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6 strategies to improve sales efficiency – doing more with less

Company

The Team at CallMiner

February 04, 2025

sales efficiency contact center
sales efficiency contact center

Sales efficiency is a top priority for call centers in several industries, including retail and financial services. With a sales-efficient team, you can close deals more quickly and reduce the amount of money it takes to do so, essentially increasing your return on investment.

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This guide covers proven strategies and best practices you can implement to enhance your sales team’s efficiency.

6 strategies to improve sales efficiency

Before we dive into the strategies, it’s important to note that sales efficiency isn’t the same as sales effectiveness. While they often work together, they have different goals. Sales effectiveness is the ability to convert leads into paying customers, while sales efficiency is the ability to reduce the time and costs associated with making sales.

Sales efficiency largely relies on having plenty of helpful data and resources at your fingertips and developing high-performing sales agents who understand your customers.

1. Identify areas of opportunity with conversation analytics

Conversation analytics is an AI-driven tool that’s included in many modern call center software solutions. Using speech analytics to pick up actual words, phrases, and sentences, conversation analytics gathers deep insights from every conversation a sales agent has with customers to identify their likes, dislikes, needs, and wants.

With drilled-down reporting using gathered data, you can find areas of opportunity to cater to customers even further based on your call center’s conversations alone. This can save time sending lengthy feedback surveys to customers, waiting on reviews, or making follow-up calls for feedback.

2. Uncover the most effective agent behaviors

What are agents doing to increase your sales effectiveness? Identifying key agent behaviors that cause customers to buy creates space for management to continue encouraging those behaviors to also boost sales efficiency.

For example, is there a specific script that’s performing well? Incorporating that script or elements of that script into more customer conversations could help your agents spend less time massaging leads and more time making sales.

3. Define pinpointed sales goals for each day, week, month, and quarter

Create highly specific goals for sales agents to follow each day, week, month, and quarter. Well-defined goals tell agents exactly what they need to strive for during their working hours. Along with each goal, provide examples of tasks to complete to help reach those goals to prevent wasted time.

For example, a daily goal might be contacting at least 10 new prospects, while a monthly goal might be to follow up with at least 30 customers by the end of the month to increase customer retention.

4. Offer consistent sales agent coaching and training

There’s always something for sales agents to learn, whether it’s a new tool implemented this month or changing policies regarding storing customer data. Continuous training of hard and soft skills can increase agent performance and improve their productivity.

Use real-time coaching software to listen in on conversations and offer immediate suggestions to agents. Also, have a robust learning management system in place for agents to reference when they have questions or want to upskill. Encourage a continuous training mindset with your agents by hosting competitions and award systems for high-performing workers.

5. Help sales and marketing teams collaborate

A stellar marketing team can lead to a dead end without an equally stellar sales team, and vice versa. When sales and marketing teams work closely with one another, the marketing team learns what works best during sales calls. Conversely, the sales team can learn what marketing efforts are being used to generate leads, so sales agents can properly continue conversations with customers.

Encourage frequent meetings between the two teams so they can debrief one another, and ensure your company software makes it easy for them to keep the lines of communication open through messaging, data reporting, and task management.

6. Make lead generation an ongoing process

Lead generation shouldn’t stop when you have your desired number of leads waiting in the wings to potentially make a sale. Instead, lead generation should be an ongoing process that gives your team a never-ending backlog of potential customers to sell to.

Again, this is why sales and marketing teams must collaborate effectively. While marketing teams work to generate warm leads who are just a conversation or two away from buying, your sales team can get to work on actually selling to leads who are even closer to closing a deal.

The right software can maximize sales efficiency

Understanding what drives your company’s sales allows you to replicate tasks and behaviors for continued sales. The CallMiner platform can help you increase sales without bumping up your sales agents’ workload by uncovering and reporting pinpointed data from customer conversations.

Request a demo to learn more about CallMiner’s capabilities, including workload management, conversation analytics, and sales performance insights.

Frequently asked questions

What’s the difference between sales effectiveness and sales efficiency?

Sales effectiveness refers to the success of closing deals. A small sales-effective team might consistently close 10+ sales per day, for example.

Sales efficiency focuses on the time it takes to close deals. For instance, if team A closes 10 sales in 8 hours and team B closes 10 sales in 2 hours, team B is more sales-efficient than team A.

How do you increase sales efficiency in a call center?

Call centers should create pinpointed sales goals for each day, week, month, and quarter to help agents stay on track. Your call center should also encourage collaboration between sales and marketing professionals and prioritize ongoing lead-generation efforts to create a steady stream of leads.

How can software help increase sales efficiency?

Call center software can help you increase sales efficiency by providing real-time coaching to agents while they’re on calls with customers and by gathering insights from customer calls. These insights can help your call center determine what actions help close deals.

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