Before you add targets or headcount, it is worth checking how much capacity you already have — just spent on something other than selling. There is usually more of it than anyone assumes.
Forty hours, half of them selling
A sales rep works forty hours a week. They talk to customers for roughly half of that. The rest splits across five activities that appear in no job description:
- Filling in the CRM. Notes, stages, contacts, tasks. Usually in the evening, or in bulk on Friday.
- Reconstructing agreements. Searching emails and notebooks for what was promised, and to whom.
- Reporting. Preparing for the pipeline review and explaining where each deal stands.
- Writing follow-ups. Summarising the call and the next steps — usually late.
That adds up to about eight hours a week. Two working days in which nobody speaks to a customer.
This is not a discipline problem. Every team has already tried reminders, training and simpler forms. The effect lasts a few weeks, because the problem is not willingness — it is that the work is done by a human after eight hours of talking.
The bill for a single call
Eight hours is the visible cost. The second, higher one comes from this work being chopped into fragments and squeezed between meetings. Here is one conversation costed to the minute:
| Activity | Time |
|---|---|
| Customer conversation | 45 min |
| A “quick” note in a notebook | 4 min |
| Back to the CRM in the evening | 11 min — because it all has to be recalled |
| Finding what was promised in March | 9 min |
| Follow-up written from scratch | 14 min |
Thirty-eight minutes of admin for forty-five minutes of selling. And that assumes nothing was lost — which it usually is. The conclusion gets recorded instead of the fact: “client interested” rather than “budget approved for Q3, the COO decides, a competitor dropped out over integration”.
Five reps make one full-time role
Eight hours times five people is forty hours a week. A full sales role you don't have to recruit, onboard or persuade to keep the CRM current. You have already hired them — they are simply busy retyping what was agreed.
Working this out for your own team takes a quarter of an hour and four numbers: how many reps you have, how many hours a week each spends on admin, what an hour of their time costs and what an average deal is worth. The result is worth having in the next conversation about hiring.
If you want that arithmetic spelled out in money, together with the costs that never show up in a spreadsheet — forgotten follow-ups, deals parked at a dead stage, knowledge that walks out with the person — we have a longer piece on exactly that: what manual CRM data entry really costs.
What you can do this week
No transformation and no steering committee. Three things, each of which fits into one afternoon:
- Measure one metric. The average time from the end of a meeting to the summary being sent. It is easy to obtain, nobody reports it, and it shows very clearly how much capacity admin is eating.
- Run one test at your next review. Take the three biggest deals and ask one thing about each: when did we last speak to the person who signs? Not the forecast — a date and a name.
- Agree what gets captured. Six fields on every deal: budget, decision-maker, problem, objections, deadline, next steps. Filled in with a quote or a date, not an assessment. An empty field is information too.
The whole thing, in twenty pages
The above is chapter one. The rest — why the pipeline lies, how to run MEDDIC without forms, where to invest the hours you reclaim and what building your own AI agent really costs against buying one — is in the ebook. With a worksheet for your own numbers and a 30-day rollout plan.
Key takeaway
Before you work out how many reps you are missing, work out how many you already have — and how much of their time goes into retyping what they have already said. Five people at eight hours a week is a full role you never have to recruit.