More Face Time: Increasing sales productivity in unproductive times.
2009 was a bad year for most Sales executive’s quota achievement, and quotas have risen in 2010. This puts most sales leaders behind the eight ball, and hiring more sales people isn’t a likely solution (your quotas will probably reflect any new hires anyway). So with an increasing quota and an underperforming economy/sales numbers, the only viable option is to increase the productivity of your current sales force. This might seem like a grim situation, but there is some good news. The 2009 Sales Performance Optimization Report revealed that sales reps spend a tiny 37% of their time on “selling” activities, and conversely 63% of their time on “non-selling” activities.
The 63% on non-selling activities is largely due to the fact that the selling and buying process has become much more complex since the late 1990s, and the backend tasks that sales people have to manually perform are now reflecting that complexity. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) technology hasn’t been effectively utilized to automate those tasks. Activities like sales reports, forecasting, proposal creation, order entry, CRM entry, billing, and sales team collaboration largely are done the same way they were five years ago.
- Sales people: take a piece of paper and chronicle all the non-selling activities you do this week; I bet it is huge, and would love to see the list you create in your comments below.
- Sales Leaders: Take your last month/quarter’s sales numbers, and multiply them by 1.63; that’s how much your team would have sold if all its time were spent directly on selling; did your eyes pop out of your head yet?!?
Hopefully the numbers above have painted a compelling picture for you to take action, and give your sales people more face time to sell. The more complicated question is what can you do to increase the amount of time your sales force spends selling? Below I’ve outlined some steps you can go through to help you better understand the amount of revenue lost because of non-selling activities, and how to create a compelling business case to invest in outsourcing or automating the “non-selling” activities. Like always, it would be very helpful to bring in an external consultant to help you with this process, because it is complicated and there are many unintended consequences that can significantly hurt your business if they aren’t performed properly.
Step 1: Determine your sales people’s non-selling activities and the average time dedicated to those activities. This will quantify how much time your salespeople are spending on each non-selling activity.
| Non-Selling Activity | Manual Paperwork | Manual CRM Activity Entry | Proposal Creation From Scratch Each Time |
| Time Spent on Activity Per Sales Person |
3 hours/week |
5 hours/week |
2 hours/week |
Step 2: Determine the revenue that your sales force will create if their time were spent selling instead of performing their current non-selling activities. These numbers can be hard to accurately predict for several reasons, but will provide you with a base for creating a case to automate/outsource the non-selling activities. In this table, each sales person generates $200,000 in revenue per year. The bottom line will indicate how much potential revenue sales people will drive if they stop spending time on non-selling activities, and spend time selling in front of customers.
| Non-Selling Activity | Manual Paperwork | Manual CRM Activity Entry | Proposal Creation From Scratch Each Time |
| Time (in hours/week) | 3 | 5 | 2 |
| Revenue Created Per Sales Person(@ $200k/year) | $14,976 | $24,960 | $9,984 |
| Yearly Revenue if Non-Selling Activity Eliminated (Per 100 Sales People) | $1,497,600 | $2,496,000 | $998,400 |
Step 3: Estimate the cost of automating (ex. software) or outsourcing the non-selling activities. This is probably best done by contacting potential vendors and getting initial quotes on the cost of their solution as well as the amount of non-selling time that the solutions will eliminate. Bundle numbers if the automation/outsourcing addresses multiple activities. I assumed automating or outsourcing each activity would cost $200,000 per 100 sales people. The actual numbers will vary greatly, so I just did this for illustrative purposes. Now all you have to do is subtract the revenue that your sales force will create if they were selling from the cost to automate the non-selling activities (see the two bottom numbers in the tables above)
| Non-Selling Activity | Manual Paperwork | Manual CRM Activity Entry | Proposal Creation From Scratch Each Time |
| Yearly Revenue if Non-Selling Activity Eliminated (Per 100 Sales People) | $1,497,600 | $2,496,000 | $998,400 |
| Cost of Automation, Outsourcing | $200,000 | $200,000 | $200,000 |
| Net Revenue created by automation, outsourcing | $1,297,000 | $2,296,000 | $798,400 |
As you can see, investing in automating outsourcing can instantly create millions in revenue for your top line, and propel you to a great 2010! If your sales force is only spending 39% of their time on actually selling, the list of “non-selling” activities should be very long. Coming up with these numbers is not an easy task, but well worth it. I would love to hear your feedback on how much of your time you think you or your sales force spends on non-selling activities, and what you could do if you were in front of the customer for that time.
I read your article and completely agree with your point. Too much non-selling activities for salespeople is huge now, and definitely 5 to 10 years ago.
