Is tracking clock in and out times really boost sales productivity?

We don’t really know the answer, but what we do know is that this can be important, but not the only important parameter for sales success. Tracking helps, but there are other indicators that need to be tracked to meet our sales objectives.

A director of an FMCG company learned that his corporate division expects a roughly 10% increase in sales this year. So whose shoulders will this target fall on? Yeah, you are right! The next thing he did is known to all of us.

He appreciated the target by 10% for all his sales reps located in different regions to push the product in the market. He knows it’s not an easy game to achieve. Some will fall short, some may come out with flying colors, but this is not an ambitious goal to not be able to achieve. What he knows is that he needs to keep his team motivated and up each day to achieve what they have targeted for.

If this situation sounds familiar, you might be thinking about how to keep your team motivated or keep the agents on their toes. For a manager, tracking clock in and out time might give you an idea of when they have started their task in the market, but this alone cannot ensure sales success in this new sales environment.

Today, it requires sales managers to be the savviest sales leaders powered with well-designed field sales management tools. In this blog, we will help you become one.

Putting Trackers on Sales Productivity

In this competitive sales environment, a manager cannot simply rely on tracking clock in and out times to increase a sales force’s productivity. They need tools, data, and analytics to redesign the strategy and set it right. Therefore, we have listed down a few parameters that can be tracked to build a sales strategy to increase sales force effectiveness.

Total Inactive Time in the Market

An absolutely important parameter to know what your sales agent is up to. In the sales world, every minute counts, and wasting time can incur huge losses. We are not asking you to micromanage, but this is an effective indicator to understand the effectiveness of sales agents. 

Did you know that the time sales agents utilize in prospecting and making trips to clients takes up 10% of that total time in planning and strategizing the route and sales strategy? Therefore, these moments are important for your company and your goals. Thus, we are asking you to leverage a tool that can detect the idle time in the market and thus plan out strategies to make the time more effective.

Total Number of Meetings Arranged

A very effective way to make your field force perform better is to start validating how many meetings they could arrange with prospects. Making trips all day doesn’t make sense really if prospecting is not done correctly. We know that every year the churn rate for new customers runs between 10 to 30%. So prospecting becomes important, and for field sales agents to achieve the sales target, meeting with clients, building relationships, and understanding their hidden intent is very crucial for companies. Thus, tools having the total number of meetings and appointments as validation can work great.

Time Spent With Client

If measuring idle time is important to understand the effectiveness of sales reps, then measuring the time spent with the client is another aspect of sales success. How much time is invested with the clients to understand their needs is an objective of this parameter. The more time spent with the client, the easier it will be to understand the sales sweet spot.

We are not saying that more time spent may lead to higher deal closure, but it gives a clear picture of the competencies your sales reps currently possess. Do they require training for higher sales closure, or is it that you need to change your sales strategy? This can only be done with tools deployed that can automatically track the time spent with the client based on the geo-location and can make entries automatically.

A Sales Thought

Breeze is in the process of redefining the sales process by empowering sales reps with the tools they long for and enabling managers to streamline the strategy and operations, all in one place. When we created our application, we kept in mind the challenges field sales reps face every day. Not only the field force but also the managers who hold bigger responsibility in achieving the sales target. Our application is designed for them. We have built-in AI that makes the sales process smarter. To learn more about our product, schedule a demo.