The Hidden Ingredients Eating Your Selling Time
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Finding the Hidden Ingredients Eating Your Selling Time
🕒 6 min read
By Frank Hurtte
Let's face it: summer is full of distractions. Our customers have vacations, kids' ball tournaments, golf leagues, cabins up north, lawns to mow, and who knows what else. Distractions are contagious. Distributor folks are people too, and we get caught up in the summer stuff, just like everyone else.
Sometime around Labor Day, we snap out of our summer-induced haze and put our noses back to the grindstone. That makes fall the perfect time for a sales tune-up. Think of it as an end-of-summer cocktail for a stronger year-end. If you've ever planned to build a new habit, this is the moment.
Just ask anyone who has kept a food journal
Whether they were tracking down a food allergy, counting macros, or making sure they got enough protein on a GLP-1, anyone who has kept a food journal will tell you the same thing: that first week is a shocker. The handful of chips at 3:00. The coffee shop special that is more dessert than coffee. The "healthy" granola bar with more sugar than a candy bar. What seemed innocent in the moment tells a different story once written down.
Selling time works the same way. Most salespeople believe they spend the bulk of their week selling. Most sales managers believe it too. Then we write it down.
For the next few minutes, let's ask three questions:
- How much time do our salespeople really spend selling?
- What's eating into that time?
- And how do we put the beauty back into the sales process?
How much time do distributor salespeople spend actually selling?
Based on conversations with hundreds of salespeople across dozens of distributors, the answer is simple: not much.
Start with the obvious. Vacation, holidays, and personal time for life's issues typically account for nearly 8 percent of the work year. Add a few sales meetings, training sessions, and off-site vendor meetings, and salespeople who are paid to sell are away from the job more than 10 percent of the time. Now assume the seller spends just one day per week on administrative work. We've dropped selling time by another 15 to 20 percent.
That brings the time available for real selling down to about 70 percent of the year. That's the functional equivalent of paying full wages for an 8:00 to 1:30 workday. But those are just the mechanics, you know, the calories everyone already knows about. The real question is how we get from 70 percent down to the actual number, which experts peg near 25 percent.
Salespeople, please keep reading…
This isn't about the sales department slacking. We'll brush up against planning, scheduling, and time management, but this article isn't about calendar management. It's about sales management.
What's eating salespeople's time?
Operational issues. Think back to the last time you made a joint call with a member of your sales team. How much of the call went to shipping errors, late deliveries, or a customer service issue that went sideways? Nothing sours a well-planned sales call like a little backpedaling in the first five minutes. It's hard to sell "ease of doing business" when you just cost your customer money on something easily avoided.
What's worse for many distributor managers is this: most lack the data to know whether their growth problem comes from a sloppy warehouse, a customer service team that drops the ball, or an ineffective sales team. Some wonder whether missed delivery dates and inaccurate shipments are just part of the distributor game.
This raises a fair question: shouldn't tracking administrative and logistics performance be standard procedure for every distributor? We think it should.
Pricing. Price negotiation is an integral part of selling, but a couple of points are worth exploring.
First, unless accurate pricing is loaded into your ERP system, just arriving at a valid price becomes a distraction. Every quote requires extra research, and a dozen questions flash through the salesperson's mind:
- Is this price right?
- What did we charge last time?
- Could customer service have priced it differently?
- Where do we sit against the competition?
Beyond the time spent researching, we create doubt and uncertainty. When the salesperson guesses wrong, it creates a bigger distraction, and more selling time goes to fixing it.
Second, when no pricing process exists, the salesperson is
stuck negotiating every single sale. There's an old saying among pricing folks: you never see a dog beg just once. Slip the dog a scrap from the table one time, and you've created a permanent beggar. When salespeople lower a price once, customers learn to ask every time. And every negotiation takes time away from, you guessed it, selling.
Without a real pricing process, customers bombard salespeople with "your price is too high," and it ruins the selling moment. That steady stream of negative energy causes many sellers to lose sight of the value their organization delivers. A sales conversation without value-creating solutions is about as exciting as reading the terms and conditions on a software update.
Management. Earlier we listed the everyday time consumers like vacation and sales meetings, but managers often hurt their own cause by not thinking about the sales team when scheduling. A meeting set for midday siphons off most of a day, even if it only lasts an hour, especially when end times aren't enforced.
The office. Starting the business day in the office puts the kibosh on selling efficiency. Nothing cuts into sales time like being readily available first thing in the morning. Here's why.
It's natural for customers to ask for their salesperson on routine issues, and today they don't even have to call. They text, they email, they send a message through whatever app is handy. Sales DNA steers sellers toward being helpful, so they get wrapped up in trivial tasks that belong with customer service. What's worse, customer service people often don't understand that part of their job is getting salespeople out of the building. I've seen inside salespeople and customer service reps complain when sellers refuse to handle incoming calls. That quickly becomes a management issue. You cannot afford to have salespeople handling order entry, stock checks, and routine expedites.
How do we ramp up real selling time?
It's a management-driven process. First, remove the distractions. Distributor selling today is a team sport, and many of these distractions don't start with outside sales. Metrics and measures need to be built into the entire customer experience.
Develop performance expectations for every part of the selling machine. Here's a fact: many salespeople confuse reactive customer care with selling. They feel good at the end of a long day spent handling administrative tasks and customer minutiae. Customer care matters, but it isn't the best use of their time. If a seller has to step away from real selling to handle it, something is broken in another department.
Finally… start the journal
Data doesn't lie. Hand-waving and opinions are nice, and no discussion of politics, religion, or your buddy's fantasy football trades should go without them. In our world, I'll take data.
So I ask my clients to do what every nutritionist and allergist asks: keep a journal. Every salesperson logs their day in 15-minute increments. What happened from 8:00 to 8:15? If they were on the phone, who were they talking to and about what? If they were at their desk, what task was at hand?
The rules are the same as a good food journal. Log it in real time, not from memory at the end of the day, because nobody remembers the handful of chips. At the end of the week, the seller tabulates how much time went to each of 12 activities.
The results are always eye-opening for both the seller and the sales manager. And just like cutting out the afternoon vending machine run, small changes add up fast. If selling time is hovering around 25 percent, finding a few minutes a day can move it to 30 or 40 percent. That's a big jump.
Is your sales team's time going to selling, or to cleaning up after everyone else? River Heights Consulting helps distributors pinpoint the distractions eating into selling time and build the processes, pricing discipline, and team expectations that give it back. Contact us to start your team's sales time audit. You can log the time under planning and process improvement.
TL;DR
A food journal shows people what they are really eating, and a 15-minute time log does the same for distributor sales teams. Operational errors, pricing research, constant negotiation, poorly timed meetings, and mornings in the office can shrink real selling time to around 25 percent. Removing those distractions is a management job, and a week of honest time tracking shows exactly where to start.
About the Author
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