It may be the most dreaded statistic in sales management: The average rep spends only about 1/3 of their time selling. In other words, we employ salespeople at $100,000 a year and they spend less than 3 hours a day doing what we pay them to do.

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Picnics. Amusement parks. Vacations. It’s hard to focus on quotas and KPIs when the kids are off from school and the sunshine beckons. But as this salesforce blog points out, there are things that you can do to keep the summer season from turning into a summer slump.                                                          

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Your sales team is spreading out. In the past five years, the number of virtual workers in the U.S. has increased 800 percent. At least 60% of employees work in different locations from their supervisors. That means you’re going to be a lot more dependent on your CRM data to manage your team and drive results.

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From the day you started your first sales job, you’ve been getting advice on what it takes to be a success. And everybody means well. But not all well-meaning advice is good advice. Some may actually be backfiring. Here are some words of wisdom that the successful salespeople have learned to ignore.

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You’re about to lose your sales team. Or at least their presence. The mobile workforce is on the rise and a significant number of companies expect that more than 75 percent of their staffs will be working remotely by 2020. And your sales team is ripe for this disruption.

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Every couple of years or so HubSpot updates its list of time management hacks for sales reps. Some of this advice is so time-tested, it could have worked back in the days of tickler files and Filofaxes, especially #4 on the list, Swallow the frog.

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Every year millions of data entry errors find their way into Salesforce.com data. You wouldn’t be the first executive in history to look for a contact name and see a street. Or to discover that reps are duplicating (or triplicating) efforts as they contact Rich, Richie and Richard Smith.

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On most sales teams, innovation is a loaded word. It drives an expectation that the time lost to learn a new technology will take away from time used to sell. And that the innovation won’t pay off in results. Yet there’s one type of innovation that sales teams embrace. And the ROI is palpable.

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All sales processes are pretty much the same. You contact the lead, present, address objections and close. In larger organizations, there may be several presentations, each with their own set of objections. But within that workflow, top performing salespeople use a few simple techniques to be more effective.

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We hear all the time that machines are getting smarter. Where once they were only capable of single repetitive tasks, artificial intelligence (or AI) lets them acquire knowledge and experience, “learn” and adapt. All this has created a lot of gloomy predictions. But the reality for B2B sales reps, is a bit more nuanced. The difference between intelligence and sapience.

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