Among the list of sales challenges that many reps and their managers mentally keep, the lack of face-to-face time with prospects is in the top five on most. The time demands of CRM, B2B buyers’ preference for email communication, and an inability to schedule meetings are key culprits that result in bagging the elusive sales call.
David Brock, sales coach and author of “Sales Manager Survival Guide,” is having none of it. If salespeople bring value to the table, prospects and current customers will make time for them, he says. Brock doesn’t buy into the statistic he’s seen that salespeople spend only 10 to 30 percent of their time face-to-face with customers.
While it’s true that B2B buyers leverage more channels than ever for product information and many have “salesperson avoidance,” buyers still spend as much as 20 percent of their time with salespeople. If your company is on a shortlist of finalists, it means your rep stands to get as much as 7 percent of that buyer’s time. That may not sound like a lot, but salespeople should have plenty of prospects to see. In fact, Brock argues, it should be your reps that are squeezed on time to spend with one prospect.
Brock argues that for many reps, lack of time available for selling (TAFS) is self-inflicted. “Being with customers is tough work. You have to prepare, you have to think, you have to engage. Too often, we find salespeople unconsciously reveling in the distraction from being with customers. In our efforts to dumb down our salespeople, administrative work becomes a refuge and a convenient excuse for salespeople.”
Through his consulting work, Brock says he has freed up more time for sales reps than many know what to do with. “It’s a more real issue than we would like to believe. It requires huge management attention, coaching the people on how they should be spending their time, giving them the skills — perhaps better prospecting skills — to be more effective with customers.”
According to the 2017-2018 State of Enterprise Work Report, the amount of time office workers have to spend doing their primary job duties was 44 percent. That increased from 39 percent in the 2016-2017 report.
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