Ouch! Only 1/3 of sales time is spent selling! How to fix the problem
What if you owned an auto repair garage and your mechanics only spent about 1/3 of their working hours actually fixing cars for your customers?
It would be an intolerable situation, wouldn’t it?
That’s essentially what a Hubspot survey discovered when it inquired about the ways sales professionals spend their time. On average, they devote only 34 percent of the time to actually selling. Here’s the breakdown the Hubspot survey revealed:
When presented with information like this, one of the first things a leader needs to do is ask the question, “Which of these tasks can be systemized, farmed out, or automated?”
Consider the impact to your bottom line if you could increase the percentage of time sales professionals spend selling by 25 to 50 percent? Let me give you one quick example.
Our average sales pro spends 12 percent of the work day scheduling meetings. However, with apps – many free, such as Calendly – scheduling meetings with customers and prospects can be automated. I don’t think it’s too outrageous to suggest that adopting an app to handle some of the meeting scheduling could cut that 12 percent by as much as one half.
Prospecting is often ripe for systemization, which can then be turned over to a virtual assistant. For example, I know someone who is targeting sales to health clubs. He has developed a system to search Facebook to identify his best prospects and it usually reveals their contact information as well. An overseas virtual assistant is able to “work” his system, pull together lists of prospects, and make the initial contact with them.
Thanks to the good work that Hubspot did with sales professionals, we have this snapshot of how sales professionals spend their time and many of you can use it as a basis to examine your own salesforce. However, a similar survey could be conducted for virtually any job within your organization.
Make this year a time to rethink or eliminate the ancillary tasks that suck the productivity out of your organization. If early indications are good, this should be a profitable year for many businesses, therefore it should be a good year to invest on automation and experiment with virtual assistants and other freelancers.