the right place. 

Measuring sales productivity lets you identify where your teams are struggling, so you can provide the tools and sales training they need to improve. 

But with modern sales teams generating a tsunami of data every day, how do you know which KPIs to track? 

Knowing which sales productivity metrics to measure helps you focus on the right numbers  

Well, sales productivity varies from company to company, so it’s all about choosing the right metrics for your business. 

You’re probably here because your sales teams are doing their best, but somehow they’re not hitting the numbers you need. 

And that affects your bottom line and team morale, and can even cause burnout.

Maybe you just need to hire more of them? 

Nope. 

If your revenue teams aren’t operating at peak efficiency and effectiveness, hiring more is unlikely to improve your results. But it will add to your overheads, and sow panic among your reps if there isn’t enough opportunity to go around. 

Instead, the answer lies in tracking and measuring sales productivity so you can empower your teams to achieve more with less.

Rep burnout is real. 

It’s a common scenario: you can see your sales reps are overwhelmed and juggling tons of different tasks. But even still, you’re not getting the results you expected. 

Maybe you’ve even hired more salespeople, so you know it’s not an issue of getting more sales reps to work even harder. 

Instead, you need to increase their productivity so they can quickly and effectively move more prospects down the pipeline—without burning themselves out. 

In an increasingly complex sales landscape, you don’t want your top reps juggling low-value tasks that don’t contribute to converting prospects.

You want to arm your sales reps with the tools and strategies they need to focus on finding and nurturing high-quality accounts and building strong relationships.

We’ve talked to our salespeople and other top sellers to compile sales acceleration strategies you can use to empower sales reps to efficiently and effectively interact and communicate with prospects for better results. 

Deals are won and lost in discovery. 

No pressure. 

If you qualified your prospect properly, you should already know they’re a good fit. Now, you need to use the discovery call to dive deep into their pain, processes, and find out who the decision makers are. 

And who they’re looking at besides you. 

Like we said, no pressure. 

It’s a lot to cover in one call, but failure to gather all this vital info could see you lose out to another hungry AE, even if yours is the better product. 

Feeling that pressure yet? (If not, what’s your secret, Iceman!?)

We make software for salespeople, so we know how hard it is to extract all the information you need without turning the conversation into an interrogation.

We reached out to real live sales professionals to see how they handle this critical stage. Based on those conversations, we’ve put together a checklist to help you run better discovery and boost your chances of moving prospects forward to the next stage.

Too many salespeople waste valuable time and resources going after leads that are unlikely to convert.

Which hampers your teams’ ability to hit quota.

However, asking just a few sales qualification questions can ensure you place more high-quality opportunities in your pipeline.

At Mixmax, we sell to salespeople so we know how important (and hard) it is to maximize the chances of sales prospecting success.

We reached out to salespeople on our team and in our network to sales qualification best practices. Read on to understand:

Getting a response to sales prospecting emails was never easy, but since early 2020, the volume of emails people receive has skyrocketed.

Now, prospects are so overwhelmed that it’s impossible for them to read everything that lands in their inbox.

This means you need to change up your email outreach tactics to get a response.

Before, you could blast off a quick product summary and ask for a meeting.

Not anymore.

The mission for sales professionals (whether they choose to accept it or not) is now to connect with prospects as individuals and survive “inbox triage.”

And do it all at scale. With personalization.

With this in mind, we reached out to LinkedIn sales influencers and our own SDRs to find out what makes a great sales prospecting email, and which sales prospecting email templates get results.

You’ve decided to automate parts of your sales process, go you!

How you build and scale your sales automation workflow will massively dictate the success (and adherence) of your sales reps. 

But where do you start with automation? And more importantly—where do you stop?

There are many things that robots are better at than humans are, and that includes:

• Pulling data together
• Keeping track of conversations and files
• Enriching data
• Checking in with customers that have gone quiet
• Reminding you that you haven’t followed up on an important email
• Dancing

Okay...maybe humans still have the upper hand over dancing—but for some reason, human sales reps are still handling a lot of these tasks regularly when robots can do them better. Those should be automated.

Just like dancing, humans are better at creativity, empathy, and developing relationships with other humans.

So if you’re trying to build a workflow that combines the unique capabilities of humans and robots, this article is for you.