You want to find out the actual sales time of your sales people to identify the realistic sales potential of your current sales staff.

Here you'll get a simple process & tool that will make you get insight into current sales time of your sales staff in ONE week.

How to get insight into sales time of your sales people in ONE week?

Select a few of your sales people for the whole group and let them for a week fill in a form similar to the one below:

Time	Travel Time	Waiting Time	Sales Visit	Break	Planning	Telephone	Meeting	Other
08:00
09:00
10:00
11:00

You'll use a whole working day and you might split time in half hour sequences.

Create a Summary Chart

After finishing this activity, you'll create a summary chart. See illustration below

Activity	% of Effective Sales Days	% of Working Days
Travel Time	20%	15%
Waiting Time	2%	1%
Sales Visits	30%	25%
Planning	22%	20%
Telephone	5%	2%
Meetings	20%	14%
Other (Specify)	1%	1%

The results are quite astonishing. Sales People usually only spend a fraction of their total time selling. You need to know these details, however, to set new standards for performance.

Who are your Sales People visiting?

You also need to know who your sales people are visiting now.

Select a few of your sales people and let them fill in which customers they have been visiting over the last couple of weeks.
The sample chart below shows what the weekly itinary could look like.

Company Visited	Customer Prospect	Market Segment	Sales $/1000/yr	Person Visited	With Manager?	Purpose	Subject Discussed

ABC Welding	C	Manufacturing	100	Purchasing	No	Price Increase	Price
Catapilar	C	Manufaturing	150	Foreman	No	New Business	New Plant
Siemens	P	Manufacturing	170	Welder	No	New Business	Gas Supply