What Do Most Sales Reps Actually Dedicate Their Time To Doing?

Did you know that most sales reps actually don’t spend their time selling? A recent survey and report published by InsideSales showed that sales reps only spend 36.6% of their time actually selling. This means that your company could be losing revenue and wasting resources on internal sales hires.

Sales Reps Find Interacting On Facebook More Valuable

Oddly enough, sales reps claim that they actually find spending time interacting with people on Facebook was more effective than a lot of internal related activities. They claim that interacting with their peers on Facebook was 7% more effective when it comes to closing deals than dealing with internal policies.

They also believe that internal policies, the time it takes to get approval for deals, and meetings was actually slowing down their sales process.

Sales Reps Actually Don’t Like CRMs

Most sales people will tell you that CRMs are the bread and butter for closing deals, but in fact sales reps only spend an average of 18% of their time actually on a CRM. They felt that this is similar to “data crunching” that a lot of people in Finance have to do and felt that a lot of the task is an unnecessary waste of time.

In terms of valuable systems, CRM was rated lowest. They also explicitly called CRM out as the most frustrating or not directly valuable to a sales reps objectives.

This doesn’t necessary mean that a CRM isn’t necessary or effective, but it shows that a lot of repetitive tasks that companies require their sales reps to do on the CRM can be a time killer.

Time management for Sales Reps

So what else do sales reps do with their time? Let’s take a look at the breakdown:

• 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

I believe that spending time on meetings and customer interaction is important in sales especially when you need to be closing deals and upgrading customers, but I also believe that internal policies and approvals taking up 12.8% of their time can be avoided.

How About Lead Research?

12% of a sales reps time is spent on researching target accounts and contacts. This means doing research on the prospect, inbound leads, and more, but how necessary is this?

From my experience, reps actually spent more than 12% of their time researching leads. It’s more close to 25–30%. That is A LOT of time dedicated to researching leads, finding their emails, and ensuring that they craft the perfect pitch.

I believe that this can be avoided and that the cost of resources can be lowered by outsourcing it to a quality data enrichment and lead generation company.

This is why we built GrowthOK, to provide sales reps with quality leads along with custom data points and research all included in one package.

Conclusion

It seems that from the research report that most sales reps actually don’t spend enough time closing and this can be a huge downfall and stall for your company. Because of this, I believe that all companies should revamp their internal process and consider outsourcing all the unnecessary tasks to ensure that the sales peeps can focus on what they’re good at.

If you’re looking high-qualified and targeted sales leads with custom data points that actually convert, check out GrowthOK