What Do Sales Managers Do with Their Time?

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Dave Kurlan is a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, sales thought leader and highly regarded sales development expert.
If you've been reading my Blog for a while you've probably learned  that sales managers should be spending about 85% of their time on Accountability, Coaching, Motivation, Growth and Recruiting.  We mined some of our never ending data to see what sales actually spend their time on. 

There should be a big take away for a lot of people here.  Most articles report on what sales managers spend their time on and when they find activities that are common, report those activities as the competencies that sales managers should focus on.  Just because they're doing it doesn't mean they should be doing it.  Salespeople play golf but it doesn't mean that golf leads to success in selling.

Here's what we learned and remember, this is NOT what it should be, it's what they do:

Nearly 30% of sales managers spend less than 10% on motivational activities and only 10% spend 25% or more of their time on motivation;

50% of sales managers are spending less than 5% of their time on recruiting activities and less than 1% spend more than 25% of their time on recruiting;

30% of sales managers spend less than 10% of their time on accountability and less than 5% spend more than 25% of their time on accountability;

25% of sales managers spend less than 25% of their time coaching salespeople and less than 15% spend more than 25% of their time coaching;

10% of sales managers spend more than 40% of their time selling.

Is it any wonder why more salespeople aren't over achieving?

© Copyright 2007 Objective Management Group, Inc.

Posted by Dave Kurlan on Fri, May 11, 2007 @ 10:51 PM