Spend More Time Selling
- Dan Greenberg
- Feb 6
- 4 min read
Sellers must spend more time selling. This is not really a skill or a behavior per se, it is more of a mindset or a discipline. Our modern work culture is full of distractions and secondary demands of our time, but we know what drives sales, and it is up to us, as sellers, to guard our time and make sure we are spending our time on the right activities.
A Salesforce study published in December of 2022, which studied 7,700 sellers from 38 countries published data that indicates that sellers, on average, spend only 28% of their time actually selling. This means that they spend 72% of their time doing other tasks.
It is unrealistic to expect that a seller would spend 100% of their time selling, as they do need to research prospects and clients, prepare presentations, and organize their sales activities. However, even when you pull those sales preparation activities out and add them to the sales side of the ledger, the report shows us that sellers are still spending over 44% of their time on administrative activities such as data input, and internal meetings.
Let’s keep in mind that this survey asks people to report on past activities, and studies have shown that humans are remarkably bad at doing this. However, the data is stark enough to give us a sense that there is something worth discussing here. But I would go a step further in assuming that not even the 28% of time reported by sellers as selling time is actual selling time. It is human nature to procrastinate that next cold call or cold email. Why? It will make someone uncomfortable. Or, the seller might get rejected. Or, it’s very monotonous work. Sellers don’t sell for many reasons; fear, boredom, desire to avoid rejection, desire to avoid failure, wanting to stay in their comfort zone, laziness. So, even the reported selling time is likely inflated.
It is incumbent upon sellers to develop a clear understanding of what their revenue generating activities are. Most likely the answer is something along the lines of; calls, emails, meetings, presentation building / meeting prep, research, and book organization. These activities, in aggregate, should take up at least 60% of the day, and in order to make this a reality, sellers must put time blocs on their calendar for these activities that are as immovable as client meetings. It is unreasonable to expect that sellers won’t have some downtime in their day, every worker does. It would also be unreasonable to expect that administrative tasks and side projects won’t come up. They will, and they aren’t necessarily bad. In addition, well-run internal meetings can be very effective, and trainings are a must.
But the just mentioned are not the activities that sellers end up flaking on, because they are the easy ones. They are the ones where you don’t have to exercise your mind and they are not mentally exhausting, they are the activities that don’t risk rejection and uncomfortability. So, when given a choice, as much as sellers complain about internal meetings, they often times secretly prefer them to the hard work. This is not a slight against sellers, it is just human nature. We work hard every day, it’s a grind. It is easy to let a little calling or emailing time slip through the cracks if you aren’t careful. But making sales requires the doing of selling activities, and the only way to ensure that they are done at a level that makes sense is to set time blocks and make them almost uninterruptible.
Everything above takes resilience. You will get rejected. You will send 100 well thought out emails one day, and get zero responses. I have touched on Daniel Pink’s ABCs of selling in past posts, The A is for Attunement and is focused on a sellers ability to understand the client. The C is for clarity and has to do with the sellers ability to communicate a message to the buyer. The one is most relevant to our conversation today is the B, for buoyancy. To Pink, buoyancy is the ability to stay afloat in a sea of rejection. I would take this a step further. It is not just the rejection that bogs down sellers, it is the consistent need to be “on”. Being “on” does not mean that you are somehow acting, or being someone who you are not. Being “on” simply means that your brain is engaged, and you are attentive, and perceptive. You are listening and thinking. You are not allowing yourself to switch to auto-pilot.
Human beings are inherently lazy. This is not a negative, it is an evolutionary necessity. We are lazy because it was incredibly important to our ancient, and not even so ancient ancestors, on limited food and resources, to be able to conserve energy, both physically and mentally, in order to be able to use that energy to escape or avoid any one of hundreds of potential life threatening circumstances, from lions, to enemy archers, to unexpected storms.
Avoiding auto-pilot, and being mentally engaged for long periods of time is extremely mentally exhausting. Remaining engaged in a sea of monotony, and amidst the constant drumbeat of rejection takes an incredible amount of resilience. But how do we achieve resilience? I can’t just say to myself, “Hey self, be resilient”, and then I will magically be resilient. Resilience is preparation. It is the discipline to set rules for yourself and then adhere to those rules no matter how distasteful the activities are at the moment. The rules should be attainable, and they should not drive you into the ground and overwork you, but they have to be likely to drive the outcomes you want to see, and you have to adhere to them. In a vacuum, or without routines and rules, resilience does not mean much because unless resilient thinking can be translated into effective activities, it will not change your outcomes.
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