Your salespeople spend two thirds of their time on everything but selling. You know it. The question is, what are you going to do about it.
Data collected from encounters with 460 sales professionals reveals the five most common pain points in Finnish B2B sales. Manual work consumes the largest share of what should be spent on selling. This challenge was mentioned 238 times during the study. In this five-part blog series, we go through each of the five pain points one by one: what the data says, why the phenomenon occurs and what it means for you. The study is based on the experiences of 460 Finnish sales professionals over the past 12 months.
460 sales professionals. 2,376 challenges mentioned. One clear message about what is broken in Finnish B2B sales.
When a salesperson isn't selling, they're not resting either
On average, a salesperson spends 34 percent of their working time on actual selling. The rest is divided between CRM notes after meetings, copying summaries into emails, building proposals manually and filling in weekly reports for management. Email alone accounts for nearly a fifth of the day, which in an eight-hour workday means almost two hours spent just in the inbox. This figure does not reflect laziness. It reflects a structure that was designed for everything except selling.
Revial's data confirms that this phenomenon is just as familiar in Finnish sales as anywhere else. It is not an individual salesperson's problem but an organizational structure that has been so gradually accepted that no one questions it anymore.
Fragmented systems add friction to daily work
The first root cause is fragmented systems. Calendar, CRM, proposal templates and notes all live in different places, and since they do not communicate with each other, every piece of information must be entered manually into each system separately. The more systems there are, the more administrative friction builds up and the less time remains for what a salesperson should actually be doing.
The second is that documentation has evolved into a burden of proof. A salesperson does not update the CRM because it helps them sell better, but because management expects it. The result is predictable: 91 percent of CRM data is incomplete or inaccurate, because no one feels ownership over the task. Data accumulates, but it tells the wrong story.
The third is the structure of the information management receives. Reporting is built on realized figures: revenue, pipeline size, number of meetings. The quality of interactions, the real pain points of customers and the reasons deals stall do not appear anywhere. Management leads based on condensed narratives, which turns both forecasting and development into guesswork, no matter how accurate the numbers appear to be.
What this costs in concrete terms
The direct cost is the easiest to grasp. Take a 20-person sales team as an example. If each salesperson spends five hours per week on administrative work that could be automated, and the hourly cost including overheads is 65 euros, we are talking about 312,000 euros per year.
The indirect cost is considerably larger. If those same five hours per week were returned to client work, preparation and follow-up, the win rate would improve immediately. With a conservative estimate of a five percentage point improvement in win rate, on 10 million euros of annual sales, that means 500,000 euros in additional closed deals. Revial's own waste analysis for an organization of 20 salespeople and 80 specialists shows that manual work is the single most significant factor, adding up to over 20,000 wasted hours and 5 million euros in lost sales potential per year.
Most organizations do not calculate this. The problem has become so normalized that no one puts a price tag on it anymore. That is one of the study's most striking findings.
When logging disappears, presence returns
The most advanced sales organizations have realized that full presence with the customer and simultaneous accurate logging are structurally incompatible demands. The solution is not to ask the salesperson to do both better, but to remove the logging obligation from the salesperson entirely where it can be automated today.
Revial joins meetings automatically through calendar integration, listens to the meeting, produces notes and a summary, and updates the CRM without any manual effort. The salesperson prepares for the next meeting based on previous encounters, because information does not get lost in someone's personal notebook. Management sees the real content of interactions, objections, buying signals and the points where deals stall, not just a summary of what the salesperson remembered to report.
Adapting is also a choice
How sales teams spend their time is a leadership question. If an organization accepts a structure where two thirds of a salesperson's time goes to everything but selling, that is a choice. Conscious or not.
An organization that has solved the manual work problem does not compete under the same constraints. Its salespeople have more time for the customer, better preparation and leadership that sees reality unfiltered. The gap grows every month the equivalent change is left unmade.
Next in the series: Pain points in sales processes Why do more than half of salespeople miss their targets, even when the product is good and the salesperson is motivated?