Giving time back to sales reps is one of the best gifts you can give to your company. Why? Increasing selling time improves rep productivity. This is because with more selling time, each rep on your team can spend more time in engaged selling activities such as prospecting, progressing opportunities, and closing more deals to grow sales. Imagine the impact you can make to the top line by giving each of your sales team members five hours per week of additional selling time. But what are the best ways to do this?

Here are three ideas to get started:

1. Connect your teams to prospects and customers more quickly.
With Data.com, your reps gain one click access to more than 30 million crowd-sourced leads. They can identify high quality contacts in seconds instead of hours.

2. Deploy mobile to drive on-the-go productivity.
With mobile your sales teams can master those mini moments while on the go, like the time they spend waiting in the lobby for a meeting to start. Now, your reps can quickly and easily log tasks and update opportunities with Salesforce Touch. Available since last Fall on the iPad, Touch is built on HTML5, which means it will run on any smartphone or tablet. Stay tuned as we roll out Touch on more devices. 

3. Save time building and updating forecasts.
With Collaborative Forecasting in the Sales Cloud, you can get smarter about forecasting as a team. Collaborative Forecasting reduces the time required to build and update forecasts, and increases forecast accuracy. Your reps can build their forecasts and their opportunities are automatically associated with each of their forecast numbers. Your management team gains real-time visibility on every rep’s forecast and can apply their judgment in making any adjustments. The information is transparent, and is updated in real time. 

Want more ideas? As our holiday present for you, we’ve assembled a virtual gift bag of best practices you can use in your company. This includes access to a Webinar we conducted with CRM magazine, “More Time Selling Means More Sales.” In addition, we’ve included three videos with sales best practices from CareerBuilder, PlayerLayer and Fireclay Tile. And while we’re at it, you can see the Sales Cloud in action with a hands-on demo. Simply click here to get all the goods.

Happy holidays!