What is holding back sales team productivity
It’s 9:40 pm. The car is already in the garage, dinner has gone half cold and the laptop is open on the kitchen table. The day began at 7:30 am, with the first visit 80 kilometres from home, and included four clients, two meetings that dragged on and a lunch eaten behind the wheel. Now the second shift begins: writing up the orders jotted in a notebook, filling in the weekly report in Excel, sending the warehouse confirmation that the Leiria client really does want delivery on Friday, and replying to three emails that have been waiting since morning.
Nobody explicitly asked them to work until eleven at night. But nobody gave them another way of doing things either.
This article is about that second shift: the work that happens after work, and that says a lot about how a company organises its sales force.
The work that starts when the day ends
When people talk about sales team productivity, the conversation usually lands in the same places: number of visits, conversion rate, average order value. These are important indicators. But it is rarely asked how much of a sales rep’s time is actually spent selling.
A field sales rep is hired to be with clients, understand needs, present solutions and close deals. In practice, a considerable part of their day (and night) is taken up by tasks that require none of their sales skills:
- copying orders from paper into Excel, and from Excel into an email;
- phoning the warehouse to ask whether an item is in stock;
- filling in visit reports that repeat information that already exists elsewhere;
- looking for the latest version of the price list;
- checking with accounting whether a client has overdue payments before accepting another order.
None of these tasks is useless. The problem is that they are being done by the wrong person, at the wrong time and in the slowest possible way.
The client presentation: the catalogue that no longer matches reality
The most important moment in a sales rep’s day is the conversation with the client. That is where trust is built, where you understand what the client needs and where the sale is closed.
And yet that moment is often supported by a two-year-old PDF catalogue, a printed price list with hand-written corrections and a mobile phone used to call the warehouse in the middle of the meeting. The client asks whether delivery is available next week and the answer is “I’ll check and let you know tomorrow.”
The client doesn’t need a spectacular presentation. They need answers. They need to see the product, understand the alternatives, know the price that applies to them and have a clear idea of when they will receive the order. When the sales rep has that information to hand, in the moment, the conversation changes: it stops being order-taking and becomes advice.
A compelling presentation, in this context, isn’t the one with the most animations. It is the one that shows current information, tailored to that client, without the sales rep having to interrupt the conversation to go and look for data.
The order that travels three times
Consider the typical journey of an order in a company that still works with paper and spreadsheets.
The client places the order and the sales rep notes it down in a notebook or on a paper form. In the evening, they type it into an Excel file. The next day, they email that Excel to the warehouse and, sometimes, to accounting. The warehouse enters the data again into its own system to prepare the shipment. Accounting enters it again to invoice.
The same information has been typed three or four times, by different people, in different systems. Each handover is an opportunity for an error: a swapped reference, a misread quantity, a discount lost along the way. And every error ends up back with the sales rep, who has to explain to the client why they received 24 boxes instead of 42.
Then there is time. Between the moment the client says “yes” and the moment the warehouse knows it has to prepare the order, 24 hours or more can pass. At a time when customers are used to instant confirmations, that delay has a cost, even if nobody measures it.
What happens next, in the warehouse and in invoicing, is the subject of the next articles in this series. Here it is enough to hold on to one idea: the order should be recorded once, at the moment it is placed, and reach everyone who needs it automatically.
The commission you only find out about at month end
There is an aspect of a sales rep’s life that rarely comes up in conversations about processes, but that weighs heavily on motivation: knowing how much you are earning.
In many companies, commission is only known when the payslip arrives, or after an exchange of emails with accounting. During the month, the sales rep keeps working it out in their head, in a notebook or in a personal spreadsheet. At the end, the numbers don’t always match, and every difference leads to an uncomfortable conversation.
When a sales rep can see, in real time, the confirmed sales and the expected commission that results from them, three things happen. First, there are no more surprises and suspicion at month end. Second, the sales rep can manage their own effort: they know how far they are from the target and where it’s worth investing time. Third, motivation stops depending on a vague promise and has a concrete number in front of it.
This isn’t about turning the sales team into a permanent competition. It’s about giving each person the information they need to manage their work independently.
The radar that walks the field
Sales reps are often the people in the company who know the most about the competition. They hear it directly from clients: “your competitor gave me a lower price”, “they deliver in 48 hours”, “they’re offering free training with the equipment”.
This information is worth a lot. And it is almost always lost. It stays in a coffee-break chat, in a comment during the Monday meeting or in a note nobody reads again. The same goes for lost sales: it is rarely recorded why the client chose another option.
Commercial intelligence doesn’t require big market studies. It only requires that what sales reps already hear every day is recorded simply, in the moment, and reaches those who can do something with it: sales management, marketing, the board. A sales rep who feels their reading of the field is heard also feels more a part of the company.
What does the second shift cost?
It’s worth doing the sums, even roughly. Take a hypothetical example, just to illustrate the order of magnitude.
If a sales rep spends an hour and a half a day on avoidable administrative tasks, that’s seven and a half hours a week. Over 46 working weeks, that’s around 345 hours a year: the equivalent of more than eight full-time working weeks. In a team of six sales reps, the number passes 2,000 hours.
The real figures vary a lot from company to company. But the exercise is useful because it makes visible something that normally appears in no report. And there are costs that don’t even enter this calculation: accumulated tiredness, time no longer spent with family, the desire to look for a company where the day ends when the day ends.
What a different day would look like
There is no single solution, and any change should start from the concrete reality of each team. But a few principles help in thinking about the problem:
- Record once, in the moment. The order, the visit report and the note about the competition should be recorded on the spot, when they happen, and never typed again.
- Information comes to the sales rep. Stock, prices, client terms and order status should be accessible on a phone or tablet, without phone calls.
- Reports write themselves. If the information has already been recorded, the weekly report should come out of it automatically, not from another hour in front of a spreadsheet.
- Commission is visible. Each sales rep should be able to follow their sales and the expected commission as sales are confirmed.
- The field has a voice. Signals about the competition and the reasons for lost sales should have a place of their own and reach those who decide.
None of this requires the team to work more. It requires them to stop doing what isn’t theirs to do.
A question for the next sales meeting
At your next meeting with your team, try a simple question: “what time did your day actually end yesterday?” The answer may say more about sales team productivity than any sales indicator.