How much time do you think your sales reps spend actively selling? 80% of their time? 60% of their time?
Actually, average sales reps spend only about 23% of their time actively selling — 10.3 hrs/week.* Here’s what they’re doing the rest of the time:
- Writing proposals
- Strategizing internally
- Traveling
- Creating sales reports
- Attending sales meetings
- Expense reports
- Paperwork
What if you could shorten this task list and give your reps two more hours of active selling time each week? (The ideal “active selling ratio” is 33%, or 15.84 hours in a 48-hour week.)
Just 2 hours a week translates to 100 extra hours per rep per year. How much revenue could your company generate if each rep had an extra 100 or even 200 hours per year?
Here’s a simple calculation:
| Estimate the number of hours your reps spend actively selling per week. | [enter] | A |
| Estimate the average revenue per rep per year | B | |
| Calculate the revenue per hour of active selling: B/(A*50) | C | |
| How many additional hours per week could you give your reps by reducing busywork, hiring a proposal writer, adding an assistant, etc.? | D | |
| Here’s the additional annual revenue you could generate with these extra hours: C*D*50 (assumes 50 work weeks/year) | E |
This incremental revenue could be substantial — and it doesn’t require any more sales reps, just process improvements to help them maximize their selling time. Use this figure to justify any investments you may need — better software, a proposal writer, an admin salary, etc.
We recently ran a webinar on this subject — visit our archive page to download the file. You can also contact us if you’d like more detailed spreadsheets, instructions and tools on this topic.