Based on my experience, not enough support staff, structure and management’s lack of understanding what salepeople go through on a daily basis.Not to say that managers and executives do not understand sales and it’s overall importance, but on a day-to-day basis responsbilities tend to be added to their job without a lot of long-term planning.
Consequently, some “non-selling” time is required to make the most of “selling” time. Not all can be done by automation.
At the same time, the non selling activities should be given the priorities they deserve; some non-selling activities could be done more efficiently with proper planning on when & how frequently to do them, and also understanding why they need to be done.
Very interesting. I worked with a client who was selling about $4000 / customer contact/customer hour. He was spending about 40% of his time on selling activities and the rest shepherding his projects through the organization. A mere 10 hours more selling time per week would have (even with 4 weeks vacation) added almost 2M in revenue and in his case about $400,000 in profit.
Since he was spending time on project management, we figured it was a lot cheaper to build up project management staff and get this sales person more time in front of customers.
Great post and so very true. Salespeople are inundated with non-productive activities. CSO Insights found quota achievement at its lowest level, with most raising quotas.
Streamline the processes, automate what you can, integrate the groups — and importantly, turn lead generation over to Marketing – inbound marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, etc.
Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor
President, Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple”
http://www.findnewcustomers.net
“non-selling” time…seems like a very ambiguous, and potentially misleading term. If an account manager is required to write weekly reports, attend meetings, or Travel…I think those are pretty clearly non-selling ( but necessary) activities. Where do we draw the division? Is ’selling time” only the time spent on a call with a potential client, and following the sales process?
What about mining new accounts? Researching the current clients? Answering emails from current clients that support the sale, and the relationship? Digging deeper into existing accounts is a higher percentage sales than starting fresh.
If your sales team has the proper incentive, they don’t want to do anything but close deals. While statistics will show the average employee will waste almost 2 hours a day on non work related activities, most experienced sales people know their livelihood depends on closing sales, and really are selling the majority of their day if they are not shackled by “busy work” that a newly minted manger is putting in place.
Tom – you make a great point. Defining “non-selling” time is a risky proposition in and of itself. One of the things I first mentioned in the article is that companies might want to consult an expert because this process is fraught with risk.
To your point: imagine if a sales organization defined “Research Current Clients” as non-selling, and eliminated that activity. This is potentially a catastrophic decision to send in your sales teams (account managers in this case) totally unprepared.
So this process is really an art, and must be done quite carefully. I would say in general there are two categories of “non-selling” activities. The first category is filled with activities that should be totally eliminated. This category is generally pretty hard to make changes to across a sales force and is better handled by coaching from individual sales managers. The second category is filled with activities that could better be handled by someone other than font line sales. For example, hiring a marketing research person to generate research reports on prospects/accounts for the sales force might be more efficient and effective than having every salesperson do their own research.
It all depends on your company’s goals and its ideal sales process. Great discussion guys!
Love the idea of a marketing research person. It provides a constant in the way a company receives new contact info, and sales people can collaborate on what information they find as most useful. Good stuff.
Eric: Agree completely with you that: sales productivity’s being hindered by how little time sales people actually spend selling; there’s a role for technology to play in helping them get more face time; AND the economic paybacks of getting helping sales people be more productive are huge. IMO, we’ll have got our uses of Reps’ time + supporting technologies right when not only are sales people getting more face time, but they’re having more impact on buyers’ journeys from the face time they’ve had.
Hi Eric, Great topic! The ultimate objective of all marketing efforts, as well as non-face-time activity is to gain the face-to-face meeting. I agree, to a point that systems and automation can be an advantage. However, in terms of CRM, of which I advocate its use, many studies have concluded that the main value in CRM is not necessarily gained by the sales people but rather as a way for sales management to monitor sales activity and produce forecasts. Tools such as iSell which I just saw a demo of and InsideView, will go a long way to improving sales results.
But my belief is that what many sales people lack is the understanding of how to employ this information in their sales process. Again I have witnessed that some organizations have adopted new technology with the hope that it will be the magic bullet. At the end of the day, the ability to gain face-to-face meetings is greatly dependent upon the sales persons ability to provide a compelling reason for the customer to dedicate their time to meet.
Jack, agreed on your point re: help sales people need in how to employ useful info in their sales process in ways that make a difference to their sales results. IMO, conquered when they can see their Return-on-Effort from tactics + info used. The magic bullet? Learning, technology-triggered.
In my opinion some of the “non selling” activities could be managed by external resources. Research reports on prospect/customers can be more effectively done by research professionals compared to Sales Executives “googling”. Any idea on which research companies are a good source of information?