How to increase sales productivity and close more deals

In the world of sales, productivity has always been linked to high-performing teams.

However, as sellers contend with limited resources in a hyper-competitive sales landscape, increasing sales productivity has become even more critical to helping companies reach revenue targets.

In this article, we’ll break down the benefits of sales productivity, how to measure it, and some best practices for maximizing sales productivity in B2B organizations.

What is sales productivity?

Sales productivity is the relationship between an organization’s sales output and the resources needed to achieve it.

As a quantitative metric, sales productivity can be optimized in one of two ways:

1. Increasing the output—for example, higher sales revenue or more closed deals.
2. Decreasing the input—for example, the number of sales reps or the time needed to close a deal.

Productive sales teams are able to strike a delicate balance between the two factors, allowing them to do more with less. 

Why sales teams should care about sales productivity

Productivity continues to be a priority for sales organizations of all shapes and sizes. But why all the fuss?

It ultimately comes down to one thing: increasing productivity drives an increase in revenue. 

To understand how sales productivity boosts your bottom line, it’s important to recognize the benefits that productivity brings to a sales team. 

Sales productivity helps organizations:

• Stay on top of sales progress. Securing a deal isn’t always a smooth process. It’s not uncommon for deals to get held up or take longer than expected to close. By making productivity a priority, sales teams can quickly see when their output doesn’t match expectations, which increases the likelihood of identifying at-risk deals.
• Optimize sales processes. Productive sales teams put processes in place that minimize wasted resources and provide sellers with the tools and systems they need to secure more deals.
• Close more—and better—deals. When teams are productive, they are not only able to accelerate deal velocity but they’re better able to better identify high-value opportunities in the pipeline that increase average deal size.
• Lower costs and use fewer resources: Sales teams that are productive are able to generate more revenue with the same—or less—amount of resources, creating a more efficient sales cycle.
• Better employee experience: When sellers feel that they’re making a positive impact and are able to reach their sales targets, they’re likely to have higher rates of job satisfaction and employee morale. 

How to measure sales productivity 

Sales productivity is calculated by taking a sales team’s efficiency—the input—and measuring it against their sales effectiveness—their output.

You’ll often see sales productivity expressed in one of two ways:

Or

The input typically refers to the resources needed to close a deal. For example, this could be the number of sales reps or the time it takes to close a deal.

However, since productivity can be measured at different stages of the sales process, there’s a lot more variation when it comes to the output. 

For example, when considering overall sales productivity, you’ll typically look at the number of sales or the total amount of revenue generated. But you can also calculate productivity based on the number of leads generated, the number of outbound emails, or even the number of scheduled sales calls.

Here’s an example of how to calculate and compare sales productivity:

• Sales team X has 10 team members and closes 50 deals in a quarter. Sales team X has closed an average of 5 deals per sales rep.
• Sales team Y has 5 team members and closes 40 deals in a quarter. Sales team Y has closed an average of 8 deals per sales rep.

While sales team X has closed more deals this quarter and may have a higher sales performance, sales team Y is actually more productive. 

Companies can also measure sales productivity at the individual level to get a better understanding of the productivity and performance of each sales rep.

What causes sales inefficiencies? 

It’s important to recognize that sales efficiency and sales productivity aren’t quite the same thing. 

However, sales efficiency is a key contributor to overall productivity. So inefficient sales processes can significantly hinder productivity and prevent sellers from selling at their best.

There are many reasons sales teams may experience sales inefficiencies, but common culprits include:

• Low CRM adoption. Despite 41% of sales managers seeing an increase in CRM usage over the last year, CRM adoption continues to be a challenge for many sales organizations. When CRMs aren’t utilized to their full potential, sellers can miss the necessary context to make quality deal decisions. Not to mention the wasted resources and expenses that come with maintaining an unused CRM.
• Poor data hygiene. Poor data hygiene can be a factor in low CRM adoption and vice versa. When sellers are saddled with poor-quality data, they can find themselves pursuing the wrong deals and missing out on high-potential opportunities.
• Manual and administrative processes. When sellers are burdened with manual tasks, such as data record creation or scheduling, it pulls them away from high-impact selling activities. Manual processes are also error-prone, creating misinformation and crossed wires which create further inefficiencies in the sales process. 
• Poor relationship management. Relationships are key to success in a competitive and fast-paced sales environment. When sellers lack the time and contextual knowledge to effectively nurture relationships, they’re left trying to generate sales through cold outreach that decelerates pipelines.

