Why your reps spend 72% of their time not selling (and what to fix first)

Salesforce's State of Sales research found reps spend just 28% of their week actually selling. The other 72% goes to everything around the sale: finding the right people, checking the CRM, turning signals into a reason to talk, and writing the message. Most of that work can be done before a rep ever touches the account.

Where does a rep's time actually go?

When I was an AE, the selling was the smallest part of the job. Before any conversation happened, there was a list of things to get through:

• Finding the relevant people. Working out who in the company actually matters for the deal.
• Checking the CRM. Making sure there isn't already an account created, and that someone else isn't already working it.
• Making sense of the signals. Taking whatever signals you found, if you found any, and turning them into a coherent reason to have a conversation.
• Crafting the message. Or picking up the phone, which is what I did.

The phone only works if you can get the numbers for the people you need to talk to, and often you can't. So you reach out in other ways. You do things. I was doing a podcast just so I could meet people and talk to them.

Why doesn't signal data save the time on its own?

Having the signal data isn't enough. You need to put it into something.

A rep with a list of signals still has to work out what they mean together and turn them into a conversation worth having. That's slow, and it's where a lot of the 72% goes. This is why layering signals matters: the work of connecting them into a reason to reach out should happen before the account lands with the rep.

What happens when there's no shared system?

At one company I sold for, there was no institutional knowledge. There was a CRM, but everything still felt fragmented.

Somebody would be working a signal in the States, and somebody else would be working a signal in the UK. Nobody was talking to each other, and everybody was gatekeeping, because nobody wanted anyone else to get more recognition than them. It fell apart.

That kind of fragmentation eats time twice. Reps duplicate each other's research, and the knowledge that should make the next deal faster stays in one person's head.

If a founder can fix one thing this month, what should it be?

LinkedIn. If you can get your profile bringing in warm leads, it's the biggest shift you can make.

With founders I work with, one of the first things they notice is the number of followers they're getting. Then the warm leads start coming in, and they're able to concentrate on other things. They started jumping into more meetings, and they didn't mind, because the meetings were highly qualified. It wasn't someone kicking tyres.

The way to get there is to hand it to someone you can trust to write in your voice, with a system that takes very little of your time.

What shouldn't you automate?

Your voice. LinkedIn content that doesn't sound like you has the opposite effect of what you want, and you're better off not posting at all. That's why it needs someone you trust to write it, and never a tool churning out posts on your behalf.

Automating the research, the CRM checks and the signal work frees up your reps. Automating the parts where a buyer is judging whether you're a real person worth talking to does damage.

What changes when the system is in place?

With one client, the problem flipped. At the start they didn't want a scoring system for their leads. Then they told me they needed one, because the signals I'd built were bringing in too many leads to work through by hand.

They also felt very prepared. That client chose to write all their messaging themselves, and with the layered signals in front of them, they were able to build a prompt that gave them a cohesive message to reach out with.

That's the goal: reps who open an account and already know who to talk to, why now, and what to say. The GTM automation page shows what that research, scoring and prep layer looks like.