Do you know if your reps are being inundated with useless meetings? Do they have enough time to sell after you take out time for updating CRM, meeting on new internal initiatives, training and a slew of other time-sucking items? Did you know that updating CRM is 70% of what they do during the selling time?
I thought the same…and tried all kinds of things to get reps more time to sell!
At Microsoft, I would always wonder if everyone was spending the right time on the most important items. After many wasted cycles looking for an automated way to fix the issue, I finally created a “bi-weekly” email. This email was designed with ONE purpose in mind: to help the reps and managers spend time on the MOST IMPORTANT tasks since there was so much noise. Yes, it took a long time to create (several hours) and yes I had one of my sales ops people create it for me….and yes it did the job. But it was PAINFUL.
What I needed was a quick way of “reminding” my reps about their deals, giving them a SUPER easy way to update the notes and most importantly, giving them back 2-4 hours a day to SELL!!
Did you know that the average rep spends ONLY 33% of their time selling. WHAT????!!!! Yup, ⅓ of their time is spent on selling and the rest is spent on INTERNAL stuff, that we as sales leaders make them do. Of that 33%, 55% of this “selling” time is spent in CRM updating stuff (fields, fields, and more fields).
Now we need to do two things to resolve this HUGE time synch:
- We need to be better about internal meetings and ensure that they are not COSTING more than they can impact.
- We need to get out reps out of CRM!
Don’t believe me?
One of my peers is so passionate about this subject that he created a company to help people like me figure out how to get more out of meetings. Russ Mikowski, CEO and Founder of MeterX, has this to say about meetings and how they impact your rep’s selling time:
Everyone dreads the “meeting about the meeting” that starts late, finishes later, and seems to be attended by three times more people than necessary. Meeting culture bloat is a big problem – in fact, today’s employees attend an average of sixty-two meetings per month and meetings that don’t produce action items cost corporations over $37 billion dollars annually. Perhaps that’s why Elon Musk recently told his employees to walk out or hang up if a meeting they’re attending isn’t productive.
As a career sales leader, it’s clear to me that the front line in the war against wasted employee time lies in the department that most directly drives revenue. Each hour that a sales rep spends doing ANYTHING other than selling or preparing to sell is costing the company money (and costing him/her commission). This waste can manifest itself in many forms – suboptimal bookings numbers and the cost of unnecessary headcount being two of the most common symptoms of a sales team that spends too much time in internal meetings.
The good news however, is that there are simple steps today’s executives can take to quickly and markedly improve how their sellers’ time is being used. By creating visibility into and tracking trends on metrics like “meeting hours per employee per day” and “internal vs. external meeting split,” MeterX customers can easily turn the best practices of their most successful reps into the expectation for their entire organizations.
Now, if only there were a way to assure that the newfound time your account executives have is spent selling or preparing to sell and not on updating the CRM…Of course there is ;).
Please feel free to ping me or Russ with any questions you might have on how to make your sales team even more efficient!