- Sales reps spend 15.7% of their time on meetings and customer interactions
- Dealing with internal policies and approvals takes 12.8% of their time
- Another 12% is taken up by researching target accounts and contacts
How much more time should your sales reps spend selling?
The reps who actively manage their time through a specific time management philosophy are spending 18.9% more time selling than the people who don’t. That increases the 35-percent-selling number to 54%. I can assure you that the more time you spend selling, the better chance you’ll have at hitting your number and goal.
What does it take to be a successful sales rep?
The reps who win aren’t spending all their time making presentations, burning through deals as quickly as possible, only to end up mired in “no decision.” Rather, winners take time to understand how a deal impacts stakeholders and to line up the necessary internal resources to deliver.
How has Rep time spend evolved over the years?
When we compare rep time spend today with what it looked like five years ago, it’s clear that the sales world has undergone a dramatic shift. Time spent on pre-sales and post-sales activities are both up by 15%. Meanwhile, time spent on non-sales (i.e., admin) work is up a whopping 21%.
Do Field Reps spend more time in CRM or sales?
Field reps are somewhat ahead, spending 3.1% more time selling than their inside sales counterparts. But on the whole, only 22.9% of reps follow any kind of a structured time management methodology at all. And only 17.9% of their time is spent in CRM, which has traditionally been the foundational program for sales. Why is this?
What do sales reps do on a daily basis?
They spend most of their time selling retail products to customers, making cold calls, and finding sales leads using company directories. They also attend regular meetings and train new sales reps.
How much time do sales reps spend on admin?
Administrative tasks dominate sales reps' time. In fact, 14.8% of an average week is spent on these tasks.
How many hours do you work as a sales representative?
Work Schedule Most sales reps work at least full time, and this career often demands more than 40 hours a week. Even outside reps might spend a great deal of time on the phone and online, pitching products, taking orders, and fielding complaints, when they're not traveling and personally seeing customers.
How do you plan your day in sales?
4 Tips for Planning Your Most Successful Sales DayStart Strong to Finish Strong. How you begin your day matters tremendously. ... Plan Your Daily Calendar. Think of your day in chunks and block out discreet times of the day to achieve specific tasks. ... Prepare for Surprises. ... Measure Your Success.
How much time should you spend with customers?
The general consensus is that CEOs should be spending 25 percent of their working hours with their customers.
Is sales rep a good job?
Is sales a good career? Yes, sales is an excellent career. Salespeople have the potential to earn a high salary and often have a clear career path within their organizations. Most importantly, anyone can get into sales.
Is it hard being a sales rep?
Sales Is Not an Easy Job Working in sales is a tough job. If you are considering a sales job, you must first understand that you will be expected to work very hard, long hours before you can earn some of the privileges of being in sales.
What are the four basic skills of a sales representative?
Here are four fundamental skills every salesperson should have:Communication skills. Good communication skills are a must if you're planning to be a great salesperson. ... Public speaking skills. Public speaking skills are immensely important for individuals who opt to pursue a career in sales. ... Negotiation skills.
So, What ARE Sales Reps Doing With Their Time?
Administrative tasks took the largest amount of sales reps time (14.8% or 5.9 hours per week).This means dealing with product issues, approvals, internal policies, paperwork, etc.. This stuff can be important, but is it worth a sales rep’s valuable time?
What Helps Sales Reps Spend More Time Selling?
Actively managing time through some time management philosophy helped reps spend 18.9% more time selling than if they didn’t have any time management philosophy. Those who only casually applied time management philosophies still gained some more selling time.
How to increase sales time?
One way companies achieve higher sales time is by bringing on dedicated assistants to bear the administrative burden and reduce responsibility creep for reps. More of these tasks are becoming automated through integrated, intelligent sales tools as well.
What takes up more time than selling?
If there’s one single area that takes up as much, if not more, time than selling, it’s administration – and it’s a top complaint across numerous studies.
How much time does CRM take up?
By some estimates, CRM alone takes up 18% of a rep’s day.
Does planning take away time from sales?
Conducting account and customer research. Planning doesn’t necessarily mean taking away from sales time. A study from Pace Productivity found the more time a rep spent planning, the more time they were able to allocate to sales down the road – up to a point, of course.
Do sales reps need administrative tasks?
Even in a perfect world, sales reps know administration tasks are necessary. When asked what their ideal day would look like, they said administrative tasks would still be there, though at a significant cut from what they spend on them today.
How many sales reps have time management?
Therein lies the fundamental problem. Yes, 61.3% of sales reps reported having some kind of time management system in place for themselves, but only 23% said they actually followed it. Is that a problem? It sounds like an issue to me. It means most sales reps just “try to hit their number.” A hope is a not a plan. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of great technology to support this task as 70% of reps are not using any kind of software to manage their time.
How much does a field sales rep make?
