7 Alarming Sales Performance Stats

By Seismic — On September 1, 2015

There are tons of statistics out there indicating sales performance and productivity are not as optimal as we would hope. It’s easy to take these at face value, brush them aside, or think that your team is unaffected. But there’s a very good chance that your sales team is not working as efficiently and effectively as it could be. Take a look at the sales productivity stats in the context of your own sales team:

  1. Only 39% of a sales rep’s time is spent selling or interacting with prospects and customers.

  2. Sales reps spend an average of 30 hours a month searching for and creating their own content.

  3. A whopping 2/3 of a company’s sales collateral goes unused, but companies are unable to determine what content cannot be located, and what is simply irrelevant for sales conversations.

  4. 92% of companies are leveraging CRM, but there has been a drop in the number of individual salespeople using CRM as part of their daily workflows.

  5. 77% of executive buyers claim salespeople don’t understand their issues and where they can help, and 78% claim salespeople do not have relevant examples or case studies to share with them. (Forrester Research)

  6. According to the Aberdeen Group, 55% of companies aren’t prioritizing reps’ ability to personalize content.

  7. The time that sales reps spend on pre-sales and post-sales activities are both up by 15%, time spent on non-sales (admin) work is up 21%, and all of this has come at the expense of actual selling time in front of the customer, which is down a full 26%. (HBR)
     

I don’t know about you, but these stats scare me. So many deals are lost because sales reps can’t adequately and efficiently communicate with prospective customers. There are numerous reasons that this happens, and sales leaders need to ask themselves:

  • Is my sales team suffering from the inability to personalize content, adopt CRM, or find the right content for a specific sales interaction?

  • Do pre- and post-sales activities take up the majority of my sales reps’ time?

  • How much time is my team actually spending interacting with customers in sales-driven activities?

Assessing the time your reps spend on different activities, both role-specific and indirect (time-wasting) tasks, can help you determine whether your reps are working as productively as possible.

Learn more about Activity-Based Enablement >>>

Once you’ve (likely) concluded that your team could be selling smarter and more nimbly, think about where reps are spending most of their time. This could be a good indication of efficiency issues. SiriusDecisions reports that sales reps spend the majority of their time in email and calendar tools, such as Outlook, and considerably less time in SFA and CRM solutions.

As a B2B company, Seismic has experienced and understands this pain firsthand. Having to endlessly switch from CRM to email to different content repositories is a colossal time waster, especially when reps are unable to locate the content they need. Then, if content needs to be tailored for a specific sales interaction, even more time is wasted. Tracking each interaction in CRM becomes a tedious chore, and is often the reason for poor CRM adoption and usage rates. That’s why Seismic has introduced its Outlook integration, allowing sales reps to access, personalize and send all relevant content to a prospect without having to leave Outlook. Seismic for Outlook connects with CRM and other data sources to ensure only the most relevant content is shared with prospects at the right time. It is our goal to enable sales reps to have the most pertinent and personal sales interactions with prospects as possible, without affecting the efficiency of sales or marketing teams.

For more on our Outlook integration, please visit our Seismic for Outlook page!

A Sales Leader's Guide to Implementing Activity-Based Enablement

Identify the biggest time-wasters for your sales reps and discover how these activities can be minimized, streamlined or eliminated together.

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