How can we really increase Revenue-Generating Activity?

It’s no secret that most of a salespersons time is not spent on revenue-generating activity.

According to HubSpot’s 2019 Sales Activity Report, "only 21% of a salespersons time is spent on revenue-generating activity". 

In January, Salesforce released their 2019 Sales Statistics Report that shows "sales professionals only spend 34% of their time selling". 

Another interesting fact, in a recent study by Markets and Markets Research, sales enablement tools has become a 1.1B industry this year, and is expected to grow to 2.6B by 2024.

Regardless of the gap in the above two studies, I think, we can all agree that most of a salespersons time is spent on prospecting and researching leads, making calls, writing emails, entering data, networking, and attending internal meetings, and not on sales appointments or meetings with qualified prospects.

As salespeople, we have countless sales enablement tools at our disposal to automate our workflow and make our jobs easier. We have sales leaders to help us overcome our challenges and obstacles. We have help from marketing teams and lead generation campaigns to get us qualified leads. SDR programs are becoming more and more popular across many sales organizations to support our sales activity and efforts. 

So, with all this support, why as salespeople, has there been no meaningful increase in the time we spend on revenue generating activity versus everything else?

Let me try and take a crack at it. 

SaaS has changed.

It has changed from the way it is bought, sold, and used. Early on, SaaS had a single application to solve one problem. Then SaaS evolved to multi-use bringing in more features to solve multiple business problems. Now SaaS is in an automation and consolidation stage where it is all about customer value. 

The market has become overwhelmingly saturated for buyers and there is much more competition than ever before. Most SaaS companies now have a ton of competitors with double-digit competition opposed to one or two competitors a decade ago. 

I think change, competition, and market saturation has made selling SaaS increasingly more complex.

As salespeople, we need to develop a better understanding of our prospects and customers.

Only a small percentage of sales teams and sales executives are using market research, internal data, customer data, and prospect data to help better prospect and qualify leads through qualitative data. Even fewer are sharing this information with their product and marketing teams to make more informed collective business decisions.

The way for salespeople to understand their prospects and customers better is to collect market research, customer data, and prospect data such as tangible and actionable feedback from all sales call dispositions. Use this data to create and develop a company sales qualification document for prospecting and qualifying leads. 

The Sales Qualification Document is a living internal document that should be centrally stored and shared across sales, marketing, and product teams. It is a description of customers and prospects beyond generalities. It helps to identify prospect types, characteristics, and traits backed by research and representations from customers and prospects. 

I would argue that a sales qualification document may be the best “sales tool” for salespeople to prospect more effectively and spend more time qualifying and closing deals.