Productivity The 60% problem: where your reps’ week really goes
Salesforce’s 2026 State of Sales puts selling time at 40% of a rep’s week. For B2B field reps, SPOTIO’s 2026 field sales survey puts it closer to a third, with around eight hours a week lost to admin and data entry.
Hiring more reps doesn’t fix that ratio; it multiplies it. The faster lever is taking the non-selling work off their plate: list building, follow-up, CRM updates and reporting.
Sources: Salesforce, State of Sales (7th ed.), 2026 · SPOTIO, State of Field Sales, 2026
Pipeline Quotes rarely fail on price. They fail on follow-up.
In a 2026 BuildOps survey, more than 29% of contractors said their quotes don’t get followed up, and the most common leak was work spotted in the field that never became a quote at all.
Every one of those quotes already cost an estimator hours. A simple cadence with an owner and a deadline recovers revenue without spending a dollar on new leads.
Sources: BuildOps contractor survey, 2026
Lead generation Buyers research alone. Outreach has to earn its place.
Gartner’s March 2026 survey found 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience, up from 61% the year before, and its 2025 survey found 73% actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach.
That doesn’t make outbound dead. It makes generic outbound dead. Messages built on real signals, written in the buyer’s language, still get replies.
Sources: Gartner B2B buyer survey, March 2026 · Gartner B2B buyer survey, June 2025