What are High Payoff Sales Activities?
High payoff, revenue-generating activities are the sales tasks with the highest revenue potential, likelihood of success, and expected return on investment, such as:
- Meeting with prospects
- Networking
- Developing centers of influence
- Problem-solving
- Cross- and Upselling
- Closing
They move the needle on your sales numbers.
Non-revenue-generating activities, on the other hand, may be necessary for the sales process but don’t directly contribute to closing deals, such as:
- Generating reports for management
- Administrative work
- Training other salespeople
- Locating and verifying prospect contact information
According to Daly and Kopp, a salesperson’s day should be 80-90% revenue-generating and 10-20% non-revenue-generating. However, for most sellers, it is the reverse. Think of how much more revenue you could generate if sellers were primarily focused on HPAs!
4 Strategies for Managers to Keep Sellers on Track
1: Track Time for 2 Weeks
One way to ensure that your sellers are spending their time doing revenue-generating sales activities is to have them track their time for two weeks in 15-minute increments. Have your sellers write down everything (yes, everything) they do during the workday. Have them categorize each activity as either revenue-generating (R) or non-revenue-generating (N). Then, calculate the percentage of time spent on “N” vs “R.” People are often shocked at how little time is spent on “R.” But if you don’t know it, you can’t fix it!
For more information about the R and N exercise, check out the article, How to Increase Revenue Generating Activities.
2: Stop Assigning Non-Revenue-Generating Activities to Sellers
A blind spot for many sales managers is assigning activities to sellers that steal precious time from revenue generation. Before putting more responsibilities on a seller’s plate, managers can ask themselves these three questions:
- Is this task directly related to generating revenue?
- Does this activity need to be done by the seller specifically?
- Could someone else on the team handle it just as well as a seller?
3: Have Sellers Focus on the HIGHEST Pay-off Activities
“If your guys are so good at getting the deal to the finish line, but they’re spending 80% of their time prospecting, let somebody else do that and let’s go to the finish line. Right?” – Jack Daly, CEO and Professional Sales Coach, Jack Daly Sales
One of the most strategic ways to help your best closers close more is to outsourcing part of the sales process to a partner who is highly skilled in that area of sales. By doing this your sellers can focus their time on aspects of sales where they excel, doing what only they can do. One example is using a service like Kopp Consulting’s Door Openers® to set executive-level prospect meetings for you including list building, creating the door opening sales messaging, and landing the appointments, done by senior level business developers. That way, your closers spend more time talking with prospects about opportunities versus finding the opportunities! When you pair a great closer with a great opener, you can sit back and watch the magic happen!
Listen to what Jack says about how the impact of using a service like Door Opening® can help generate more revenue.
4: Welcome Pushback
Encourage sellers to communicate openly about the impact of non-revenue-generating activities on sales efforts and pipeline growth. Ask them if they could close more if they had someone else doing the door opening for them. Regularly review how they spend their time and the percentage of HPAs to non-HPAs.
When every seller on your team is focused on HPAs and revenue-generating activities, you will be in the best position to accelerate sales success.
