One-Third of Selling Time Is Wasted, Study Shows

IT sales professionals are spending a third of their potential selling time in sales-preparation activities, according to new sales-enablement research from IDC.

“In addition to the staggering 26 percent of their week spent on administrative tasks, we find 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,” said Lee Levitt, program director of IDC’s Sales Advisory Service, which helps IT sales executives and their operational counterparts calibrate organizational and infrastructure investments based on revenue, expense and productivity benchmarks.

IDC’s research suggests that shifting as little as 10 minutes per week to productive selling time is worth $57,000 per year in increased revenue for an enterprise sales professional.

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, according to IDC’s research.

Better sales-enablement processes will have a profound impact on sales productivity. IDC found “time-to-revenue” drops from months to weeks for organizations that have moved to “third-generation” sales-enablement environments. With more attention to enablement, sales people feel empowered, they perform better, and customer satisfaction increases, the researchers concluded.