Here's a statistic that should make every business owner wince: your sales team spends roughly a third of their working hours actually selling. The rest? Swallowed up by admin, data entry, chasing information and sitting in meetings that could have been emails.
If you're running a small or medium-sized business in the UK, particularly in sectors like accounting or property where relationships and responsiveness matter enormously, this isn't just an inconvenience. It's actively costing you money and opportunities.
Let's break down where all that time goes and, more importantly, what you can do about it.
The uncomfortable truth about sales productivity
Recent research paints a fairly grim picture. Inside sales representatives spend only 33% of their time actively selling, with the remaining hours consumed by tasks that don't directly generate revenue. Some studies suggest the figure is even worse, with sellers spending less than 30% of their day on actual selling activities.
Meanwhile, 69% of sales professionals report that selling is harder now than it used to be. The environment has become tougher, buyers are more informed and demanding, and yet we're asking salespeople to do more with less actual selling time.
Think about what that means in practical terms. If you employ three salespeople, you're effectively paying for one person to sell and two people to do admin. That's a brutal return on your salary investment.
Where does all the time actually go?
When you audit how sales teams spend their days, the same culprits appear repeatedly.
Data entry and CRM updates consume hours every week. Every call needs logging, every email needs recording, every meeting needs notes. The CRM that was supposed to help your team sell better has become a hungry beast demanding constant feeding.
Searching for information eats into productive time. Your salesperson knows they spoke to a prospect last month, but finding the details of that conversation means scrolling through emails, checking notes and possibly asking colleagues. For property agents trying to match buyers with properties, or accountants following up on advisory opportunities, this information hunt happens dozens of times daily.
Internal meetings multiply like rabbits. Sales meetings, pipeline reviews, team updates, cross-departmental coordination. Each one feels necessary in isolation, but collectively they fragment the day into unusable chunks.
Creating proposals and quotes takes longer than it should. Without proper templates or automation, every proposal becomes a fresh document built from scratch.
Chasing internal approvals adds delays. Need a discount approved? Waiting for someone to sign off on terms? These bottlenecks don't just slow deals, they pull salespeople away from finding new opportunities.
Why this matters more for SMEs
Larger companies can absorb inefficiency. They have dedicated sales operations teams, sophisticated tech stacks and enough headcount to throw bodies at problems.
Small and medium businesses don't have that luxury. Every person needs to pull their weight, and every hour matters. When your sales team of three or four people loses 60% of their capacity to non-selling activities, you feel it immediately in your pipeline and your revenue.
For accounting firms, the impact shows up in missed opportunities to expand client relationships. Your people know that certain clients would benefit from advisory services or tax planning conversations, but they're too busy updating spreadsheets to have those discussions.
For property businesses, it means slower response times to enquiries, less thorough follow-up with potential buyers, and deals slipping away to competitors who simply got there faster.
The real cost of administrative burden
Let's put some rough numbers on this. Say you have a salesperson earning £45,000 per year. If they're only selling for a third of their time, you're paying £30,000 annually for activities that don't directly generate revenue.
Multiply that across a small team, and you're looking at a significant hidden cost. More importantly, you're looking at lost opportunity cost. What could that person achieve if they had even 50% of their time freed up for actual selling?
The maths becomes even more compelling when you consider that sales productivity improvements tend to compound. More selling time means more conversations, which means more pipeline, which means more closed deals. The relationship isn't linear.
What high-performing teams do differently
Businesses that buck this trend share some common characteristics.
They ruthlessly protect selling time. This means fewer internal meetings, clearer boundaries around when salespeople should be available for calls versus doing admin, and a culture that values revenue-generating activity above busywork.
They automate repetitive tasks. Every piece of data entry that can be automated should be. Every report that can generate itself should. Every reminder that can trigger automatically should.
They centralise information. When everything a salesperson needs lives in one place, searchable and accessible, the time spent hunting for details drops dramatically.
They simplify their processes. Complex approval chains, elaborate proposal requirements and convoluted CRM workflows all add friction. Stripping these back to essentials gives time back to the team.
Where AI fits into the picture
Artificial intelligence has moved beyond the hype phase into genuine practical application for sales teams. The technology now exists to handle many of the tasks that consume your team's time.
AI can listen to sales calls and automatically generate summaries, action items and CRM updates. Instead of your salesperson spending fifteen minutes after every call typing up notes, the system does it for them.
AI can surface relevant information before meetings. Heading into a call with a prospect? The system can pull together everything you know about them, their company, previous conversations and relevant market context.
AI can draft follow-up emails, create proposal outlines and suggest next steps based on conversation patterns. The salesperson still reviews and personalises, but the heavy lifting is done.
For property businesses, this might mean automatically matching new listings with buyers based on stated preferences and past behaviour. For accounting firms, it could mean identifying which clients are most likely to need additional services based on their situation and timing.
The key is that these aren't futuristic possibilities. They're available now, at price points that make sense for SMEs, with implementation timescales measured in days rather than months.
Starting the shift
If you recognise your business in this article, the temptation might be to launch a major transformation programme. Resist that urge. Wholesale change is disruptive, expensive and often fails.
Instead, start by measuring. Ask your sales team to track their time for a week or two. Where does it actually go? The answers might surprise you, and they'll tell you where to focus first.
Then pick one high-impact area. Maybe it's automating call notes. Maybe it's simplifying your CRM requirements. Maybe it's cutting one recurring meeting. Make that change, measure the impact, then move to the next thing.
Build momentum through small wins rather than betting everything on a big transformation.
The competitive advantage waiting to be claimed
Here's the opportunity hidden in that depressing 60% statistic: most of your competitors are in exactly the same position. Their sales teams are drowning in admin too.
If you can shift even a portion of that time back to actual selling, you gain a meaningful edge. Your people have more conversations, build more relationships, respond faster and close more deals.
In sectors like accounting and property, where trust and responsiveness drive decisions, that edge translates directly into market share.
The sales teams that figure this out first will outperform those that don't. The technology exists, the methods are proven, and the only question is who moves quickly enough to capture the advantage.
Your sales team shouldn't be spending 60% of their time not selling. And with the right approach, they don't have to.
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