Your sales team is often the face of your organization, the first point of contact for someone doing business with your brand. In fact, their impact is so important that 53% of customer loyalty is driven by the sales experience customers have. An empowered sales team can do wonders for converting prospects into long-term customers, driving revenue and creating brand awareness.

While it’s no doubt your sales team is an important cog in the organization wheel, 89% of salespeople report feeling burned out. What’s causing the drain on one of your most valuable organizational resources? Burnout can be caused by impossible quotas, endlessly long days, lack of support from leadership and basic busy work. Sales team members who are left with less than three hours on sales-related activities each week report an overall average job satisfaction level of just 3.45 (out of 5). Not only do sales reps report lower job satisfaction when faced with busy work, but they will also spend less time selling. In fact, in 2022, sales team members were spending only 28% of their week on sales activities.

How can you alleviate the burden placed on your sales team? Start by eliminating busy work! Not sure where their time and efforts are being drained? Here are seven busy-work tasks that you can focus on to help alleviate burnout in your sales team.

1. Time tracking

If you’re asking your team members to track their time manually after every call, this is a busy work task that can easily be eliminated through the use of a time-tracking system like Swipeclock. With a click of a button, employees can start and stop time tracking on an entire project or individual tasks. The system records time spent on each task and creates a daily, weekly or monthly report based on the input. Employees are then freed up to work on other, more important tasks.

2. Data input

Salespeople can spend an average of 5.9 hours per week entering data into anything from Google Sheets to Word documents to Excel spreadsheets. While each of these tools has its place, imagine the time your team could save if it had access to a more powerful CRM (customer relationship management) or customer onboarding tool. The ability to input data into one cohesive system to which all stakeholders have access cuts down on time, saves on repetitive tasks and allows you to build out powerful reports later.

3. Managing emails

An astonishing 28% of employees’ work time is spent on email management each week. Free up time for your sales team by providing them with an email system — such as Constant Contact or Mailchimp — that allows you to create personalized emails, design entire email campaigns, use predesigned templates and track important KPIs (key performance indicators) like open rates, bounce rates and more. 

Engage your marketing team to create on-brand emails that deliver effective messaging for prospects along different levels of your sales funnel. Create and segment email lists to further empower your sales department.

4. Qualifying leads

Qualifying leads is never busy work, but managing how you qualify leads might be more efficiently handled through the right process. If your team is currently faced with manual systems, it becomes difficult to know where a lead is within the funnel. Tracking if the prospect was contacted, how often they were contacted and if they fit the SQL (sales qualified lead) standards can become difficult without an automated system. 

Powerful tools such as Salesforce or HubSpot allow you to save time on data entry of each lead while also digitally identifying when a lead is hot or needs a little more nurturing. Empower your team with a tool that allows them to concentrate on the prospect rather than the behind-the-scenes busy work.

5. Sales reports

Fifty-three percent of employees say they could save up to two hours a day by automating processes. When you consider your processes, what tasks could be digitized? If your employees are creating their sales and other analytical reports by hand, consider upgrading to an automated system. 

CRM tools can quickly pull reports on everything from how long outbound calls are taking to the number of closed deals, the average length of the sales cycle and so much more. The reporting dashboard of the tool you choose will allow the team member pulling the report to personalize the data they want included on the report, giving you powerful insights into performance KPIs.

6. Locating support materials

Employees can spend up to an estimated 1.8 hours a day searching for information. Within the sales team, this might be time spent looking for support materials for sales calls or presentations. If each team member’s information is siloed on their work computer, it makes it much more difficult to locate files when you need them. 

Consider a platform that stores all of your files in one place. Options for storage may include Dropbox or Google Drive. However you choose to store materials, make sure the option you choose is secure and can easily be managed and accessed by stakeholders.

7. Preparing quotes

Preparing quotes for prospects is a necessary and important part of the job for sales. However, with an outdated or manual system, quotes often drag out a potential implementation and can miss the mark without the latest forecasting models, pricing and resources. If you have digitized your products and pricing and are using a CRM tool, you can quickly and easily prepare an accurate quote for a prospective client. A unified tool that all sales team members have access to ensures the process of quoting clients is cohesive and provides additional transparency to the entire team, saving both time and money.

If you’re noticing signs of burnout in your sales team, review your approach to see if there are busy-work tasks you can eliminate, automate, digitize or improve. Any support you can provide to your team will improve its success. In fact, organizations that implement sales enablement strategies like these achieve a 49% win rate on forecasted deals, compared to 42.5% for those without. Now that’s a success rate anyone can get behind.

Peter Ord is the founder of GUIDEcx, a client implementation and onboarding project platform based in Lehi.

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