Salespeople sell. That’s what you hired them to do and what you measure them on. So why are so many salespeople bogged down with non-selling tasks?
Mention the phrase “productivity killer” with a sales manager, and they’ll probably associate it with their sales reps looking at Facebook and Buzzfeed all day. They probably won’t associate it with prospecting, research, and proposal generation – but they should.
Instead of selling – the process of educating, engaging with, and converting prospects into buyers – today’s salespeople indeed find themselves spending an inordinate amount of time prospecting, researching, and most importantly, drafting customized quotes. This results in a huge opportunity cost, where every hour they spend doing administrative tasks is an hour they could have better spent on their next prospect.
In fact, according to Salesforce’s State of Sales research, the average rep spends just 28% of their time actually selling. QuotaPath’s internal data revealed that in 2024, only 9% of sales teams hit quota, and this serves to explain why.
Here are 5 things keeping your sales reps away from talking with customers and ways to reduce the time they spend on them.
1. Drafting proposals
A typical salesperson will easily spend 10-15 percent of their day generating quotes and proposals. This number gets even higher the more complex your products are, where some proposals can take hours to put together. Obviously, if a proposal has to be created from scratch for each opportunity or the information the rep needs to create the perfect proposal isn’t readily available, sales productivity takes a huge hit.
Now, one of your team members finds himself prospecting for several clients at once. Should he send the same proposal to each client and hope for the best? No. That’s called spamming, and it’s not acceptable in sales or anywhere else.
A far better idea is to use a software platform that will customize each proposal to fit the prospect’s exact needs. CPQ (configure, price, quote), for example, can make each proposal seem unique, and each one can be served up and sent off nearly instantaneously. This saves time and impresses the customer, solving two major issues in one fell swoop. Most importantly, customizable templates reduce the chances of proposal errors, making them the go-to choice for top sellers everywhere.
2. Sales call preparation
For most sales reps, a relatively small portion of their time every week can be spent planning before it starts to be counterproductive. Having well-put-together sales strategies and being prepared for sales calls is important, but it shouldn’t take that much time away from selling. You need to identify your sales team’s process for planning and organizing new sales to figure out where time is being spent and where time can be saved.
Here’s how to fix it:
- Use your CRM to centralize prospect info. If your CRM is well-organized, it should take just a few clicks to find recent activity, key contacts, previous deals, and notes. Reps shouldn’t be bouncing between platforms.
- Lean on sales enablement software. Sales enablement tools surface the right sales content automatically, based on the deal stage, vertical, or persona. That way, reps don’t waste time creating materials from scratch.
- Build repeatable call frameworks. Instead of starting from zero every time, give reps sales playbooks, objection-handling guides, and dynamic call templates. These speed up prep and keep everyone aligned with what works.
Pro tip: With DealHub CPQ, all sales collateral is organized and fully customizable, which is a great way to increase sales efficiency. This also shortens the sales cycle, enabling each rep to see – and close – more clients than ever before.
3. Staying up to date on the industry and your products/services
In order to sell effectively, reps need to have a complete understanding of the products and services they are selling, as well as what their competitors are up to and industry trends.
But sellers can’t answer ~40% of buyer questions about their own products, according to Allego. And in a separate 2025 enablement/statistics overview, 90% of reps pinpoint “product knowledge” as a key challenge (second only to sales objections). Unfortunately, acquiring true domain expertise means spending a good portion of their time reading and following industry news.
Instead of leaving reps to take time finding this information themselves, you should make the updates they need readily available. Providing your team with sales dashboards that include widgets that highlight marketing, product, and competitor information will keep them in the loop and minimize the time spent out of the field.
Ongoing education should also be baked into your sales training program. One onboarding session isn’t enough. Product updates, industry shifts, new competitor moves, all of that needs to be part of a consistent learning rhythm.
Here’s how to make it manageable:
- Deliver short, focused updates through your sales enablement platform. Think 5-minute videos or weekly digests—not hour-long webinars.
- Include product and market quizzes in your training cycles. It keeps reps accountable and helps identify knowledge gaps.
- Encourage peer-led sessions. If a rep learns something new about a competitor or trend, have them share it in your next team huddle.
4. Chasing down technical and management approval for quotes
If you sell complex products or services that involve negotiations and/or large discounts, the time it takes to get approval from sales managers and technical teams can become a real bottleneck in the sales process. Sales managers and team members need to easily work together, not slow each other down. Look into your approval process and see who or what is slowing things down and where you can add tools to streamline the process.
Rule-based approval workflows in CPQ make it quicker and easier for sales to gain approval for quotes and provide both sales and managing the needed insights to understand the status of opportunities.
Approval Workflows in CPQ
5. Collaborating with channel partners and third-party vendors
To gain the maximum benefit from your sales channels means your partners need to be able to function on their own, as an extension of your team. Yet in many organizations sales reps, pre-sales engineers and/or sales operations teams remain very active in generating sales quotes for partners, canceling out many of the benefits of using channels. Sales collaboration tools can improve the process of working with partners, dramatically reducing the time your team needs to spend helping them do what they should be able to do on their own. You should also open up your CPQ to allow channel partners the ability to generate quotes on their own. The easier you make it on your partners, the more they’ll sell and the more time your sales team will have for their own selling.
Productivity improves when sales teams spend more time selling
When reps get bogged down in excessive prep, outdated training, or disjointed tools, productivity tanks (and revenue follows).
The fix isn’t necessarily “working harder.” The fix is building smarter systems.
That’s where DealHub CPQ comes in. DealHub streamlines and centralizes everything from quote generation, sales playbooks, and content delivery to contracting and buyer engagement insights. Instead of switching between apps or scrambling to prep, reps always have what they need right when they need it.
With the right tech in place, your team can focus on what really moves the needle: building relationships, having better conversations, and closing more deals.
