TTG, Incorporated: Professional Territory Design Software Since 1988

Time Study – Sales Reps

How can sales reps increase their selling time?

As a successful sales rep (or someone who manages sales reps), you probably already know the key skills needed to develop and maintain your business. Essentially they boil down to a) finding qualified prospects, b) determining potential needs, c) closing sales and d) taking responsibility for customer service.

This means you need to find, cultivate and maintain relationships with new prospects and existing clients. By keeping the funnel full of prospects, you'll ensure you have a steady stream of business. But transcending proficiency in these areas is the issue of time. What key priorities should you be focusing on? How do you spend your time compared to others? Are you maximizing your productive time and minimizing time wasters?

If you could know what other successful sales reps are doing, you could emulate them. Pace Productivity Inc., based in Toronto, Canada conducts sophisticated audits of how people spend their time. The information for these time studies is gathered from a small, portable electronic device called a TimeCorder. This device, about the size of a videocassette, allows individuals to easily track the time they spend on different activities.

Here's how it works. The TimeCorder is programmed with 26 pre-coded activities, each one corresponding with a letter of the alphabet. Whenever a time-study participant presses a button, time starts recording on that activity, like a stopwatch. When the person changes from one activity to another by pressing another pre-coded button, the time stops recording on the previous activity and automatically starts on the current one. It's like a chess clock in reverse and about as simple to use as the average doorbell.

In addition to measuring cumulative hours, the TimeCorder also tracks the number of times each activity occurs. When a button is pressed, the "count" for that activity also increases by one. We refer to these as occasions. By dividing cumulative time by the number of occasions, a typical duration is derived. It is the average length of time an activity occurs, expressed in minutes. So a time study participant might work for 5 hours on marketing over 10 different occasions. Therefore each occasion averages 30 minutes.

TIME STUDY RESULTS

The first thing we discovered about sales reps is that their work hours are not exceptionally long. Surprising, but true. Typically their workweek is 46 hours long. This includes lunch and breaks, plus travel time and other miscellaneous activities. It also includes work done at night or on weekends.

HOURS WORKED PER WEEK

For comparison, sales managers are slightly higher at 50 hours per week. Clerical people tend to work fewer hours, only 43 per week. Among the highest jobs we've tracked are independent consultants and trainers who average 61 hours per week.

Frequency of activities is higher than for other employees. We can measure how often they are engaged in different activities based on the number of occasions they track. Sales reps are "interrupted" every 11 minutes, while managers come in at 20 minutes. The reason for this is sales reps have a higher number of short telephone calls, usually sales calls, than others.

Now let's look at how the total hours break down by category. Usually time study participants track 26 different activities. Of course, each client has a different list. However, the individual activities can be grouped into 8 major categories for analysis; selling, customer service, order processing, planning, administration, travel, lunch / breaks and miscellaneous.

The pie chart below shows the break down of the various categories. A discussion of each category follows.

PLANNING HOURS

Planning takes up just 2.4 hours per week, or 5 % of the time.

This category includes determining long term strategies, deciding which customers to call this week and working on presentations to be made. Most sales reps spend about half of the time in this category planning their schedule and activities; the other half is in presentation preparation.

SELLING HOURS

The selling category consists of activities designed to seek out new business. Mostly this consists of making sales calls on the phone, making sales presentations and writing letters. Occasionally some respondents have also included marketing and networking.

On average, these add up to 10.3 hours per week or just 23% of the workweek. Typically, sales reps engage in sales activities on 58 different occasions per week. These are direct contacts with customers and prospects, primarily phone calls and meetings with both current customers and prospects.

Sales contacts with current customers generally take longer than those with prospects. Specifically, sales calls with customers typically take 9 minutes each, while those with prospects are only 5 minutes.

Meanwhile sales meetings with current customers average 36 minutes each, while they last only 26 minutes with prospects.

Sales lunches are not that frequent. Not all of our respondents measured these, but among those that did, they average 2 lunches / socializing events per week of only 40 minutes each.

CUSTOMER SERVICE HOURS

The largest customer service activities are responding to special requests and collections. This category also includes credit issues, handling complaints, account maintenance, service meetings and even occasional deliveries.

Ideally, sales reps would delegate these activities, while remaining as the main contact point for the customer. In organizations where this is possible, minimizing service time is an objective, at least for the sales rep.

Typically, the average rep spends 5.9 hours per week or 13% of the time on service issues. Those who tracked an activity called "service and support calls" usually answer these for 1.8 hours a week. Collections can be heavy, taking some reps 2.4 hours per week over 7 different occasions. Phone calls, whether they're about service, complaints or account inquiries usually average 13-21 minutes each.

ORDER PROCESSING

The order-processing category consists of pricing, preparing quotes and even design work for custom orders. These activities take 6.3 hours per week or 14% of the time. This is a necessary part of the job that would be difficult to delegate. However, where repeat orders are involved, many sales reps can increase their efficiency by giving these to an inside or telesales rep.

ADMINISTRATION HOURS

Administrative activities are those B and C priority items that don't directly generate revenue, but are a necessary part of the job. They include paperwork, filing, handling mail, internal phone calls, sales meetings, correspondence, meeting with one's manager and reading.

Together, these activities can be a huge time hog. On average these B and C priorities take up 9.8 hours per week, 21% of the time.

No matter what the group, the biggest time gobbler for most people is an activity called "general administration and paperwork". Depending on the person, this might include filling out government forms, writing reports, sending service updates, updating databases, and even fixing a computer problem.

For sales reps, this one activity alone can represent over 5 hours per week. We're constantly told that administration and paperwork are among the biggest time hurdles. Those who are good at managing their time find ways to minimize paperwork. They delegate to others, they automate them or they standardize them.

Other administrative activities are shown on the list below. It shows averages among those who tracked these activities. Not everyone tracked all of these, so the list should not be added. Nonetheless, it demonstrates how some reps could accumulate over 10 hours on these non-priority activities!

Another important activity in the administration category is personal training. After all, how can your business improve if you don't improve? But sales reps spending only about 1/2 hour per week on it are not getting the development time they deserve. For other employees we've studied, 1-2 hours per week is a typical target.

TRAVEL HOURS

Travel activities add up to 4.1 hours per week, or 9% of the time. However, the database contains many sales reps, such as bankers, who don't travel. When these are excluded, travel time jumps to 6.5 hours per week or 14% of the time. There is a corresponding drop in customer service. Typically outside reps make 18 trips per week of 22 minutes each. (Few of the study participants did overnight trips.)

OTHER HOURS

Breaks, lunch and personal business usually average about 3.4 hours per week, consisting of 10 breaks of about 19 minutes each. Finally, the miscellaneous activity includes items that weren't tracked anywhere else. If mailing or filing were not included in the list of activities given to a participant, the time spent on them may have ended up in this activity. It might also include charity projects, special task forces and office socializing. At 3.5 hours per week, or 8%, miscellaneous time for sales reps is at an acceptable level relative to others in our database.

THE IDEAL PROFILE

The data in this report represent averages. Here's what we believe an ideal profile should look like, based on a 48-hour week. That's the equivalent of working 8:30 a.m. ­ 5:30 p.m. Monday to Friday, plus another 3 hours spread out between evenings and the weekend.

THE IDEAL SALES PROFILE

©2010 Pace Productivity Inc. Used by permission.