POD Selling: How to Master Time Management

When sales teams consider productivity improvements, their minds often turn to two things: providing more tools to speed up manual processes and finding ways to help sellers complete tasks more quickly. But they overlook the most important aspect which is key for the improvement of a sales force, that is: “Time Management”.

Here are the 3 topics this week:

1. POD Selling: How to Master Time Management
2. Is Your Sales Tech Stack a Drag on Your Team?
3. Want to Share Your Sales Expertise?

POD Selling: How to Master Time Management

Ever feel like your sales team spends more time buried in administrative tasks than actually selling? You’re not alone.

A recent study revealed a surprising truth: salespeople dedicate a whopping 20% of their week to administrative tasks – things like building account lists, enriching data, updating CRMs, and crafting presentations. That translates to a lost selling day every week!

These tasks, while necessary, are often tedious and worth roughly $5 an hour. They eat away at valuable selling time, hindering your team’s ability to connect with prospects and close deals.

Introducing POD Selling: A Smarter Way to Sell

There’s a new approach to sales improvement that goes beyond just tools and training: POD Selling. It’s about freeing up your team’s time to focus on what matters most: closing deals.

POD Selling works by embedding sales support reps within your sales force. These reps tackle those time-consuming $5/hour tasks, allowing your team to focus on what they do best.

Here’s how it works:

1. Effortless LinkedIn Prospecting: Account Executives know LinkedIn is powerful, but daily prospecting can be a chore. Sales reps take over, becoming your virtual prospectors on LinkedIn, opening doors for your team.
2. Market Mapping Made Easy: Need a comprehensive market map with contact information? Sales support can handle it all – identifying companies, and contacts, and enriching data with phone numbers and emails. This saves your team days of work.
3. Seamless CRM Updates: Eliminate the post-call scramble to update CRMs and document the next steps. Again, sales support handles it, ensuring a smooth workflow and clear next steps for your team.

POD Selling: More Than Just Outsourcing

POD Selling isn’t just about offshoring tasks. It’s about creating a structured enablement program that leverages offshore resources. This frees your team from time management constraints and allows them to focus on what they do best – selling.

Is Your Sales Tech Stack a Drag on Your Team?

A recent LinkedIn post by Brian Brown, a founder-in-chief analyst at Go To Market Strategy Partners, caught our eye.  Their research reveals a troubling trend: traditional sales strategies are failing.

Salesforces are plagued by incomplete pipelines, extended sales cycles, missed quotas, and even layoffs.  These negative headlines highlight the challenges facing sales teams today.

But there’s a crucial missing piece in the conversation: Technology overload.

For years, the “sales stack” – an ever-growing collection of tools – was touted as the key to success.  Our company, Pipeline Signals, was even caught up in this wave.

The Problem with Too Many Tools:

The truth?  Most sales teams are drowning in a sea of underutilized tools.  A recent customer audit revealed a staggering reality – 48 sales tools per seller, with an average adoption rate of only 3-4 tools!

Most salespeople rely on a core set of everyday tools like email, LinkedIn, and basic research platforms.  While AI-powered tools like ChatGPT or sales intelligence platforms like ZoomInfo and Apollo offer value, they often go underutilized.

Tools Become Time Drains

The irony is that these tools, meant to boost productivity, are actually hindering salespeople.  Learning and integrating them into workflows consumes valuable time, slowing them down instead of speeding them up.

The New Go-To-Market Strategy: Focus on Enablement, Not More Tools

This whole observation highlights a critical shift – the go-to-market strategy needs to move beyond tools.

The focus should be on sales enablement.  This means empowering sellers to utilize existing tools effectively, equipping them with winning strategies, and fostering autonomy in decision-making.

Time Management: The Key Battleground

The biggest challenge facing sales teams today isn’t a lack of technology – it’s a lack of time management. Streamlining workflows and minimizing time spent on non-selling activities is crucial for success in 2024 and beyond.

Want to Share Your Sales Expertise?

Are you a Chief Revenue Officer, Revenue Operations leader, Account Executive, or Account Manager passionate about account-based prospecting (ABP)?

Join us as a guest on the “Get More At Bats” podcast! We focus on reinvigorating the prospecting muscle for sales teams.

FREE RESOURCE – Activity & Pipeline Gap Calculator

Does each of your sellers know the exact number of conversations they will need to have next month to highly influence Pipeline Creation?  

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