Increasing and maintaining a steady growth of sales numbers keeps your business alive. While there are different ways to achieve these objectives, everything boils down to your sales and marketing teams.
Before working on your CRM data, you must lock down personnel performance create new sales strategies and processes. That’s because you rely on your teams to execute marketing campaigns, follow up on leads, and keep up with clients.
That’s where employee monitoring comes in. The business process that boosts performance and productivity.
What is Employee Monitoring?
Employee monitoring involves tracking an employee’s work activities and using the data to shape company policies. It combines time and task tracking to determine areas of improvement, efficiently assign tasks, and manage resources. The result is higher productivity and performance levels. And when applied to your sales team, you have the necessary firepower to increase sales.
But employee monitoring is more critical in a remote team. Since every remote employee lacks physical supervision, companies need a robust employee monitoring system to calculate billable hours and track work output and efficiency.
But how does employee monitoring affect business sales?
As we mentioned, you need performing teams to attract new leads and keep existing customers loyal. But it’s not that simple.
This article shows you different ways an employee monitoring system can drive up your sales.
Efficiently Schedule and Allocate Tasks for Your Sales Team
Your sales team must be at their peak to ensure your business maintains impressive sales.
As you know, team members might be bogged down by repetitive admin tasks and non-selling activities.
Research found that sales reps use only 23% of their time working on sales-related tasks.
So, you have to take measures to reduce these activities and focus more of their time on selling.
So, how do you do that?
Use Time Tracking to Understand Time Use
Time tracking is a core aspect of employee monitoring. It monitors how much time each employee spends on specific tasks and records how they spend each workday. With this data, you’ll understand how to handle task schedules and assignments. You’ll also be able to manage shifts and avoid overwork.
What’s more, it will be easier to identify those non-sales-related tasks that take up your sales team’s time. You can then remove those tasks and refocus your sales team’s priorities.
Identify Each Worker’s Strengths
Employee monitoring shows you how fast an employer finished a task and how well they executed the job. This way, you can measure their efficiency in specific work areas. For example, an employee might be better at collating and following up on data for new leads. In this case, you should allocate more of those jobs to them.
Employee monitoring is used to identify the right people for different sales teams. You can also learn how to improve your team’s efficiency by identifying areas where they struggle and providing appropriate training.
Properly Manage Your Marketing Team
No business can thrive or improve sales without a competent marketing team. First, you must run campaigns to attract leads and prospective clients. Then pass them on to your sales team.
Whether you’re using an in-house or outsourced marketing team, you must manage them properly to see results. You can’t have team members working in a disjointed manner without proper task planning and time management.
Companies that use employee monitoring data to organize marketing projects and workflows can boost sales since they run successful campaigns.
From properly allocating tasks to managing time, employee monitoring allows your marketing team to work more efficiently. As a result, they will reduce errors, shed bloated processes, and focus on marketing objectives.
Prevent Burnout
A Stanford research reported that burnout claims about 120,000 lives every year in the US and takes $190 billion from the country’s economy. In addition, a Gallup survey reported that 23% of respondents said they were always or often burned out at work, and 44% said they feel burned out sometimes.
Employee burnout is a threat to your sales numbers. Your sales and marketing teams become less efficient when they’re physically or mentally exhausted. So, you must do what you can to prevent overwork and its debilitating effects.
The first rule for preventing burnout is convincing your workers to take breaks and avoid working after hours. Then, if you can, create a company policy that frowns on overworking.
However, you need employee monitoring to properly enact such policies and encourage your workers to sign out when it’s time. For example, you can set up reminders in your employee monitoring software program to notify workers that work hours are over.
What’s more, employee monitoring data allows you to assign tasks that won’t stretch beyond working hours. As it turns out, workers don’t always like to keep things pending and would want to start the next day with a new task. So, they’re more inclined to clear their work pile for the day, even if it means putting in extra hours after work.
Focus on Key Business Areas
Time monitoring takes many administrative tasks off your hands, allowing you to focus on core business processes. This way, you can allocate more resources to sales activities, customer engagement, and marketing campaigns.
Employee monitoring programs can create accurate timesheets and collect essential data that saves you a ton of work. For example, you can automate check-ins, so you don’t have to personally call a worker to check on their job progress.
Also, you won’t have to spend much time going through paysheet reports since they’re almost always correct. Task delegation will become a breeze when you’ve used time tracking data to identify who to assign particular tasks and when to assign them.
Improve Discipline and Accountability
Disciplined sales and marketing teams will undoubtedly help your company drive your sales numbers.
It’s not news that even the most dedicated professionals often get distracted. And according to research from the University of California Irvine, a worker takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to regain focus after an interruption.
Thankfully, employee monitoring helps reduce distractions and interruptions. Since workers know they’re on a deadline and are being monitored by a time tracking system, they’ll be more focused on getting their jobs done. However, that knowledge of being tracked isn’t always enough.
Some employee monitoring systems record how much time a worker spends surfing the internet and using social media applications.
Then, after each session, the app provides a detailed analysis of time spent on each platform, whether it’s a website or an app. This way, workers can identify common distractions and block them.
Identify Profitable Clients
Improving sales involves maintaining existing clients as much as it consists of bringing in new leads. Knowing which client pays more and needs your services allows you to focus efforts on them.
With time tracking data, you can find out precisely what client to spend more time and resources on.
Since employee monitoring programs record billable hours, you can determine how much time your workers spend on each client’s project. Then, deduce how much is made per hour and calculate the general revenue the client’s projects attract.
These metrics also help you build an ideal client profile, which is gold for targeted marketing. This way, you’re focusing your marketing efforts on the types of clients and customers that will boost your downline.
Build Better Data-Driven Proposals
The success of every sales pitch depends on the contents of your proposals. As much as prospective clients want to learn about your track record, your presentation is also important. They want to know how you plan to start and finish the project, plus everything in between.
You need hard, data-driven facts and estimates to carry them over the line.
A massive chunk of this data comes from employee monitoring. That’s because time tracking records help you understand how long it will take to execute a particular project judging from your previous works.
If the client tries to push back, you can outline the numbers in detail, using data from previous works.
What’s more, with your employee monitoring, you can make accurate price estimates using recorded billable hours. It’s also easy to review the job process and find out how to cut costs to maintain a competitive edge.
Redirect Your Focus to Team Performance, not Just Profits
Boosting your sales numbers means bringing in new clients and keeping existing customers satisfied. The secret is keeping your sales and marketing teams engaged and at their peak. So, ensure their talents are put to good use, their paychecks are sorted correctly, and they’re not working more than they should.
