Hours a week? Sounds crazy, right? But your sales team spends countless hours each week just reporting what they did. We added up some real-time numbers to see how much time you can realistically save with automated reporting.
The Salesperson’s Time
On a typical day, a salesperson spends about 20 minutes manually entering reports. That’s 100 minutes per week per employee. Multiply that by 52 weeks a year, and you’ve got 86 hours (more than 2 weeks) each employee wastes typing in data.
Related: A Day in the Life of a Successful Salesperson
From the salesperson’s perspective, that’s time they could have used to make sales. Add a group meeting each afternoon where everyone shares their daily activity and you’ve just doubled the amount of time your sales team isn’t selling.
The Manager’s Time
What happens to that data? The sales manager compiles it into one spreadsheet to analyze daily activity. Even if the manager spends only 20 minutes a day working with the data, they’ve lost the same 2 weeks a year as the employees.
Instead, managers could use this time to act on the actual data. They could be mentoring and motivating their sales team. Yet, they’re using part of each day to compile spreadsheets.
Yesterday’s or Today’s Data?
Automated data reporting saves actual time, but it also salvages days that started off wrong. Managers, when you’re working through manually reported data, you see yesterday’s information. If you notice a sales rep had an unproductive day, you can’t intervene to make that day better. It’s over. What if you saw their reports in real time?
Related: Time is Money: 4 Ways to Reduce Costs for Your Salespeople
When you get data as it happens, you can act on it immediately. Let’s say it’s 12:00 and I look at my team’s activity. If I see that one guy hasn’t done anything, I can call him and say, “Hey, let’s get back to work. Let’s see what you can get done in the last few hours today.” Maybe there’s something holding him back, or he just got demotivated by a tough prospect. As you see his data suffer, you have the chance to motivate him again.
With yesterday’s data, there’s nothing actionable you can do. But real-time data shows you when to step in so you can salvage the rest of the day.
The Solution
You save time and boost sales when you see activity in real time. Make the switch to a sales activity tracking program, like CallProof. It automatically tracks emails, calls, and meetings, usually without sales reps entering anything.
Automated sales reporting gives you and your team weeks back each year. In fact, if you have 10 sales people, making this change adds the equivalent of one extra sales person a day.
The bottom line: Manual sales reporting costs each manager and each sales person about 2 work weeks a year. And it reports old data.
It’s worth making the switch. Who wouldn’t want to save all that time?
