As a sales rep, taking a step back to analyse how well your time is spent and where you should focus your efforts takes a lot of work.

As a manager, identifying where you can have an impact and how to prioritize your support can be challenging to process.

There is an formidable way to understand the scope and time spent:

Running a task breakdown.

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What is a task breakdown?

It's about listing all the tasks performed by a given sales function (or else) with the highest level of detail and granularity.

It is usually initiated by a manager and sent to the sales team.

Here is a template for an account management role:

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It’s about understanding where time is spent.

Let’s say that you have a team composed of 5 sales members.

Each member will individually and separately insert their time on each task.

The manager will aggregate the data and have something like this:

• Number of hours per week/month spent per individual per task
• Total number of hours spent on critical chapters
• Discrepancies between team members with team average, highest and lowest time spent on a given tasks
• Most time-consuming tasks
• Most underdeveloped tasks

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Moving forward: analyse and identify opportunities.

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Observation #1: in this example, the five account managers spend 70% of their time on activities that have a direct impact on the business (great!):

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Observation #2: looking at member-level, you can identify discrepancies:

Which, by the way, is 100% fine and should be encouraged!

But it would be interesting to:

• Understand how member #2 manages to spend less time on “client-facing activities”? What about his/her performance compared to the team? Therefore, can this member share valuable practices to others?
• Some members (#3 & #5) don’t spend time on their development. As a manager how can you help them? Do you allocate enough coaching time? Do they have too much on their plate? Etc.
• Member #4 doesn’t spend time on Quarterly business reviews: is this person more efficient? Does this person has found a way to shorten the meetings, improve the efficiency, generate decks quicker? Going deeper, you can notice differences in quarterly business reviews preparation:

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Observation #3: 6 tasks account for 71 hours of the total time spent by the team:

The question to ask yourself here is:

How can you reduce your time spent on low-value tasks? On Repetitive tasks?

I’m pretty sure that these tasks can have some automation, alerting system or templates at their disposal:

• Create deck,
• Review your top accounts,
• Reply to frequently asked questions and emails,
• Send weekly emails,
• Send monthly reports,
• Gather data from the competition.

Reducing the time spent on these tasks would allow the Sales rep to spend more time on higher-value tasks. At least you now have an idea about the size of the opportunity.

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Observation #4: running a task breakdown can help you understand your current team’s focus.

In our example, the account managers spend most of their time and efforts on Hardware & Travel clients.

Is it what is expected? Do you have numbers to back that up?

Does the team have insights, practices to share on why they’ve decided to focus on a given industry?

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Running a task breakdown offers endless possibilities and can be a formidable coaching tool.

So make sure to have a collaborative and genuine approach with your team (rather than a micro-management one).

Otherwise this exercise would arguably back fire and be counter-productive.

Feeling like trying it?

You don’t have to start from scratch!

Here is the template and fake results.

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