6 min read
5 sales efficiency killers (and how to stop them)
Sales efficiency is no longer a nice-to-have.
Budgets are tighter. Quotas are higher. And exec expectations are rising.
But you can’t just snap your fingers and expect reps to double their numbers. First you have to figure out what’s standing in their way.
Keep reading to learn:
- Why achieving sales efficiency is getting harder
- What’s impeding sales team performance
- How to resolve common efficiency issues
The state of sales efficiency
Generating more revenue while lowering overhead is always a tall order.
It’s even taller in today’s selling environment.
It’s not just that the average CFO is now analyzing each and every purchase decision (although there’s that, too)—it’s that buyers themselves are harder to keep up with.
Reps only have about 5% of a buyer’s time during the sales cycle. The other 95%? Prospects spend it sourcing solutions and researching recommendations via social media, online forums, chat platforms, and other dark-funnel channels that keep their activities hidden from view.
And product-led growth on only throwing fuel on the fire.
Seventy-five percent of B2B buyers say they prefer a rep-free experience. Self-serve products make that possible.
Instead of getting pinged when a buyer raises their hand, reps are now expected to spot the signal from the noise in a sea of free trial sign-ups.
It’s no wonder reps are struggling with time management and tool fatigue.
Reps spend 72% of their week on non-selling activities on average. Researching leads, prioritizing prospects, personalizing outreach—it all adds up.
They’re also tabbing back and forth between tons of tools (the average sales team now uses an average of 10 tools to close a deal).
Slashing operating costs may help you tighten your belt, but it won’t boost sales efficiency.
Removing sales roadblocks will.
Sales efficiency killers
Every org is different, but when it comes to sales efficiency issues, there are five common culprits:
1. Limited visibility
Reps have limited visibility into the full breadth of modern sales signals (aka buyer actions and conversations happening across dark-funnel channels). Research based on a sample of our customers revealed that an average of 28% of open pipeline (worth approximately $103.5M) was discovered in the dark funnel before a deal was ever created in a CRM.
This leads to a smaller pool of prospects, missed opportunities, and time wasted hunting down leads instead of converting them.
Reps need easy access to every signal that matters—from cross-channel digital interactions to surges in product usage to customer relationship history—to fuel pipeline growth.
2. Weak intent signals
Most reps have to make do with weak buyer intent signals—account-level insights that are devoid of any context. Not to mention the fact that traditional intent providers often supply stale, outdated data.
This leads reps to chase after low-value opportunities and reach out to the wrong people.
Reps need person-level insights and a full 360-degree view of buyers in order to separate real intent from false alarms.
3. Time-consuming qualification
Reps must make sure high-intent buyers are also high-fit—generally a manual, time-intensive process.
This leads reps to spend too much time researching leads just to make sure they’re worth pursuing in the first place.
Reps need the ability to quickly examine leads across every firmographic dimension that matters so they can stay focused on qualified opportunities.
4. Missing context
Reps have limited insight into what’s driving buyer interest, which channels buyers prefer, and where buyers are in their evaluation process.
This leads reps to reach out with the wrong message, in the wrong place, at the wrong time—slowing (or outright ending) deals in the process.
Reps need visibility into the entire buyer journey, including all cross-channel activities that will help them inform their outreach strategy.
5. Context switching
Reps are toggling between siloed tools to research leads and manually pushing data from one tool to another to take action on them.
This leads reps to spend more time on gathering intelligence and crafting an appropriate message than actually engaging buyers.
Reps need an intelligent command center where they can centralize and automate their tasks—researching, qualifying, prioritizing, personalizing—in order to work efficiently.
How Common Room helps you clear sales efficiency hurdles
Common Room is designed to make every rep a top performer.
Dozens of natively built and fully managed integrations allow reps to pull in all relevant digital, product, and customer data and access it from one user-friendly interface.
Common Room’s AI-powered identity engine centralizes, deanonymizes, and enriches every data point, transforming disparate sales signals into rich buyer profiles.
Reps get instant access to all relevant demographic and firmographic information—from job title to organization size—as well as every buyer action and conversation across digital channels.
All these signals can then be run through customized lead and account scoring algorithms to reveal which prospects are primed to buy.
🎤 "Common Room gives our go-to-market team members daily feeds of users showing intent across multiple channels—all in one place. Over 50% of our meetings come from Common Room."
—Tim Hughes, Vice President of Sales at Temporal
Reps can easily dig into where people are active, what they’re saying and doing, when they’re saying and doing it, and more.
Easy-to-use filters allow reps to qualify with a click based on any attribute, from job function to tech stack to annual revenue.
And automated tags make it easy to quickly spot product-qualified leads, economic buyers, ideal personas, and more based on customizable criteria.
🎤 "Common Room has made it easier for our SDRs and AEs to book more and better meetings. It’s our favorite sales tool here. One of our AEs called it 'my closest friend.'"
—Tyler Hayden, Director of Sales Development at Pulumi
Finally, reps can put their research and prioritization to work without having to switch to another tool.
Automated segments and alerts keep reps updated on buyer movements in real time and enable them to add leads to personalized Outreach sequences, send off Slack DMs, sync records with Salesforce, and more—all from the same place.
🎤 "Common Room made the operationalization process easy and within a few days we were off to the races. Our sales team has realized real results with meetings booked."
—Aisha Nins, Senior Sales Operations Program Manager at Apollo GraphQL
Every company wants to sell faster and smarter.
It starts by making sure you have the right tools for the job.
Kick sales efficiency killers to the curb with Common Room
Ready to see how Common Room helps you research, prioritize, and engage leads all in one place?
