Sales Productivity: Selling Vs. Non-Selling Time
“We live in zero overhead growth environments. Productivity is something that we have to do every day. When we want to grant the organization a 3% merit pay increase we have to find it within the organization. So if we’re not getting 3% more productive, we’re underwater.” – Sales Operations Executive, Consumer Products Company
Almost all sales roles have non-selling administrative or customer service aspects. But too often those non-selling activities take up more time than the selling activities. When we talk about our Revenue Roadmap, the first step is to gather insight. The same is true for increasing the productivity of your sales team. The first step is to understand where they are spending their time, and quantify the amount of time spent on selling versus non-selling activities.
Often, the sales organization doesn’t even realize how much time is spent on non-selling activities. Or, customers call with problems that should be passed off to customer service or another department, but the sales person feels it’s his responsibility to personally solve the problem, since it’s his customer.
Help the sales organization to gather insight around their own productivity. Identify and track the non-selling activities, and remove as many of those activities as possible. Often this means hiring sales support resources or simply passing customer service issues to another organization better equipped to solve the problems.
- Determine where the sales organization is using its time.
- Statistically identify focus by account type, product type, sales strategy, activity type, and stage of sales process.
- Understand pure selling time and NRGs (non-revenue generating activities).
- Decontaminate the sales organization to shift or remove NRGs, increase selling time, and increase sales capacity.
- Follow trends of time allocation and productivity improvement over time for continuous improvement.
- Allow the sales team to understand their individual effectiveness for personal development.
The Sales Time Optimizer Tool is designed to calculate where the sales organization is spending its time. Contact Mark Donnolo at mark.donnolo@salesglobe.com for a free trial today.
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