How to improve sales productivity

With sales productivity tied closely to revenue, organizations should always strive toward building more productive processes within their teams. 

Here are a few tried-and-true strategies for boosting productivity. 

Invest in proper onboarding and sales training

Taking the time and resources to coach your team to success can be critical for reaching long-term profitability. 

A Gartner report found that effective coaching from sales managers can improve B2B sales rep performance by as much as 8%.

However, this doesn’t only apply to new hires. The sales environment is ever-evolving and the sales strategies that were effective two years ago may not be as impactful today. Regular training ensures that sellers are equipped with the methodologies and resources they need to reach their sales goals.

Communicate with your sales reps

Selling shouldn’t happen in a silo. 

The Salesforce State of Sales survey found that 81% of sellers say team selling helps them close deals. When teams work together, salespeople can lean on each other's strengths and networks to move sales forward. 

This requires sales leaders to regularly check in with their teams and companies to put processes in place that foster communication and collaboration. 

Centralize access to your sales data

Actionable sales data is key to keeping the sales cycle moving.

Data offers critical insights and customer context that sellers need to confidently identify and prioritize the right opportunities. Instead of leaving sellers to string data together from several different sources, keeping sales data unified in a CRM database ensures all sales reps have access to the right insights when they need them.

Set, monitor, and track KPIs

“What gets measured gets done” is a saying that certainly holds true when it comes to sales.

By setting targets and tracking KPIs around productivity and sales progress, you can quickly identify areas of opportunity within your sales pipeline.

With productivity KPIs, it’s often helpful to think beyond just revenue. Metrics higher up in the sales funnel, such as sales activity or even lead generation, contribute to closed deals. By keeping a close eye on metrics across the pipeline, you can see if and where you’re lagging sooner rather than later—and before it’s too late.

Some KPIs to monitor can include:

• Wins per sales rep 
• Average sales per quarter
• Average deal size
• Average time-to-close
• Average lead response time

Implement sales automation solutions 

One of the biggest challenges that sales teams face is the abundance of time-consuming, administrative tasks. These tasks—while important—are distracting and limit the ability of sales reps to focus on higher-value tasks.

A great example is CRM use. We know that CRM adoption can impact sales performance. Yet when asked, 35% of sales managers state that the number one reason their sales team doesn’t use their CRM is not enough time.* 

Sales automation solutions, such as Affinity for Salesforce, eliminate unnecessary repetitive tasks and give sellers time back in their day to focus on revenue-generating activities.

Use the right sales productivity tools

Automation is just one way to make your sales processes more productive. Sales productivity tools use technology to enable sales reps to sell more efficiently beyond automating manual tasks. 

Many sales productivity tools use AI and machine learning to surface valuable insights or generate resources for sellers during the sales cycle. An Affinity study found that over half of sales leaders (55%) believe that AI can play a role in creating better prospecting materials.*

Of course, the right productivity tools will depend on the blockers in your specific organization. Adding productivity tools to your sales tech stack can promote better deal decision-making and management. The result? More deals and more revenue. 

The 8 sales productivity tools your sales team should be using

Increasing sales productivity is often easier said than done. 

Fortunately, sales teams have access to a wide selection of sales enablement tools, ranging from activity capture to project management, that can boost productivity across the entire sales funnel.

Here are some of the top sales productivity tools your B2B organization can use to increase team productivity.

1. A CRM — Salesforce

As the number one CRM for B2B sales teams, Salesforce helps manage customer information and deal insights in one centralized database. 

By keeping data organized, Salesforce enables sellers to make better deal decisions, faster, creating a more productive and streamlined sales process.

Top productivity features

• Centralized sales database provides easy access to customer contact data, deal insights, and sales activity all in one place.
• Email automation capabilities allow sellers to stay in touch with prospective customers while eliminating the burden of manual email outreach and follow-up.
• Native Salesforce automation tools, such as Flow and Apex, allow organizations to create custom workflows that improve dealmaking.

Pros

• Easy integrations with leading sales enablement and automation tools, such as Affinity for Salesforce, to further increase sales productivity.
• Access to Salesforce’s suite of sales and marketing productivity tools.

Cons

• The cost of Salesforce can quickly add up for larger sales organizations.

