The 70% Problem: Where Your Sales Team’s Time Is Really Going
There is a number sitting inside every commercial vehicle sales operation that most leaders have never properly confronted.
70%
That is how much of the average sales working week is consumed by activity that has nothing to do with selling. Not prospecting. Not conversations with customers. Not closing deals. Administration. CRM updates. Data entry. Follow-up emails that should have gone out three days ago but didn’t, because something more urgent got in the way.
Salesforce research across more than 5,500 sales professionals put the actual selling time figure at 29%. The rest , 71%, goes elsewhere.
Your executives are being paid to sell yet they are spending less than a third of their time doing it.
This is not a motivation problem.
When performance falls short, most organisations reach for the same toolkit. More pressure on targets. A restructured incentive scheme. A training programme that costs a significant amount and delivers a fraction of what it promised.
None of it touches the 70% problem. Because the 70% problem has nothing to do with attitude, skill or effort. It is structural. It exists because of the way commercial vehicle sales operations are built, and it will still be there after the training is done, the incentives are refreshed and the next round of targets has been set.
You cannot train your way out of a time problem.
The numbers get worse the closer you look.
43% of sales professionals say that administration alone, not travel, not preparation, just admin, takes between 10 and 20 hours of their working week. That is before a single customer conversation has happened.
Then there is follow-up. Research shows that 48% of reps never contact a prospect again after the first interaction. Not because they don’t know it matters but because the system doesn’t make it easy and everything else fills the gap. The opportunity quietly disappears. Nobody tracks it. Nobody notices it’s gone.
In commercial vehicle sales, where a single relationship can be worth decades of repeat business, that is not a small inefficiency. It is a commercial liability.
This sector carries more weight than most.
Commercial vehicle sales is built on relationships that take years to develop. The fleet customer who places an order today has been nurtured through multiple touchpoints, multiple renewal cycles and a relationship that probably predates the current exec’s time in the territory. That relationship has real, long-term financial value.
And yet the executive responsible for it, is spending most of their week doing things that have no relationship to it whatsoever. Chasing build numbers. Updating records that were already out of date. Writing the same confirmation email they have written two hundred times before.
The cost is not just the hours. It is what those hours could have produced.
More process is not the answer.
The typical response to operational inefficiency is to build structure around it. Better CRM training. Email templates. A new weekly review process to make sure the admin actually gets done.
More process on top of a process problem makes the problem heavier, not lighter.
The only fix that works is removal. Every task an executive performs that does not require their expertise, their judgement or their relationship with the customer, should be automated completely, not partially. Not reduced. Gone.
When that happens, the 70% problem does not gradually improve. It stops existing. And the time it consumed becomes selling time, which is what your business actually needs it to be.
McKinsey research suggests that automating non-customer-facing sales activity can recover around 20% of a sales team’s total capacity. In commercial vehicle terms, where deal values are high and customer relationships are long, redirecting that capacity toward prospecting, conversion and relationship management produces measurable revenue impact within the first quarter of deployment.
The 70% problem is not an industry inevitability. It is a design failure.
And design failures can be fixed.
If the numbers in this piece look familiar, it might be time to have a conversation. Get in touch with NCLA Consult to find out how The DRIVE Performance Model™ addresses both sides of the problem.