This article was updated on April 13, 2026 with an up-to-date FAQ section.
Every company has a different sales process. Your team, industry, and product determine the unique activities of your process. Despite its uniqueness, you can examine your overall sales cycle in just 7 steps. Each stage in your sales process can improve. Improving one process almost always benefits the stages around it, which makes the entire process stronger. Improving lead qualification with Saleswings , for instance, will increase the close rate and productivity of your sales team. After all isn’t improving sales productivity everyone’s goal?
You can improve your sales stages in a variety of ways, Content, Logistics, Training, Management. But the best bang for your buck is to use technology to implement new strategies. Technology handles a lot of the leg work in the modern sales process. Being a modern sales manager involves understanding where you can leverage technology to improve sales.
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Here’s how you can leverage technology to 6 ways to increase sales productivity at every stage of the sales process.
Lead Generation technologies
Generating leads requires marketing. You need a system in place that shows the value of your product to its market. The best leads are free leads. Software like Moz can help you drive traffic to your website for relevant keywords. Your marketing department will still have to do a bit of leg work, but Moz makes it easier than ever.
Lead Qualification technologies
Your leads need attention. How else will you tell apart valuable prospects and uninterested time-wasters?
Lead qualification is the science of segmenting your leads based on buying criteria. It keeps your sales team busy without wasting their time.
Saleswings is built to automate your lead qualification. No more guess work by the sales team and no more missed opportunities. Saleswings analyzes the activity of your leads to score their interest. It then alerts your sales team when a hot lead is ready to buy. Can you think of an easier way of improving sales productivity? Because we can’t.
Setting Appointments with a lead
Setting appointments is one of the trickiest parts of sales and also. An appointment is when you demonstrate the value of your product. It could be scheduling a demo, a face-to-face meeting, a phone call – any form of contact with your prospect.
Appointments create sales. Badger Maps is an application for outside sales teams to create routes, schedule appointments, and visualize opportunities. Sync all of your sales appointments with your calendar and reschedule on the fly. That’s one of the easiest ways to increase sales productivity.
Presenting & Handling Objections
Every appointment involves a pitch and (hopefully few) objections from customers.
Knowledgetree is an excellent solution for improving sales productivity and delivering sales content to prospects and customers. It helps you choose the right content to provide the right customers. You should have content to address buyer concerns, along with content that showcases the value of your product for customers in different industries and roles. This enables the sale by transforming the rep into a provider of valuable information instead of a yapping sales guy.
Closing the deal
The close is the most crucial part of any sale. Closing the deal is entirely in the hands of your rep. It’s their job, after all! Your sales team should be hungry to close, the tricky part is keeping track of the results. This is where a solid CRM comes in handy. Capture sales results for the entire team so you can make strategic results and keep the company running.
Salesforce is the most popular CRM on the market, and for good reason. It’s a great customer management tool for any size business, and it’s completely customizable to your needs. Your sales team records their results and Salesforce sorts them into actionable business intelligence. It has a huge eco-system of partner apps for all possible aspects like email marketing (try Sendloop), Gamification (Ambition), a handy lead scoring system (SalesWings add-on), and even automatic territory management for Field Sales Reps (Badger Maps).
Referrals
A happy customer is a referring customer. Referrals make up a large percentage of a successful businesses leads. After all, if you were happy, wouldn’t you tell your friends? Managing referrals can be tedious and complicated. Worse still, even your happiest customers might need some monetary motivation to incentivize their friends.
For cases like these, a paid referral program can pay dividends. Influitive manages your referrals across all of your marketing channels, allowing you to build a killer cycle of happy customers and referrals. Referral customers close at a rate of 80% or higher, making them a priority for any serious business.
Creating New Strategies with Technology
The ability to adapt new sales strategies by leveraging technology will separate winners and losers in 2017. Give your sales process an honest evaluation. Can improvements be made? The answer is likely yes, and this guide can help you make them. If you notice that your team is struggling with hardware and software programs, you should enlist the help of an IT services Virginia Beach provider. Most of these solutions include trial periods, try implementing new processes into your sales process to see the benefits it can have on your bottom line. Improving sales productivity will come naturally if you follow the above tips.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How does sales productivity improve with lead qualification?
- Which sales tools help most with appointment setting?
- What sales tools belong in a modern sales process?
- Where does sales productivity usually break in the sales process?
- How should your sales process handle objections more quickly?
- Why does sales productivity depend on CRM discipline?
- How do sales tools reduce admin time for reps?
How does sales productivity improve with lead qualification?