2. Activity capture and relationship intelligence — Affinity for Salesforce 

Affinity for Salesforce is a sales enablement and sales productivity tool built for B2B sales teams. With over half of sales managers (51%) citing relationships as an important part of their sales process, Affinity harnesses the power of automation and relationship intelligence to help sales teams find, source, and close more deals. 

Top productivity features

• Automated activity capture. Affinity creates and updates sales activity and contact records by analyzing your entire team’s inbox and calendar. Automated data entry increases information availability and takes the data drudgery out of the sales process, saving each seller over 200 hours each year.
• Time-saving browser extensions. Give sales reps access to the insights they need in the tools they use every day, so they can make deal decisions with confidence. Affinity for Salesforce includes browser and inbox extensions that make it easy for sellers to access and update Salesforce CRM data without needing to toggle between tabs and apps.
• Relationship insights. Affinity enriches existing Salesforce CRM data with relationship intelligence. By providing a complete history of customer interactions and relationships, sellers can focus on high-likelihood-to-close deals and identify paths of warm introduction that close deals 25% faster.

Pros

• Teams can easily implement Affinity for Salesforce through the Salesforce App Exchange.
• Unlock unique productivity benefits that shorten the sales cycle by making the most of your company’s entire network.

Cons

• Affinity for Salesforce is only available for teams using Salesforce CRM. However, non-Salesforce teams can access Affinity’s productivity benefits and relationship intelligence features with Affinity CRM.

Watch now: Discover how relationship selling can help close the productivity gap for B2B sales teams in 2024.

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3. Sales intelligence — Gong 

Sales productivity is driven by smarter sales decisions. Gong is a sales and revenue intelligence tool that helps sales and marketing teams surface insights across sales activity to boost revenue and sales productivity. Gong digs deep into sales calls to summarize and highlight customer priorities, so sales reps can focus more on the conversation and securing deals.

Top productivity features

• AI-driven conversation intelligence provides data-backed recommendations and action items to help sellers engage more effectively and close more deals.
• Forecast uses machine learning and unique signals to predict deal outcomes, helping sellers and managers quickly understand if they’re on track to reach revenue targets.
• Call Spotlights uses generative AI to help sellers quickly identify customer priorities, pain points, and conversation insights.

Pros

• Supports language recognition in over 70 different languages.
• Integrations with most leading tools used by sales teams, including Salesforce.

Cons

• Some users have reported inaccuracies with transcripts.

4. Transcription — Otter.ai

Otter.ai uses AI to provide sellers with a virtual meeting assistant. The goal is to reduce the administrative labor involved in summarizing sales calls by putting Otter in charge of recording, transcribing, and taking notes. Otter.ai then turns these conversations into actionable insights, so sales teams can follow up faster and get deals over the finish line.

Key productivity features

• Automated meeting notes, call summaries, and AI-generated follow-up emails allow sellers to focus on the conversations that drive the pipeline forward.
• OtterPilot pulls key insights from sales calls to identify progress and potential risks.
• Live call visibility enables sales managers to coach and provide feedback in real time to help close the deal, without interrupting the sales experience.

Pros

• Otter works with popular sales tools, including Google Chrome, Slack, and Zoom.
• Integrations with Salesforce and Hubspot push sales insights directly into your CRM.

Cons

• Limited language support beyond English.

5. Time Tracking — Toggl 

Track your team’s time with just the click of a button. Toggl helps sales teams track and manage their time so they know exactly what they’re working on and for how long. By surfacing insights on how sellers spend their weeks, Toggl can also help identify potential bottlenecks that might be preventing a deal from moving forward.

Key productivity features

• Project-based time tracking helps sales teams quickly track sales activities.
• Reports and dashboards track tasks and performance in real time to identify opportunities for better time management.

Pros

• Integrations with Google and Outlook calendars facilitate seamless time entries, directly from a seller’s calendar
• Browser extensions and integrations with tools like Salesforce help salespeople track time without needing to switch tabs.

Cons

• Limited sales-specific time tracking features.

6. Project Management — Notion 

Starting as just a note-taking tool, Notion has quickly developed into one of the most popular workspace and sales productivity solutions. Sales teams can use Notion to create custom workflows, dashboards, and wikis to improve the availability of information, boost collaboration, and promote knowledge sharing.

Key productivity features

• Wikis help teams create workspaces that centralize information, including product information, sales playbooks, and sales templates.
• Projects help teams visualize the sales funnel and stay on top of the sales pipeline with customizable project management boards, so teams never miss an opportunity.
• Integrated AI assistant saves time by helping sellers with tasks such as surfacing notes within Notion or even generating content for sales communication.

