Salespeople spend 70 per cent of their time on everything except selling
In its current State of Sales study, Salesforce puts the share of non-selling time at 70 per cent: data maintenance, internal coordination, administration. At the same time, around half of German companies report that they cannot fill open sales positions.
What happened
Salesforce has published the current edition of its study “State of Sales”. The key figure: sales staff spend 70 per cent of their working time on activities that have nothing to do with selling, and only 30 per cent in contact with customers. Manual data entry, internal coordination, quote administration and reporting fill the week. In parallel, sales consultants in Germany report that around half of companies cannot fill open sales positions; according to Bitkom, 36 per cent of German companies already use AI, and a further 47 per cent are planning or discussing its use.
Who it affects
Every sales organisation in the Mittelstand, especially field sales with products that need explaining: energy, payments, insurance, software, mechanical engineering.
Assessment
The Salesforce figure is a vendor figure; the company sells software against exactly this problem. But it matches what I see in every sales team I have built up or taken over. The best salesperson spends the afternoon feeding the CRM and formatting quotes. That is not a diligence problem, it is a structural problem.
The skills shortage in sales is therefore half self-inflicted. Anyone who lifts 30 per cent selling time to 50 per cent has increased their sales capacity by two thirds without advertising a single position. The tools for it have been there for two years: call notes that write themselves into the CRM, quotes from templates, meeting preparation by an assistant. What is missing is the decision by sales management to actually abolish the administration instead of digitising it.
What to do now
- Measure for a week how much time each salesperson spends in customer conversations. The figure is almost always lower than expected.
- Identify the three biggest time sinks outside selling and either cut or automate one of them completely.
- Align commission and targets to customer contacts and closes, not to CRM completeness.