Sales productivity improves when reps spend more time on high-fit buyers and less time chasing leads that were never likely to convert.
Lead qualification is the control point that keeps volume from overwhelming the team. When qualification criteria are clear, routing is faster, follow-up is more consistent, and managers can see whether the pipeline is filling with real opportunities or just activity. It also makes coaching more concrete because reps can work from the same definition of fit, intent, and readiness.
Tip: audit your scoring rules every quarter so qualification keeps pace with changes in your market and sales process.
Which sales tools help most with appointment setting?
Sales tools help appointment setting most when they remove scheduling friction, surface lead priority, and keep calendars, reminders, and follow-ups synchronized.
Appointment-setting gets harder when reps have to decide who to contact, when to contact them, and how to fit outreach around other work. Tools that combine calendar visibility, task management, and lead signals make that decision easier and reduce dropped opportunities. For sales ops, the real value is consistency: a repeatable workflow for meetings, demos, reminders, and reschedules creates cleaner reporting and more reliable pipeline movement.
Tip: pair scheduling workflows with focused call blocks using this guide to the Pomodoro technique.
What sales tools belong in a modern sales process?
A modern sales process usually needs tools for lead capture, qualification, scheduling, content delivery, CRM management, and referral follow-through.
The right stack depends on your motion, but most teams need coverage across the full funnel rather than one isolated point solution. Sales ops should look for tools that connect stages instead of creating new silos, especially around qualification, outreach, meeting execution, and reporting. Integration quality matters as much as feature depth because disconnected tools create the very inefficiencies they promise to solve.
Tip: review options with an eye on workflow fit and handoff quality, and use this roundup of prospecting tools as a starting point for outreach productivity.
Where does sales productivity usually break in the sales process?
Sales productivity usually breaks at handoffs, weak prioritization, and manual tasks that force reps to switch context throughout the day.
In practice, the biggest slowdowns often appear between marketing and sales, between qualification and meeting creation, and after calls when reps must update systems by hand. Those gaps create delays, incomplete data, and missed follow-ups that hurt conversion later in the funnel. A healthy sales process makes next steps obvious, assigns ownership clearly, and reduces duplicate work across tools.
Tip: map every handoff in your funnel and ask one question at each stage: what can be automated, standardized, or removed?
How should your sales process handle objections more quickly?
Your sales process should handle objections faster by giving reps the right content, context, and next-best response before calls stall.
Objections are rarely the real problem; the delay comes from reps hunting for proof points, case studies, pricing context, or industry-specific answers mid-conversation. A stronger process connects objection handling to enablement, so content is organized by buyer stage, persona, and common concern. That shortens response time and makes conversations more confident and relevant. It also helps managers identify which objections are individual rep issues and which point to a broader messaging gap.
Tip: tag enablement content by objection type so your team can reuse what already works.
Why does sales productivity depend on CRM discipline?
Sales productivity depends on CRM discipline because forecasting, coaching, routing, and process improvement all rely on complete and timely deal data.
A CRM only improves results when it reflects what actually happened in the pipeline. When reps log stages late, skip close reasons, or ignore activity fields, operations loses the visibility needed to spot bottlenecks and coach effectively. Strong CRM discipline turns everyday rep updates into usable intelligence for territory planning, conversion analysis, and manager interventions. For sales ops, that’s where technology stops being storage and starts becoming leverage.
Tip: reduce required fields to the minimum needed for action, then enforce them consistently instead of adding more clutter.
How do sales tools reduce admin time for reps?
Sales tools reduce admin time when they capture activity automatically, prioritize work clearly, and limit the number of places reps must update.
Most productivity loss doesn’t come from one large failure. It comes from small interruptions: logging calls, rewriting notes, checking multiple systems, and deciding what to do next. The best tools remove those micro-delays by syncing data, standardizing workflows, and presenting the next action inside the rep’s normal routine. For operations leaders, the goal isn’t more software but fewer manual decisions.
Tip: before buying another platform, identify every repetitive task a rep completes daily and decide whether it should be automated, templated, or eliminated.
About the Author:
Tim Jernigan is a Product Marketing and Business Development Specialist at Badger Maps, the #1 Sales App in the Apple App Store, which helps Field Salespeople be more successful. Badger provides automatic territory management for Field Sales Reps, helping them take action on their customer data by visualizing it on a map. Reps use it to optimize schedules, routes, and get more meetings and sales.
Schedule a demo with Philip if you would like your sales team to close more deals by using our website and lead scoring tracking.
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