Let me put this in dollars and cents. The average field sales rep is paid $105,482 a year. If 64.8% of the time is spent on non-revenue generating activities, the typical company spends $68,352 per rep per year to pay him or her for tasks they were not hired to do.
How much does 721 spend on selling?
As you may recall, we asked 721 reps to tell us how they spend their time. These were their numbers, which speak for themselves. They spend 35.2% of their time selling and 65% on everything else, but not selling.
What is the second task that dominates reps' time?
Thankfully, the second task that dominates reps’ time was customer meetings (14%) and third was research (11.6%). A great deal of time is spent researching, and it’s hurting the reps ability to sell. Again I asked a few reps to elaborate further:
Is Forbes opinion their own?
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
What do Sales Reps do With Their Time?
There are twelve main tasks sales reps do during a typical week. Oddly, revenue generating activities only make up 36.6% percent of reps’ activities. Over half (63.4%) of their time is spent on non-revenue generating activities.
Effectiveness on Sales Tasks
People hate meetings and internal policies, they are necessary evil of any company. Sales reps reported that time spent on Facebook and catching up with colleagues was 7% more effective than internal meetings and dealing with internal policies.
CRM Rated as the Most Ineffective System
What about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software? Every sales organization uses this type of system to manage and nurture their leads. You’d think they would find it effective.
Download the Time Management for Sales Study
Sales is a complicated profession, and time management can make or break your performance. This has been an eye-opening study, and I encourage anyone in the sales industry to download the executive summary and read it.
What do reps do before and after a sale?
Before and after the sale, reps are also spending more time planning. Within the pre-sales category, for instance, they’re spending more time creating sales plans and vetting prospective customers. And, in the post-sales area, they’re spending more time gathering customer feedback (i.e., win-loss analysis), updating their account plans ...
What is it like to be a successful salesperson?
What these data suggest is that being a successful salesperson today is about much more than being a persuasive presenter: it’s about the hard work that happens before and after that presentation, from researching customers to pulling together internal stakeholders to planning how to grow the account over time.
How long has SEC Solutions been tracking reps?
At SEC Solutions, we’ve been tracking how reps spend their time since 2003. Our B2B Sales Index contains data on the sales process activities and time signatures of more than 10,000 sales reps across all major geographic markets and industries. Recently, we took a look at how the time signature of sales reps has changed over the past five years.
Why do star reps change?
Instead, star reps have changed how they approach the sales process because customers have fundamentally changed how they buy — and these changes have been brought on by suppliers’ own efforts to sell more expensive, complex solutions to their customers.
Do salespeople spend less time selling?
This just in: salespeople are spending less time actually selling to customers, and more time on internal activities, than they were just five years ago. But before you pine for the “good old days” when reps spent more time in the customer’s office than in yours, what if we told you that having your reps spend less time face-to-face with your customers might actually be a good thing?
Is time with customers important in sales?
Time with customers is obviously critical in sales — and with less time to present the value proposition, there’s obviously less margin for error. But we think these data suggest a fundamental change in what “selling time” means today, something high performers have already figured out. While core reps fight for time to present and persuade, your stars know that the game is won as much by planning and orchestrating before and after the presentation.
Do salespeople spend more time on internal activities than they were five years ago?
This just in: salespeople are spending less time actually selling to customers, and more time on internal activities, than they were just five years ago. But before you pine for the “good old days” when reps spent more time in the customer’s office than in yours, what if we told you that having your reps ]
What percentage of sales reps spend time on technology?
The majority of sales reps’ time is spent in sales technology (62.8%) with email for sales related purposes taking the most time (33.2%) and tools to gather sales intelligence taking the least. (0.4%).
Why do sales reps call out CRM?
Sales reps explicitly called out CRM as their biggest frustration.
What percentage of salespeople spend their time on non revenue generating activities?
Here’s the kicker: nearly two-thirds (64.8%) of reps’ time, on average, is spent in non revenue-generating activities, leaving only 35.2% for functions related to selling.
Do you need to integrate sales enablement apps?
However, to reach higher usage , we will need to integrate it in progressively better ways with the sales enablement apps that reps report are providing the majority of value for their time.
Is time management important in sales?
It’s no secret time management is one of the highest requirements for succeeding in sales. But a new study of more than 720 reps (including in-depth interviews with more than a dozen) proves what we had predicted in our snapshot survey of 200 reps in the recent Dreamforce 2017. Today’s salespeople are spending the majority of their time on activities other than sales.
Is Forbes opinion their own?
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
Does CRM work for sales?
Sales technologies can have a multiplying effect on sales results, but reps know what works and doesn’t work and their tolerance for failure is small. While CRM has brought the majority of reps to a tipping point in frustration, it fulfills a necessary role in the sales process that will not be going away. As a matter of fact, I believe we need to be using CRM more.