“A sales rep spends 70% of their time doing everything except selling.”
I’ve been working in sales for several years. In very different sectors: automotive, services, online training.
Since 2017, I’ve watched the methods and the tools change. Then I spent twelve months in an MBA in China. There, AI is disrupting every part of sales, all the way to robotics. I came back with one certainty: the sales job will never be the same again.
Two weeks ago, I joined an AI startup in France as an Account Executive. Same observation. Except this time, I’m living it from the inside.
Before, after
Before, my week looked like this: prospecting, building quotes, following up, filling in the CRM. The number is well known. Salesforce measures it in its State of Sales report: a sales rep spends less than 30% of their week selling. The rest goes to deal management and data entry.
Today, I’m asked to orchestrate agents. And to focus on three things: strategy, creativity, the human side.
The rest, my squad of agents does. A pipeline that runs on its own and that I supervise. Agents that handle the follow-up. A quote that builds itself without me. I go into the CRM to see what my agent did. Not to enter data.
The reality
To sell today, you have to hyper-personalize the customer relationship. Everyone knows it. Look at what happens on both sides of the table.
Customer side “Who is this clown who knows nothing about my business?”
Sales side “Another day of doors slammed in my face.”
Yet the customer has needs. And the salesperson needs customers.
Paradoxical? Yes and no.
Yes, because everyone knows the recipe. Understand your prospect’s reality. Speak their language. And nobody applies it.
No, because applying it to every interaction is impossible. First, time. Researching. Decoding the customer’s business. Adapting every message. Multiply that by the number of accounts in a portfolio: the week isn’t long enough. Then, the profile: you need both the hard skills of the industry and the soft skills of the seller. The famous unicorn profile.
Result: still no meetings. And customers still frustrated.
What changes the game
We needed a team to do that personalization and expertise work. So the salesperson can focus on the customer relationship and on strategy.
That’s exactly what a squad of agents does. And that’s what radically changed my job.
