Time Is Money: 270-Year-Old Advice for Modern Sales Management

by Keith Mintzer

02.02.2021

Time is money.

This famous aphorism, coined more than 270 years ago by the eminently quotable Benjamin Franklin, hasn’t lost its relevance. Today I’d like to focus on this lesser-known excerpt in the same essay:

“He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, it ought not to be reckoned the only expence; he hath really spent or thrown away five shillings besides.”

Franklin uses slightly outdated language to say that if you spend half your time at work idle, you throw away half a day’s worth of wages. Similarly, there’s a steep opportunity cost to the business at-large by bogging down sales development reps (SDRs) with nonessential activities in sales. This age-old dynamic is exacerbated by a new complication—productivity lost in the era of COVID-19 home offices.

Here’s what you need to know and how you can get more sales from your reps.

 

How Much Time Are SDRs Spending on Sales?

A perfect world would see the entirety of an SDR’s time spent developing opportunities. This is obviously unrealistic. Sales reps have a wide range of responsibilities in the workplace. One can divide these activities into the following three categories:

  • Primary: Developing new opportunities with existing clients and new prospects, both proactively and reactively.
  • Secondary: These are tasks that need to be done but don’t directly support primary activities. Here we have administrative activities like paperwork, sending service updates, editing datasets, and troubleshooting technology issues.
  • Tertiary: Activities that enhance an SDR’s selling ability but don’t directly involve sales development. In other words, professional development, training, constructive one-on-ones with managers, and other internal education activities.

How much are SDRs currently spending on various functions?

The proportion of primary and secondary activities varies greatly depending on the source. A survey from XANT Labs claims that revenue-generating activities compose just over a third of all activities. A more in-depth and potentially accurate time-tracking study from Pace Productivity puts this figure closer to 23%.

Examining the latter study further, a significant portion of non-sales activities directly support sales, including 11% spent in travel, 6% in planning, and 11% in client admin, the latter of which include setting up accounts, writing customer reports, and ensuring compliance. An additional 7% are spent on breaks.

Since we’re mostly talking about junior positions involving little travel (especially during COVID), you can safely remove them, which sees selling jump to 41% of the job. Not awful, but it could be way better.

 

What to do?

Just as time is a sales professional’s most valuable resource, an organization’s dependence on sales for revenue means it’s just as valuable to management and the bottom line as well. In other words, it’s in everyone’s best interest that sellers spend most of their time selling.

Overall, you should shoot to have SDRs spend around 75-80% of their time proactively engaging in primary space proactively selling and developing business. But how can sales managers make room in their SDR’s busy schedules?

What’s needed is are a combination of the following:

  • Sales software automation
  • Streamlining job responsibilities
  • Delegating other responsibilities
  • Work-from-home-friendly time tracking
  • Work-from-home-friendly auto dialers with CRM integrations
  • Don’t schedule multiple sales and forecast meetings in the middle of the sales day

Additionally, managers will have to make greater efficiency an ongoing priority with SDRs. That means tracking the number of calls and conversations that reps are having daily and assisting with time management. Currently, only 22% of SDRs  use time management systems for workflow optimization.

 

Time is One Resource You’ll Never Get Back

Just as it was in Franklin’s era, time will continue to be a precious resource for the foreseeable future, certainly for another 270 years. Our job in the present, whether in our personal lives or at work, is to make the most of it.

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TSRM staff photo: Keith

Keith Mintzer

Keith Mintzer is the co-founder and managing partner at TSRM. Full Bio

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