Freeing up the sales force for selling

Most sales reps spend less than half of their time actually selling. Here’s

how companies can reshape sales operations to allow them to focus on

their real job.

Here’s a situation that may sound familiar. “Inside” sales

reps at a global manufacturer spent 75 percent of their time

away from the phones—pushing through stalled deals,

scurrying for data to answer questions from customers, and

cobbling together one-off proposals for even the simplest

requests. Highly paid field reps spent 45 percent of their time on

internal sales support and tracking the progress of deals.

Developing a standard proposal required meetings with as

many as seven people, and field reps had to spend up to three

weeks of constant effort to get a special price approved. This

model of inefficiency culminated when the company fumbled a new-product launch because it

failed to meet the deadline for proposals to secure initial orders.

That was the wake-up call the company needed. For two years, it worked to streamline 

its global sales operation by creating “sales factories” comprising specialized sales support staff with clear responsibilities and deal coordinators to shepherd sales through the system on behalf of reps.

Internal processes were standardized and simplified, and a comprehensive performance-

management system was implemented. While not all companies can successfully achieve these 

difficult and time-consuming transformations, the rewards are worthwhile for those that rise to 

the challenge. When the program was rolled out country by country, in some cases the impact was 

felt in just four months: reps gained an average of 15 percent more time for selling, conversions of proposals to sales rose by 5 percent, and the cycle time for internal sales processes shrank by 20 percent.

We find these results to be typical at large companies, yet few tackle the problem: sales operations remain a great unmanaged cost center in many organizations and a woefully underleveraged 

source of growth and differentiation.

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