At the end of a year’s trading, you end up with a particular level of sales. But what stops you achieving twice that level? What is the constraint? What resource don’t you have enough of?
When I ask salespeople, I often hear resources like technical support, budget, prospects, marketing support and leads. But almost every salesperson eventually gives the same answer: TIME. There is just not enough of it.
So what is the biggest waste of time in your selling? Common responses include admin, internal meetings, travel and training courses. Of course, none of these is the correct answer.
The real waste is the deals you lose
Think about your win rate. If you submit 10 proposals to prospects, what is your hit rate? In other words, when you go through the whole process of bidding and submitting some form of proposal, how many do you win? The most common answer in B2B sales is three. I have heard it so many times I have come to believe there is almost some law that dictates the figure — and I suspect many salespeople have a worse result than three out of ten.
If you are only winning 3 out of 10 of the sales you work on, then the biggest waste of time is the 7 you lose.
With around 5 million B2B sales professionals across the US and UK, that means roughly 3 million spend the year losing — a vast cost to businesses. If you are a board member, a sales leader, or in L&D, this is one of the key root causes that undermine consistent revenue growth and the levers behind it: effective selling hours, sales velocities, hit rate and size of deals. In simple English: how to win more orders, bigger orders, more profitable orders, more quickly.
If you are only winning a third of the sales you are working on, then two-thirds of your selling time is wasted. And you cannot really claim that you learn something when you lose — you learn far more when you win.
Why top performers have high hit rates
Some individuals have very high hit rates. They are good salespeople, and given that they are bidding, they would be expected to perform well. But far more importantly, in their own minds, was a simple discipline: they refused to bid unless they were practically certain they would win.
There are really only two reasons for losing a sale: you were outsold, or you should not have been there in the first place. Both are avoidable, and avoiding them is what frees up the selling time everyone says they lack.
Qualification is a three-way process
There is a discipline in selling called qualification. The idea is that when you find a sale, you do not go rushing in to submit a proposal. First, you take a cool, hard look at the opportunity and ask: is this a winnable situation? If it is going to take two or three months of your life to do all the work to quote, is that a good investment of your life? If it is not, you drop it like a hot brick.
And here is the important point where so many companies go wrong, at high cost: qualification is not a two-way process — a simple yes-or-no bid. It is a three-way process. Yes, I will bid. No, I won’t bid. Yes, I will bid — but only if I can resolve these specific issues first. That third option is the most valuable, because it tells you exactly what work is needed to turn a risky opportunity into a winnable one.
Doubling selling time, automatically
Win more of what you pursue and pursue only what you can win, and you genuinely double your effective selling time — without working an hour longer. The discipline is simple to describe and hard to sustain across a whole team, on every deal. That is exactly what SCOTSMAN® AI does: it runs three-way qualification continuously on every opportunity, flags the deals you should drop, and names the work needed on the ones worth winning — so your selling hours flow to the winnable.
