Compensating New Sales Roles: How to Design Rewards That Work in Today's Selling Environment

How Sales Managers Spend Their Time

Regardless of the role in which they find themselves operating, our research shows that sales managers are working harder—certainly more hours—than they ever worked in past years. Since the late 1980s, we have tracked how sales managers spend their time during the day and on weekends using a structured questionnaire. The questionnaire has four major categories: (1) management time; (2) time spent with sales representatives; (3) selling time—time spent with customers; and (4) other, including travel, "downtime," and miscellaneous time. In the late 1980s, we found that a typical sales manager worked approximately fifty to fifty-five hours a week. Our 1998 surveys find that the typical sales manager works an average ...