What are the tasks salespeople need to perform?
The best sales people focus on the most important priorities
- Finding qualified prospects
- Determining potential needs
- Offering solutions
- Closing Sales
Some of the tasks below are not even included in the job description:
- Providing services
- Delivering goods
- Handling complaints
- Writing reports
But when interviewed, what are salespeople telling are the most important tasks in order?
- Prospecting / generating sales / orders / marketing — 41%
- Build relationships, meet, contact customers –36%
- Provide customer service — 20%
- Time planning — 10%
Long week hours, short selling hours
Outside sales reps on average work long weeks of 49 hours and Consultants up to 54.6 hours but how is teh time used?
- 23% (ONLY) in actual selling
- 22% in General and Admin
- 11% in Travel
- 11% in Client Admin
- 10% in Service
- 7% in Breaks
- 6% in Planning
- 5% in internal meetings
- 5% in misc Some
However, some salespeople manage to spend over 40% of their time selling by hiring a full-time assistant to handle their administrative and order processing activities.
Sales engagement Frequency
Typically, sales rep engage in sales activites on 35 different occasions per week. These are direct contacts with customers, through email, phone calls and meetings with current customers and prospects.
Calls, Emails and Voicemail
Sales calls to current customers are longer than those with prospects. Specifically, sales calls with customers take 11 minutes each, while those with prospects are only 7 minutes long.
The prospect calls may be shorter because some of them are just voicemail messages.
Web Conferences and meetings
When sales reps engage in face-to-face meetings, they spend an average of 50 minutes per meeting with current customers. Meeting with prospects meetings are shorter, at 39 minutes.
Thus, telefone conversations tend to be short, but once meetings occur, there is a great opportunity in-depth discussions. No surprise there.
Customer Service time
- Once the product is sold, the sales rep is often responsible for delivering customer service. He or she does this through client meetings, account maintenance requests and related activities.
Total customer service time is on average 4.9 hours / week.
This area includes:
- customer inquiries
- credit issues
- contract issues
- handling complaints
- account maintenance
- service meetings
- and even occasional deliveries.
- Service and support calls 2.3 hours (average of 13 per call)
