Members of staff working in the sales department only spend 11 percent of their working time on active selling and 9 percent on new acquisitions. According to their own feelings sales people think to spend 22 percent of their working time on active selling.
But even this figure appears to them to be too low. In their opinion a figure of 33 percent would be ideal. In reality most of their time is consumed by unproductive administrative tasks (31 percent). Additional such time-consuming factors are business trips (15 percent) and internal consultations (18 percent). Thus, it is not surprising that 55 percent of all executive managers give bad marks to their sales teams. The biggest weakness is said to be conversion: Only 40 percent of executive managers questioned believe that their team is able of turning sales talk into signed contracts. This is one of the findings revealed by the global 2006 sales study carried out by the Proudfoot Consulting in Frankfurt. In the course of this study 800 executives from all branches of industry were questioned worldwide. Furthermore, this study took into account the results of 580 projects on sales efficiency carried out over the last three years by Proudfoot Consulting. 