Pros

• There are many templates available for sales teams (from Notion and third-party providers) that streamline workspace implementation.
• Flexibility allows sales teams to build a workspace that fits their productivity needs.

Cons

• The highly customizable nature of Notion can be overwhelming for new users to navigate.
• Limited sales-specific features, although many can be custom-built from templates and other customization features.

7. Contract signature — DocuSign 

Securing that signature on the dotted line is one of the final steps to closing a deal. DocuSign is a sales productivity tool that transforms how teams send, manage, and sign contracts in the sales process. As one of the leading solutions for managing e-signatures and contracts, it’s a popular solution for increasing productivity during one of the most critical stages of the sales funnel. 

Key productivity features

• Digital collaboration and e-signature solutions speed up the negotiation and contracts process, to eliminate unnecessary back and forth and close deals in less time.
• Docusign Gen enables sales teams to quickly generate contracts and sales documents by automatically merging CRM, product, and pricing data into templates.
• Web Forms automate customer data capture and automatically populate the necessary information into agreements.

Pros

• DocuSign’s suite of contract and e-signing tools seamlessly integrates into Salesforce to reduce friction and boost productivity.
• 400+ pre-built integrations and APIs bring the power of DocuSign into your existing tech stack.

Cons

• Some users have reported challenges with integrations for some third-party tools.
• Many users report that DocuSign is more expensive than most competitors.

8. Schedule management — Calendly

Calendly helps sales reps keep their schedules organized by skipping the scheduling nonsense. With Calendly, sellers can set their schedules and availability so potential customers can book calls and meetings on their own time. By avoiding the back and forth, Calendly gets calls scheduled faster so sales reps can focus on preparing for the call and moving the sale forward while delivering a seamless customer experience. 

Key productivity features

• Instant calendar booking allows contacts to schedule and reschedule meetings on their own time and eliminate the administrative scheduling process.
• Lead routing coordinates internal calendars to schedule meetings with the first available sales reps, turning quality leads into prospects faster.
• Automated pre- and post-meeting follow-ups allow sales reps to stay top-of-mind and keep the sales conversation going at the right time.
• Pre-call questionnaires help capture information faster and qualify leads accurately.

Pros

• Integrations with top calendar apps and sales communication platforms, such as Google Chrome, Gmail, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom.
• Customized options to personalize the booking experience to your sales process.

Cons

• Limited sales-specific functionality beyond calendar management

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Boost sales productivity with Affinity for Salesforce

Let Affinity for Salesforce be your new partner in productivity. By enhancing relationship insights, improving access to networks, and automating data capture, Affinity is the key to helping sales teams find and close high-quality deals faster.

Discover how Affinity for Salesforce can help increase your sales productivity today.

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Sales productivity FAQs 

What does productivity mean in sales?

In sales, productivity often refers to how well a sales team is able to generate revenue. Sales productivity is a function of sales effectiveness and sales efficiency.

However, in highly complex sales processes, sales productivity isn’t always limited to revenue as an output. It can also refer to other ways in which sellers move sales through the pipeline. For example, you can measure how productive a sales rep is at booking new calls or generating new leads. 

What are sales productivity metrics?

Sales productivity metrics are different data points that you can use to track how well your team is moving deals through the pipeline. Depending on your organization’s goals and priorities, sales productivity metrics can vary. However, you’ll typically see sales productivity expressed as an output amount versus the input.

For example, the input is often a seller's time or the number of sales professionals. Output can range anywhere from revenue dollars and the number of deals closed to the number of outbound email communications.

How can you use templates to optimize your sales productivity?

Templates are one of the simplest ways to optimize your sales productivity. By providing a skeleton that sellers can use as a foundation for their customer communications, sellers save time throughout the sales process. Not only do templates save sellers from having to draft emails or documents from scratch, it gives them time back to focus on delivering a more personalized sales experience that can improve conversion rates.

Common examples of sales templates to improve productivity include email outreach and follow-up templates, contract and RFP templates, and sales scripts.

Sales teams can take the productivity gains of using templates even further by integrating them with their CRM platform. This automates contact information and other customer insights, so sellers can get personalized communications out the door faster.

* Data from Affinity’s 2024 survey of 250+ business leaders across investment banking, media and communications, real estate, professional services, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and enterprise technology.

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