Your reps have a 40% job
Salesforce surveyed 4,050 sales professionals for its 2026 State of Sales report. Reps said they spend 40% of their week selling. The other 60% goes to prospecting, manual data entry, quoting, planning and training.
That split is the most expensive number in your sales org, and the clearest measure of sales productivity you have. You hired people to sell, you pay them to sell, and most of their week goes somewhere else. That’s as true for wholesalers and relationship managers at financial services firms as it is for SDRs.
Meanwhile buyers want more from every conversation. 69% of sales pros say measurable ROI matters more to customers than it did a year ago, and 57% say customers take longer to decide. Reps are being asked for deeper, more personal selling with less than half a week to do it in.
Halve the sales admin and rep selling time goes up 75%
Take a 40-hour week. At a 40/60 split, a rep sells for 16 hours and spends 24 on everything else.
Cut those 24 hours in half and the rep gets 12 hours back. Selling time goes from 16 hours to 28. That’s a 75% increase, and it comes from removing work nobody wanted to do in the first place.
| Selling | Non-selling | |
|---|---|---|
| Today | 16 hrs (40%) | 24 hrs (60%) |
| Admin halved | 28 hrs (70%) | 12 hrs (30%) |
No new hires, no new territory, no new comp plan. The same people sell 12 more hours every week.
Volume is the floor
EngageTech’s SDR benchmark looked at 469,230 outbound cold calls made by 61 SDRs over four months. It sorts reps into three tiers by weekly activity.
| Tier | Dials per week | Qualifying conversations (3+ min) | Meetings |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | 400 to 600 | 30 to 60 | 5+ |
| Average | 400 to 500 | 20 to 40 | 3 to 5 |
| Underperforming | Under 200 | Under 10 | 1 or fewer |
The biggest gap in that table sits between the bottom tier and everyone else. Underperformers make less than half the dials, and they book a third or less of the meetings.
EngageTech’s own description of those reps reads like an admin audit. They spend their time manually hunting for prospects and contact details, they’re calling switchboards because they have no usable data, and they move from task to task with no plan. Average reps get bogged down in data sourcing and CRM updates too, just less.
Getting a rep to 400 dials a week is mostly a time problem. Before you coach anyone’s talk track, give them the hours back.
If you run a distribution team at an asset manager or an advisor-facing sales team in wealth management, the job titles differ but the question is the same: how much of the week goes to CRM updates and data hunting instead of client-facing time?
Relevance is the ceiling
Look at the top two tiers again. Average reps make 400 to 500 dials a week and high performers make 400 to 600. Past a certain point, everyone is working about as hard.
What separates them is what happens once someone picks up. High performers turn more dials into real conversations and more conversations into meetings. EngageTech puts that down to preparation:
- They know their ICP down to the person, where average reps only know the type of company.
- They research each prospect and walk in with a specific reason to be on the phone.
- They adjust the value prop to the prospect’s situation instead of reciting it.
- They qualify properly and close with dates, then confirm the meeting so it actually happens.
Every one of those takes time before or after the call. So the hours you win back from admin have two jobs. Some go into more dials, and some go into the research that makes each dial worth more.
What a top SDR still does by hand
The EngageTech report includes a day in the life of one of its high-performing SDRs. He averages 100 to 150 dials a day. Read his routine as a list of manual steps and it looks like this:
- Reviews yesterday’s activity and pipeline every morning to plan his first calling block.
- Opens each account on LinkedIn, finds the right job titles, then looks up numbers in a data tool.
- Dials with the prospect’s LinkedIn profile open in another tab so he can tweak the pitch live.
- Sends the calendar invite while still on the call, then phones the prospect three days before the meeting to confirm.
- Keeps callbacks for tomorrow on a sticky note and catches up on CRM admin at the end of the day.
This is one of the top reps in the dataset, and steps 1, 2, 4 and 5 are still assembly work. Step 3 is the only part that needs him. If the research, the CRM updates and the confirmation calls came to him already done, he’d spend that time on more calls like step 3.
Where AI sales automation earns its place
Sales teams already believe in this. 54% use AI sales agents today and another 34% expect to within two years. High performers are 1.7x more likely than underperformers to use agents for prospecting. Wealth management and banking are the top two industries using sales agents, which makes financial services the place where AI for sales teams is moving fastest.
The same report shows why so many projects stall:
- Too many tools. Teams run eight tools on average, and 42% of reps say they’re overwhelmed by them. 51% of leaders with AI say tech silos delay or limit it.
- Bad data. Manual errors and duplicate records are the top data problems for teams using agents. EngageTech’s average reps say the same thing about their data provider.
- Security. 51% of sales pros say security concerns delayed their AI initiatives. In financial services, the security review decides whether a project ships at all, so secure AI for financial services has to be designed in from the start.
Another AI tool on top of the stack won’t fix any of that. The work is CRM automation and sales admin automation across the systems you already own (Salesforce, HubSpot, Gong, your data provider, your calendar) so the research, the CRM update and the follow-up draft appear on their own. A model like Claude drafts the work, and the rep approves anything that goes to a customer or changes a record.
Start with your own number
The 40% figure is an average across 22 countries. Yours could be better or a lot worse.
Pick three reps, wholesalers or relationship managers this week and have them log their time by hour: selling, prospecting, data entry, quoting, internal meetings. Then do the math from the top of this post. If time spent selling comes in under half the week, halving the rest is where your growth is.
So how much of your reps’ week is actually selling?
Sources
- Salesforce, State of Sales, 7th edition (survey of 4,050 sales professionals in 22 countries, fielded August to September 2025)
- EngageTech, The Outbound SDR Benchmark Report (469,230 outbound cold calls by 61 SDRs across 57 clients over four months; SDRs selling to IT buyers at mid-market and enterprise companies)
Both are vendor reports. The Salesforce figures are self-reported, and the EngageTech tiers compare different reps, so they show correlation rather than cause.