It is estimated that sales people spend less than 30% of their time actually selling. This is a surprising number - but only if you haven’t worked in sales. The administrative burden of the sales holy trinity (research, outreach, and follow-up) is massive.

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In fact, I’m surprised most sales people even make it to 30%.

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So how do you know if you can do better?  Start with measurement & insights, then move to automation, and then refinement.

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Measurement & Insights

Without measurement, it’s virtually impossible to tell if you’re doing anything well. That’s both personally and professionally.  Everpeak has a fair bit to say about measurement and attribution in general.  In terms of sales specifically, the business model and accompanying sales motion matters.  There is likely some mix of:

• Outbound
• Partnerships
• Events

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Each of those will have a mix of emails, calls, and meetings. Every one of those sales activities should be automatically logged in the CRM (Client Relationship Management) software. Meaning, you should be able to quickly see how many of each activity occurred by Sales Rep. If you cannot do that today, please contact us!  It is not difficult, and its table stakes.

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One you have this number, it’s a matter of extrapolating time and expectations.  If you are an organization with a very heavy outbound motion, you’ll look at the number very differently than an organization placing a heavy emphasis on conferences and tradeshows. In either scenario, you’ll have some reasonable estimate of how much time those functions take.  

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The time remaining is your “non sales activities.” it will probably be different than the amount of time you’d expect the person to have available. However, this is not a witch hunt. We are not looking to arrive, point fingers, and demand productivity.

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The goal is understanding.  You want insights. Where is the time spend around non-sales activities? Chances are, it is still very much work-related activities but in the area of research, outreach and follow-up.  Assuming that’s the case, then let’s think about automation.

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‍Automation

Candidly, it is very difficult to automate research.  In fact, you probably should not.  At least, not until you have a very well-oiled revenue operating system. We often see clients focusing on scale at mass outreach, when they should be focusing on a very niche and targeted named list of prospects.  So without knowing your business, let’s punt on research.

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That leaves us with outreach and follow=up.

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Outreach

There are SO MANY great tools to automate outreach.  Salesforce has Sales Engagement (formerly High Velocity Sales) built-in.  Hubspot has Sequences.  You can even use Google work emails with Templates to save time.  In any of them, the key is to have your outreach lists segmented by something meaningful (i.e. industry, product of interest) and then to have the outbound messages very targeted around that.

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The only catch is that you can only “automate personalization” so far.  AI is trying to do it, but we have yet to experiment with an AI personalization tool that we’d be comfortable sending to our own contacts.  Frankly, most are scary bad.

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Follow-up

Consequently, personalized email just works better.  How many emails do you respond to that weren’t tailored to you?  Probably zero.  Even if you’re email is 100% tailored and perfect, you still have to follow-up.  The follow-up can be automated. Some of our favorite tools are MixMax, Outreach, and Apollo. Here is a short video on how to use Apollo for follow-up.

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If you don’t automate the sending of the email, then automate the actual reminder. This does not mean setting a calendar reminder. You can do better.  A few options:

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• CRM Automation - If you are tracking your email activity (and you SHOULD BE) in a CRM like Salesforce, then you can use flows to automate a Task that reminds you to follow-up.  Hubspot can do the same.
• Apollo - Most think of it as outbound, but it may be even more effective in automating the follow-up. See video below.
• MixMax - This is a lightweight tool for email follow-up.  Not as robust as something like Outreach or SalesLoft, but good to experiment with.
• FollowupThen - Freemium service. Check out their website.

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Finally, if reps spend a lot of time crafting messages - stop! Everyone on your team is writing similar messages. You should absolutely have a library of best-practice messaging and the metrics. This includes subject lines, which are the single largest predictor of an email leading to an action.

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Refinement

This process outlined above is useful in identifying areas that the team spends time on that could be minimized: research, outreach or follow-up.

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That’s just the beginning though. Processes are built to be improved. Measuring the data, analyzing, and discussing as a team will absolutely yield new insights and best practices to emulate.

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But making your sales team more productive starts with discussion and understanding the status quo.