What’s the true cost of productivity?
Or rather, a lack thereof?
Inefficiencies in your processes could be costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Maybe even more.
If your processes are inefficient, chances are you’re bleeding revenue.
Why?
All those inefficient processes waste money, time, affect your quality of work, and make for disengaged employees and unsatisfied customers.
Every company has inefficiencies in some form, but it’s important that businesses assess their processes to identify where they can improve — especially in times of recession.
In good times, companies can afford a little leeway in terms of productivity and efficiency. It’s easy to brush aside a little extra admin work. Or shrug off weeks of back and forth emails reps send before scheduling a meeting.
But when times are tough and the budget is tight, these turn into huge problems.
In times of recession, small issues become magnified — building on each other and putting unnecessary strain on business.
But don’t panic.
Because we’re here to help you identify where productivity can be increased and work to eliminate roadblocks.
- A powerful tool for better productivity: The RingCentral / Chili Piper integration
- Common productivity issues and how to solve them
- How to prevent burnout and retain top talent with more efficient workflows
A powerful tool for better productivity: Chili Piper and RingCentral
When building your tech stack to increase productivity, look for tools that integrate with each other.
Integrations like Chili Piper and RingCentral, for example, that help you scale your scheduling process.
“Reliability, security, and scalability are the core components of RingCentral’s cloud communications platform,” said David Lee, vice president, product management at RingCentral. “The integration of Chili Piper with RingCentral will offer customers a scalable platform that provides them with the ability to supercharge their scheduling process by dynamically creating a unique RingCentral Video meeting every time a new meeting is booked. This type of process automation ensures our joint customers get the most seamless, accurate, and efficient experience between our two products.”
“Chili Piper is honored to be chosen as a Premier Partner for RingCentral,” said Alina Vandenberghe, co-founder and co-CEO at Chili Piper. “We are looking forward to the collaboration to support their Solutions Engineers and Sales teams, and to allow their teams to seamlessly work better together, by taking advantage of the slick integration between the two tools.”
What does the RingCentral / Chili Piper integration look like?
Businesses are able to dynamically create a unique RingCentral Video meeting every time a new meeting is booked.
You’ll have meetings added to your RingCentral dashboard and it stays updated when meetings are canceled, rescheduled, or reassigned.
When reps want to schedule a call, they simply click on Chili Piper’s calendar icon and it pulls up Instant Booker and they can schedule with an AE.
“All they do is choose their meeting type. Once they click on the meeting type everything’s pre-populated and because of the RingCentral and Chili Piper integration, so they don’t have to do anything. They don’t have to go to that person’s calendar, find the meeting link, put it in the calendar invite, do any of that. All they have to do is choose the meeting type and click send. I mean, it’s that easy,” said Melanie Shaw, manager of business data systems at FieldRoutes.
While tech tools are fantastic for automating your processes, there comes a point when you can have too many.
And B2B is notoriously intrigued by the latest shiny objects, but you probably don’t need every tool you see.
Pro tip: Use this checklist to see if you really need it.
Common productivity issues and how to solve them
1. The problem: Admin work
Let’s face it… we all waste more time than we want on admin work.
In fact, in a study done by Forbes reps spent nearly 15% of their time on admin work. In total, only 35.2% of their time was actually spent selling and 65% was spent on everything else.
Think of it this way, if a rep makes $100,000 a year, that means they’re getting paid $65,000 a year to not sell…
And a large reason for that is admin work and other non-revenue generating activities that are sucking up all their time.
What’s considered admin work?
- Sourcing contact info and inputting it in your CRM
- Drafting emails outreaches
- Writing notes from sales calls in your CRM
- And more…
The solutions:
Look for tools that sync with your CRM
To be truly productive you need to streamline the process of inputting information into your CRM — and cut down on the dreaded busy work.
Each and every activity completed by your sales team should be automatically synced to your company’s CRM. This includes prospect calls, emails, notes, etc.
There’s really no reason in this day and age to be wasting valuable time on these tasks.
An additional benefit to having all your team’s info in your CRM is increased visibility into your team’s performance. It’s right there ready for you to see and can help inform future decisions.
Work with your marketing team to create easy to insert outreach templates
Reps spend a lot of their time drafting emails, follow-ups, and cold outreaches.
And it’s not just limited to email. They also spend a ton of time on LinkedIn — a platform that requires its own unique cadence and vocabulary. It can be incredibly time consuming to write a personalized email or message to every individual.
But you also don’t want your outreaches to sound canned or artificial.
This is where your marketing team can help — just imagine how much time your reps will be able to save and what they can accomplish when they don’t have to type up every message they send.
Better yet, tools like Chili Piper can generate automated email follow-ups and reminders, completely removing the admin work and encouraging better attendance for meetings.
Instead of relying on your sales team to write a new email or outreach for every lead, work with your marketing team to create templates for email, LinkedIn — as well as copy for different stages of the buyer journey.
Reps can have these handy and easily insert them into their next email or message.
Pro tip: It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. A word doc they can copy and paste from will work just fine.
Integrate a tool for automation
Once you’ve figured out the best process for your team, automate it.
For example, lead qualification and routing.
Instead of spending valuable time qualifying leads, pulling up a spreadsheet and assigning it to an AE, use a tool that automatically does it for you. That way, reps are only meeting with the highest intent leads.
You should also evaluate how much time your team currently spends on non-revenue generating activity and figure out how to reduce it.
How?
