15 Years of "Sales is spending 70% time doing non-selling activities!"
Okay hear me out on this one. I have spent 14 years in RevOps and every year it is the same crazy story: the sales productivity story has basically refused to change.
🔵 2018 — #Forbes study states sales reps spend 𝟔𝟓% of their time in non-selling activities. Forrester
🔵 2020 — #Forrester strikes back! 𝟕𝟕% of sales rep time goes in non-selling tasks.
🔵 2024 — #Salesforce State of Sales study states reps are spending 𝟕𝟎% of their time in non-selling activities.
🔵 2026 — #Salesforce’s State of Sales says reps still spend 𝟔𝟎% of their time on non-selling tasks
So after CRMs, sales engagement tools, CPQ, RevOps, dashboards, and now AI, the seller still seems to spend most of the day doing everything except selling.
What exactly is going on!
My totally scientific guess?
🟠 They’re updating fields so the fields can feel included.
🟠 They’re chasing approvals for deals that were already “almost there” last Thursday.
🟠 They’re looking for the latest deck, the latest pricing, the latest forecast, and the latest person who can approve the latest thing.
And somewhere in between, they’re supposed to sell.
The funniest part is that every sales tech wave promised the same thing: more time to sell 🫠
Instead, we seem to have created a very efficient machine for manufacturing non-selling work.
At this point, #selling is the side quest.
The real job is operating the stack🥲
Cannot wait for 2027 Forrester / Salesforce State of #Sales report to see how much time did sales reps earn back post Claude euphoria and the Agentic wave of #SalesTech 🫣