Summer is here! And with it, comes summer vacation, which is great, but not for your business. For SaaS businesses, summertime means customers are logging off their computers and overall prefer not to hear from salespeople, unless you have a great vacation destination recommendation.
But, like any other sales manager in a SaaS company, you got your KPIs, and your team still needs to meet its target, which is usually lower than in Q2, but still difficult to meet.
This can be very stressful for your employees, who not only enviously watch their customers (and colleagues) go on vacation, but also need to overcome the summer drought and bring in new customers. This can easily lead to frustration and churn, and hurt their performance and eventually, the company’s revenue.
Luckily, there are tools in the market today that help sales managers like yourself increase employee productivity. Here’s a list of 5 I recommend:
1. WalkMe
WalkMe provides onscreen contextual guidance that simplifies the sales CRM for your reps. WalkMe’s step-by-step walkthroughs increase employee productivity, as your reps can use WalkMe to complete any CRM-related task, without having to distract their colleagues. It’ll also allow each employee to work on their own pace, with the ability to focus on reaching their goals rather than on operating their CRM. Your employees will love WalkMe because it makes their jobs easy and burden-free, and every manager knows that when your employees are happy, they are more motivated to perform better.
2. Box
Box will make it easier for your employees to work with each other. This useful tool allows employees to securely share files through any device, easily create and review documents with others, and overall, improve the workflow. By speeding up collaborative processes and simplifying project management, working with Box will increase your employees’ productivity. While not offering a lot of storage space in compare to other storage providers, Box is fast and responsive, and has a very nice and simple user interface.
3. Asana
Asana is dedicated to help your team track their work, and stay on top of things. This task-management tool will dissolve the major worry of “staying on top of things” for your employees, and overall improve their workflow management. Asana is not an end-to-end workplace management software, and it lacks offline capabilities, but overall it’s one of the best team productivity apps out there. It’s free version, by the way, supports up to 15 team members.
4. KiteDesk
Finding qualified leads is perhaps the #1 challenge salespeople face, and a lot of time is spent daily on searching for new customers. This is where KiteDesk steps in, helping sales teams prospect for new customers, while wasting as little time as possible. Its database avoids duplicate leads and provides contextual information, thus cutting down drastically on research time. Its dashboard GUI featuring a schedule, task, opportunities, and leads allows sales reps to focus on the task at hand, cutting down on wasted time and leading to great sales productivity.
5. HipChat
HipChat is a real-time team communication platform that will help your team to communicate and share files while working on projects. It also offers easy video sharing, document sharing, and screen sharing. With unlimited chat rooms, fully searchable history and a high security protocol, this app will allow your employees to have simpler and faster interaction, while having less face-to-face meeting, which, in many of the cases, are less productive.
Summertime is a great opportunity to make teamwork as efficient as possible and improve productivity. With these tools, your employees will not only work better and get the most out of their jobs, but they will also feel more comfortable, and will be less likely to churn.