Are Your Salespeople Too Busy to Sell?
A study found that the average salesperson spends less than 20% of their time each day selling. Some companies are hiring more salespeople to fix this sales problem. Hiring more salespeople and increasing your overhead and cost of sales is not the answer. We need to improve sales productivity by understanding their tasks instead of selling and creating new expectations for the time they sell. Productivity in sales is key to top performance. Top-performing salespeople know and execute the behaviors that drive results. However, many salespeople are bogged down with tasks that distract from their primary objective: selling. This can lead to decreased performance, missed targets, and frustration. Identifying and minimizing these time-wasting activities is essential to freeing more time for activities that drive sales growth.
I have yet to meet a salesperson who did not feel they were very busy. Salespeople will fill their days with busy activities if we do not train them in sales activities, which we know drives increasing sales and gross margins. This post shares the top 10 time-wasting sales activities and the top 10 activities that Drive Explosive Growth.
What are the Top 10 Time-Wasting Activities Salespeople Are Doing?
1. Unnecessary Internal Meetings: Too many meetings, especially those that need clearer agendas and outcomes, can consume valuable time that could be spent on selling. Here, we work with sales managers and coach them, as far as too many meetings could have been via email.
2. Administrative Tasks: Excessive time spent on paperwork, data entry, and other administrative tasks diverts focus from core sales activities. One of the biggest complaints I hear from salespeople is how difficult and time-consuming it is to enter information into their CRM and create weekly call reports. If your team uses the CRM correctly, why are you asking for call reports? The sales manager can quickly see the last week’s activities, notes, and next steps in a quality CRM.
3. Internal Emails: Handling a high volume of internal emails, especially those unrelated to sales, can be a significant distraction. In our time management for salespeople course, we suggest having email time blocks to review and respond to internal emails.
4. Research Overload: While some research is necessary, too much time gathering information can delay actual selling efforts. We teach salespeople to research their customers, but how we teach it should take at most 5 minutes. My teams share that it takes a lot of time to find customer data in their systems. What top-performing sales teams provide their salespeople are data dashboards to quickly find the insights you need to have a great conversation that leads to revenue with customers.
5. Procrastination: Delaying important sales tasks in favor of less critical activities can hinder progress and productivity. The biggest delay we often see is prospecting. Since so many salespeople struggle with prospecting, it is often scheduled to be the last on their lists daily. In our professional prospecting course, we suggest prospecting in the top three daily activities. We refer to this as eating the frog early.
6. Social Media: Unproductive use of social media, such as browsing or non-sales-related posting, can waste considerable time. I have a course on Social Selling and how to use social media to win more appointments and revenue. But I am referring to scrolling daily through nonbusiness-related social platforms. If this is something you must do, apply the time block method I teach in the Time Management for Sales Course and block time after work.
7. Poorly Qualified Leads: Spending time on leads that could be better qualified can be a significant drain on resources. First, we work with sales and marketing and create common terms and understanding about the words “leads” and “ prospects.“ Then, we train salespeople in qualifying skills to ensure they spend time with opportunities to speak with a decision maker and the customer has a problem they are willing to pay money to solve. Untrained salespeople lose hours each day chasing what they think are leads but fail to pass the qualifying process we teach.
8. Travel: Inefficient travel planning and excessive commuting time can reduce the time available for sales activities. The first question I ask salespeople who travel a great deal is…Is a face-to-face meeting the best strategy for this stage of the sales process? Post-pandemic decision-makers are used to phone and Zoom meetings. If you must travel because it is the right strategy for this stage of the sales process, make sure to plan a full trip. Review your CRM and meet with several current and prospective accounts on each trip.
9. Ineffective CRM Use: Misuse or overuse of CRM systems for activities not directly supporting sales can be a time sink. Have your salespeople been trained to use your CRM correctly?
10. Multitasking: Trying to handle multiple tasks simultaneously can lead to reduced efficiency and lower overall productivity. The data shows shifting your focus from one task to another does not make you more productive. It often takes 20 minutes for your mind to adjust and awaken the critical thinking part of your brain when you add a new task.
So, we have discussed the time wasters, but what about the behaviors and activities that drive explosive sales growth?
Top 10 Sales Activities That Drive Explosive Sales Growth
1. Prospecting: Regularly identifying and reaching out to new potential customers is crucial for maintaining a healthy sales pipeline. Today it can take 12 to 20 customer touches to start a conversation that leads to revenue. When we deliver our professional prospecting training, we design a prospecting cadence based on timing and tools. ( Email, phone, LinkedIn, …)
2. Qualifying Leads: Efficiently qualifying leads to ensure they are worth pursuing helps focus efforts on high-potential prospects. Far too many salespeople have what we refer to as unhealthy optimism because they have yet to be taught how to qualify prospects. When salespeople need to learn how to qualify, you will see many quotes, and salespeople seem very busy following up but with few closing sales. As we share in our training, we need to spend time on qualified opportunities and not everyone who can fog a mirror.
3. Building Relationships: Developing and nurturing relationships with prospects and clients fosters trust and long-term business. This also includes building your relationship matrix of decision-makers at each key account. We recommend 4-6 relationships with decision-makers at large accounts. How would you rate your relationships today with your customers?
• You are a vendor
• You are a peer
• You are a strategic advisor
• You are a strategic trusted advisor
We train salespeople to build trust, demonstrate competence, and build strategic business relationships.
4. Follow-Up: Consistent and timely follow-up with leads and clients ensures that opportunities are noticed, and relationships are strengthened. Doing what you say you will do builds trust.
5. Product Knowledge: Continuously improving knowledge about the products or services sold enables more effective and confident selling. Here, we learn about products, services, and applications and the value they deliver to our customers.
6. Customer Needs Analysis: Understanding and addressing customers’ specific needs and pain points helps in tailoring solutions and closing deals. Business challenges change frequently. New constraints for your customers often occur monthly. As salespeople, we are to use our discovery and qualifying skills to uncover unresolved problems that our customers have. We use our consultative selling skills to help our customers solve their challenges.
7. Sales Presentations: Crafting and delivering compelling sales presentations that highlight the value proposition of the offering. We often train salespeople on how to build a business case and deliver it in a presentation to close more sales.
8. Networking: Attending industry events, conferences, and networking functions to connect with potential clients and partners. We also teach salespeople how to network on social platforms like LinkedIn.
9. Training and Development: Conduct ongoing sales training and professional development to enhance skills and stay current with industry trends. If you are curious about what good sales training looks like, you can download my free white paper on Sales Training Reimagined. To experience a strong ROI from sales training, we strongly recommend you first assess your teams’ sales skills, then prescribe sales training and coaching to close skills gaps we discover by each sales role.
10. Closing Techniques: Mastering various closing techniques to effectively seal the deal and ensure that efforts result in successful sales. A number that drives CEOs and other senior leader’s crazy is that 67% of salespeople do not ask for the order. Why? Often, it’s because they were never taught closing skills or had limiting beliefs that asking for the order makes them a pushy salesperson. We also find if a salesperson has a high need to be liked, greater than a need to be respected as a trusted business advisor, they fail to ask for the order.
Salespeople are most effective when their time is focused on activities that directly contribute to selling. By identifying and minimizing time-wasting activities, sales teams can allocate more time to high-impact sales activities that drive growth. Prioritizing tasks such as prospecting, qualifying leads, and building relationships will increase productivity, higher sales, and greater success for the entire organization.
Have your salespeople received sales skills training?
How effective is your sales team today?
How much more effective could they be?
Let’s schedule a call and discuss how we can improve sales effectiveness and the overall productivity of your sales team.