Why Sales Reps Spend So Little Time Selling 

The Facts

A recent article in Forbes addressed this issue on time management in a study they did showing how little of their salespeople’s time is spent in actual selling. Here is the bottom line: Sales reps are only spending one-third of their time selling. This just can’t happen. Creative people create, production people produce, and sales people sell. That’s the way I was trained and educated.

Spiker Insights

Let me put this in dollars and cents. The average sales rep is paid $105,482 a year. If, as they reported, 64.8% of the sales rep 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. That’s a lot of coin for administrative issues, and it’s got to stop.

It’s not that reps don’t want to spend more time selling, they tell Forbes. It’s just they struggle to get through “the crap.” What is all this crap that is taking the bulk of their sales time? I don’t know about you, but it’s our job as managers and owners to fix this to make it easier for reps to sell. Sales is a complicated profession, and based on this data, the 35.2% of time reps spend selling is leading to just 53% achievement of their quota revenue goals.

We need to be asking our sales reps “How easy are we to work with?” and hear them out.