According to IDC, One Third of Potential Selling Time Is Wasted Due to Poor Sales Enablement……wauuu, what a conclusion that came from the IDC Sales Advisory Practice's recent sales enablement research was that shifting as little as 10 minutes a week to more productive selling time is worth $57,000 per year, per rep.
For the IT vendor community, sales productivity is more important than ever before. For the past year, it has been the key issue faced by most technology companies and, with the current state of the economy, sales productivity and efficiency will only become more important to sales and marketing executives and the executive teams running large companies.
Sales enablement, which IDC defines as the broad set of activities that prepare members of the sales team (including channel partners) for success in sales engagements, is a key lever for sales productivity. Despite this, most companies have not moved beyond first or second generation sales enablement strategies, which will be devastating in this economical situation.
"In addition to the staggering 26% of their week spent on administrative tasks, the IDC research found that sales professionals are spending, on average, 2.3 hours a week searching for marketing collateral; 5.8 hours a week searching for customer related information; and another 6.4 hours a week creating presentations," IDC noted. "In short, they spend a third of their potential selling time in sales preparation activities that could be done better by automated systems and improved processes."
"IDC research further suggests that shifting as little as 10 minutes a week from this unproductive time to productive selling time is worth $57,000 per year in increased revenues for an enterprise sales professional. In general there was a over 30% increase of productivity potential, that would have to be brought about by sales enablement focused on sales productivity".
Better sales enablement will have a profound impact on sales productivity. IDC found that "time to revenue" drops from months to weeks for organizations that have moved to "productivity" sales enablement environments. With more attention to enablement, sales people feel empowered, they perform better, and customer satisfaction increases.
Obviously have I as a Sales Coach over the years studied sales people as well and this is what I have found in terms of “their unproductive and most significant time consuming activities”.
The four most important, that I found again and again accruing – arranged by frequency – includes 78% of the waste of time the sales people experience:
• Attempts to do too much
• Distracting interruptions
• Crisis management
• Administration – paperwork, etc
Do you see the pattern?
I have the opinion that the most problems and solutions related to sales people and their time management can be put into the following two categories: productivity and efficiency.
1. Productivity means doing things right.
2. Efficiency means doing the right things.
I just thought that I wanted to share this, especially since we are in troubling times. Times where you need to do more with much less and where productivity and efficiency will be the key driver for that
Regards
Mark von Rosing
