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Posted on Jul 02, 2007 - 2:33am by John P. in Sales Management, Work
The following article, by Vickie Elmer, appeared in the Washington Post, Friday, December 8, 2006. It is in reference to this survey from Industrial Performance Group.
The Harder Sell
The sell, sell, sell strategy for sales staff may now be sell, fill out paperwork, look up some details, go to a meeting, sell.Salespeople, on average, spend only 38 percent of their time pushing products or services, and even peak performers figure they are selling during just 58 percent of their work hours, a new survey of 1,502 salespeople shows.
The average salesperson spends as much time on operations and management tasks, such as turning in information or expediting orders, as he or she does talking to customers, according to the survey for Industrial Performance Group.
One-fourth of the time is spent dealing with mistakes, finding information or expediting orders. Altogether, two-thirds of time goes to non-revenue-generating activities; only one-tenth of a work week — four or five hours — is devoted to prospecting and locating new customers, according to the survey.
That’s because many companies have cut customer service staffing and have inefficient or outdated work processes.
The result: Salespeople are swamped with other tasks, costing companies in their bottom line.
I’ve seen situations where this scenario is most certainly true, and I’ve seen situations where salespeople are only spending a fraction of their time selling even though the excuses are really not valid. The best way to determine the legitimacy of the sales department’s claims of overwork is to perform a process-mapping study.
Process mapping simply involves the following steps:
After this exercise you should be able to determine if the organization is suffering from massive inefficiency, or horrible mis-management. If you don’t have the in-house expertise to determine if your sales organization is “normal” I would highly recommend spending the money to bring in a real expert with plenty of experience to assist.
The bottom line is, a company will not grow without sales, and selling cannot occur without support from the rest of the organization.
This is a great article for me right now. I’m currently looking for a new sales person who can really bring in the local sales. It will be interesting to see how this articles lines up with my own findings. If my sales staff is spending 38% of their time selling, that’s fine with me, as long as their hitting the marks.
Actually, I’d argue that if your sales staff is spending 38% of their time selling AND hitting their marks – their marks are way too low!
The goal is to extract all the efficiency out of the system to enable people to achieve higher quotas and make the business more profitable. I have spent many years doing this for a number of companies and it is absolutely possible to improve performance of most sales teams by 100% or more.
I’m going to begin writing a lot more articles on the topic of business and sales performance improvements, so stay tuned. Normally companies would charge HUGE money for the knowledge I’m about to begin dishing out for free…
John
This number surprises me – it is higher than I would expect.
I worked for very large multinational organization (>$2B/yr) that had close to 3,000 professional sales people worldwide. Our initial surveys of sales showed that they only spent 11% of their time actually selling. The rest of the time was tied-up with things like supporting implementation, placing and tracking orders, problem solving, and other administrative type activities.
After several years of major efforts to restructure and retrain the salesforce we were able to get the number up to the low 20s. Still that may be considered a low number, but it represented an effective doubling of sales time. (Interestingly, we did not see a doubling of revenue.)
One might argue that the mere “observation” of how sales people spend their time resulted in a change in reporting, not necessarily a change in behavior. (This is metaphysical debate of the observer affecting the observed.)
The survey itself was a huge challenge. The initial surveys of “how do you spend your time?” did not yield reliable data. What we decided to do was to take a daily random poll of 10% of the salesforce with a “what did you do today?” anonymous survey. Over time, we found this approach to provide much more reliable data. This method requires a rather large population and long period of time to get significant results. (Initially, we implemented 100% tracking of all activities for the entire salesforce. That was met with extreme opposition.)
This is a challenging issue and there is no one magic bullet. Running a successful sales organization requires leadership, mentoring, training, and coaching. It needs to be supported throughout the whole organization. It requires a clearly defined sales process that aligns with the company’s business model. It’s not just about removing barriers, but it’s also about providing direction on what they need to be doing and how they should be doing it – set expectations and hold the organization accountable.
Wow Eric! Fantastic commentary. Thanks for sharing this story, and certainly there is a wide range of productivity affected by a number of different factors.
In the case that you offer, I would venture a guess that although you might have called them “Sales People” your sales force was probably doing more of an “Account Management” role. In other words, they spent the majority of their time working with the existing base of accounts – and yes, new sales into the base was part of their responsibility.
It is very difficult to improve the productivity of an established sales force without making some changes to the structure. A colleague of mine once said that field sales organizations have an “infinite ability to absorb productivity”, meaning that no matter what improvements you throw at them they don’t produce more revenue.
You are correct that there are a lot of moving parts that need to come together. The strategy in which it is implmented can also make a tremendous difference. For example, shifting some of the traditional field sales activities to telesales or online channels, combined with the implementation of an efficient SFA program and increased management scrutiny.
Sales people don’t need to love you. They need to respect you, be motivated, and produce.
John
Great post. I think that sales people should actually get involved in the process of delivery as it helps build better relationships with their clients. We would be happy with 38%