- Conduct a survey to understand where and how your employees are spending their time
- Figure out what can realistically be done to cut down on wasted time
- Integrate tech tools to streamline your new processes and increase productivity
Using the right technology helps you keep your teams organized, produce higher quality work, and have more control over your processes.
Pro tip: Look for a tool that’s multi-purpose and can be used for email campaigns, scheduling demos and routing leads, and onboarding, and more.
Some favorites to reduce admin work are:
- Gong: Easy access and sharing capabilities for your prospect calls/notes. Send recorded snippets or the whole meetings to your team
- Chili Piper: Capture high intent leads and book a meeting immediately. Leads won’t slip through the cracks and will be automatically qualified and routed to the right rep
- RingCentral: Hop on a call with your team or prospects with one click. No more back and forth with customers. Easier collaboration and communication with your team
- Both! Use the Chili Piper RingCentral integration for the ultimate productivity tool
2. The problem: Back and forth email convos
We all know the struggle of the never ending email chains.
And more often than not, they never end up resulting in a meeting or anything productive.
But email is still an important part of doing business. In fact, on average employees spend up to five hours a day checking their email.
The trick is to learn how to use it more efficiently.
Doing so will not only provide your team more time, it’ll be a better experience for your customers. You’ll also want to be aware of how many questions you’re asking for qualification purposes, and what can be realistically accomplished via email.
Those types of in-depth convos are better served in a face to face call.
Plus, you don’t need to be asking all those questions or planning projects over email. It leads to more headache than it’s worth with the miscommunication, clarifications, etc. And before you know it your thread is 100 emails long and you still haven’t made progress.
Eliminating back and forth will reduce friction and create higher satisfaction for everyone involved.
Not to mention anyone seeing a novel of an email may just decide it’s not worth their time and ignore it.
The solution: Choose your communication channel wisely
Before starting that next mile-long email thread, take a moment to consider:
- Is this conversation better suited for a face to face chat?
- How much time will I waste by trying to have an in-depth discussion via email?
There are much more effective ways to get your point across and have a productive conversation.
You can have much more productive conversations by simply hopping on a call. When you make it easy for them to schedule a meeting that works for them and immediately be able to join a call, you’re way more likely to win that business and get them to convert.
When email convos start edging toward the realm of a long book, it’s best to touch base on a video call. No matter if it’s a colleague or a prospect.
Plus, with RingCentral, video calls don’t necessarily have to be a formal scheduled meeting. It’s easy to hop on a video call from messaging with just one click — you can communicate in any way you need.
Pro tip: Keep your email communication short and sweet (we’re talking no more than 100 words) if you don’t want to overwhelm the recipient.
3. The problem: Unnecessary meetings
On the flip side, you don’t want your team to be overwhelmed with meetings.
You know when you’re chatting with someone and they suggest a meeting… but then in that meeting you realize you needed X person involved too? And so you end that meeting by scheduling another meeting?
Not a great use of time.
It’s also easy for reps to overschedule themselves. Especially when you have SDRs scheduling meetings on behalf of AEs.
Even worse, they were routed to the wrong person or the meeting is with an unqualified lead. A total waste of time.
When lead routing is done manually via spreadsheets, it’s nothing short of a disaster.
It is one of the most inefficient processes in your sales org.
And there is absolutely no reason to still be using one.
The solution: The right tools can cut out extra meetings
Instead, get a tool that streamlines the way you communicate and cuts down on unnecessary back and forth.
While it’s important to get tools to help, it’s even more important to choose the right tools.
Think: Are they easy to implement? How much training will be required? And most importantly… will my team use this?
If they’re not going to use it in their day to day life, it’s probably a waste of money.
How to prevent burnout and retain top talent with more efficient workflows
While you want to ensure your team is as productive as possible, you don’t want employees to be overworked or stretched too thin.
Inefficient processes frustrate your employees and can lead to stress, disengagement and burnout.
The result? High employee turnover and an increase in hiring and onboarding costs.
This is dangerous to your organization’s growth and success.
How to increase productivity and fight disengagement?
So, how do you find the balance between increasing productivity and reducing burnout?
Keep morale high
How?
Let your employees do what they’re good at.
This means cutting back on admin and “busy” work. As mentioned before, you might have to invest in some tools to help.
But trust me, it will pay off.
Bottom line: You can’t succeed unless you’re motivated to do so. Inefficient processes kill motivation.
Retain top talent
Don’t let burnout happen.
It might be hard, but take a look at your turnover rate. Are you happy with that number?
If not, start figuring out a solution. Go right to the source and ask employees what they need to make their jobs easier, and find joy in their work.
Ask questions like:
- Are they fulfilled in their job?
- Are they stretched, but not stressed?
- Do they feel confident in their career path?
Even asking these questions will show employees that you care about their wellbeing and future at the company.
Turnover is expensive, but can be prevented. Make sure your employees are empowered to work on projects they are passionate about and not busy work.
Getting the most out of your employees (without overworking them) can be difficult to get right. You need to:
- Find tools that help increase productivity without overwhelming your team (this means really finding the right tech stack and tools that work together rather than buying every new shiny tool that comes on the market).
- Lean into your employee’s strengths. You hired them for a reason… they’re smart and creative. Don’t waste their talents doing work that Chili Piper and RingCentral could be doing for them.
- Fight burnout and keep morale high. Get in tune with your employees and figure out how to keep those motors humming happily.
By taking a closer look at your processes and automating ones that are inefficient, you can save time and money, reduce friction in the buyer journey, and create happier employees and customers.
Originally published Sep 13, 2022