When the winds of change blow, some people build walls, and others build windmills. - Chinese Proverb

Market demand in B2B segment is stagnating. This refers to the fact that the Indian manufacturing and infrastructure sectors have been stagnant in the recent past. India’s manufacturing sector has shown little progress over the past decade, with its share of GDP in 2024 (17.3%) remaining unchanged from 2014. Moreover, the country’s exports have declined as a proportion of GDP, falling from 25.2% in 2014 to 22.7% in 2024.⁽¹⁾ India’s core sectors (coal, crude oil, natural gas, refinery products, fertilisers, steel, cement, and electricity) recorded a growth rate as low as 1.7% in June 2025.⁽²⁾ This has left many companies watching helplessly as costs are escalating while sales are flat or falling. They are aware that the way to harness sales volumes in a stagnating market is to expand their customer base aggressively. However, in the B2B space, customer acquisition is not easy. Numerous meetings with different managers in client organisations, followed by technical approvals and demos, may be required to land the first order.

The effort and time taken to get an order from a new customer is usually much higher than that required for getting reorders from the existing customer base. So, the more customer interactions, more the sales. Consequently, the current narrative of the top management in almost every B2B organisation is ‘go out in the market… spend less time in the office’. On the face of it, this instruction sounds odd – aren’t the salespeople already expected to spend most of their time in the field?

Analysis of how sales teams use time

Vector Consulting Group analysed how sales managers in equipment manufacturing companies spend their time. The results provide an interesting insight.

Salespeople put in long hours at work. Many of them (33%-43%) work overtime
Salespeople spend as much as 65%-80% of their time doing sales support activities!
80%-85% of field visits of salespeople are limited to existing customers
Only 15%-20% of these visits are to potential customers

If we define the core competency of a salesperson as the ability to bring about buy-in for company products through customer interactions, then all other tasks can be described as sales-support activities. The top capacity guzzlers of a salesperson are sales-support tasks related to pre-order and post-order, including ensuring clean order-entry in the system and all customer follow-up during order execution. Most of these support tasks require easy access to IT systems, rigorous documentation, and strong coordination with customers and other internal departments, making it necessary for sales managers to spend most of their time in local branch offices rather than on field visits. Moreover, even though each of these support tasks (as shown in Table 1) done by a salesperson looks small, they cumulatively not only use up their capacity but also waste it. Every enquiry-to-order cycle or an order-to-collection cycle is interspersed with numerous small tasks. Each of them is typically iterative and has to be done in small periods; otherwise, they are likely to become urgent. For example, if an enquiry comes in and the proposal has to be sent in the next five days, the salesperson is forced to drop everything and process the enquiry. Alternatively, if a dispatch is held up for want of inspection at the month-end, most often, the salesperson is asked to step in and sort it out. Then, the salesperson will most likely drop everything else to facilitate the dispatch. (In many organisations, the sales team spends the last week of the month just trying to ensure dispatches and invoicing, wasting a clear 1/3rd of their capacity). When each salesperson handles about 10-15 open-sales orders and 10-15 open enquiries, the number of open-support tasks can be as high as 50-100. All these 50-100 tasks, with low lead-time service requirements, create a cycle of perennial urgency and bad multitasking for the salesperson. Moreover, all these tasks affect the rate of order intake as well as the rate of final billing to the customers. So, to use time better and avoid perennial switching between different types of tasks, sales teams try to batch various kinds of tasks across different sales orders into time buckets. (Such batching is one of the reasons for spikes in order booking and dispatches in many organisations). But despite this, the capacity available for actual sales work (acquiring new customers or selling new products to existing customers) is little, and very often, the efforts required to acquire a new customer look disproportionately high with respect to immediate results. Consequently, salespeople are in a perpetual conflict.

On the one hand, they have to meet new customers to establish a new business, and on the other, they have to focus on support activities to ensure that they meet their monthly order booking and sales targets. Currently, their capacity is completely taken up by the second. So, even if the boardrooms resonate loudly with the demand for expansion of the customer base to increase market share, as long as this conflict is not resolved, nothing is likely to change.

A solution that does not work

To release the salespeople’s capacity, they need to be relieved of chasing sales-support tasks. But building a backend support team that truly serves its purpose is not simple. Many companies have tried this and burnt their fingers. To free up some of their salespeople’s time, some companies, particularly the ones with multiple business units and geographically spread-out branch locations, have tried to create a commercial function at branches to support the back-end work, like order entry, material follow-up, and dispatch. But this did not work as expected for two reasons. For one, the support team lacked the authority to interact with customers directly. They could complete their tasks only with information and help from the sales team. The prime responsibility and accountability of support tasks resided with the sales force. Secondly, the support team also had other unrelated responsibilities, limiting their availability to undertake support tasks in a timely manner. When tasks were missed or incomplete, the salespeople had to follow-up with them. So, the support team was not perceived as adding any value. On the contrary, it was seen as just adding another layer of bureaucracy that the sales team had to wade through.

The core problem

The only way out of this conflict is to question the fundamental assumptions of how sales team is structured. The two critical assumptions under the current organisation of sales are as follows:

All customers want a single window of communication for all sales-related matters.
Accountability, and hence, the responsibility of all activities related to order intake and final billing, should reside with the individual sales team.

The first assumption is flawed, and the second one is costly. Customers need to be able to reach out to the company and have access to the relevant information without having to repeat themselves again and again. But it is irrelevant whether this is to the same person who sold their product to them. In fact, in many situations, they prefer to talk to an expert rather than a person who acts as a contact point and lacks the necessary competency to deal with the queries. The banking sector works very effectively with multiple windows – customers interact with the call centre, website, and branch offices without feeling the need to contact a single point of contact.

The price organisations pay for the second assumption is the tremendous loss of sales capacity.

Releasing sales capacity

What is needed to resolve this dilemma is a method by which the non-sales or support activities are taken up in a manner that ensures clockwork efficiency and reliability without using the sales capacity for any coordination. For this, a streamlined backend has to work directly with customers with machine-like efficiency! Only then will the sales team have the confidence to let go of the support activities.

To ensure that the backend is streamlined:

The support team has to be centralised so that there is an aggregation of work across branches, making a dedicated team for support tasks viable.
The team should have direct access to customers.

The universe of tasks must be standardised with clear handover criteria, then divided among teams based on time and skill requirements (e.g., payment follow-up, design follow-up, etc.). This reduces the need for the support team to multitask and improves their ability to get back to a task after natural interruptions. (The need to distribute support tasks across different resource types is another reason why the support activities need to be centralised for maximum aggregation benefits).

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) have to be in place, which clearly define the scope and responsibilities. The entire backend has to be managed like a shop floor with real-time evaluation of tardiness and right-time expediting.

The process has to be automated wherever possible, especially for high-volume, repetitive tasks.

When all work together seamlessly, much like various stages of a production process, expediting customer calls to the field sales team will quickly reduce to zero. This will build their confidence to concentrate on ‘real sales’.

Improving sales team productivity

An effective backend may release approximately 70% of the salesperson’s capacity, but this still does not prevent further wastage. Research indicates that half of the time an average salesperson spends on customer calls gets used for travelling, and another 2/3rds is waiting to meet customers. Since customers tend to be geographically spread, this limitation makes salespeople select which customers to visit. They generally meet only those who they believe are most likely to give them an order. Many opportunities for building relationships and influencing orders in the company’s favour at pre-bid stages are, thus, missed in the bargain.

So, to make the most of the salesperson’s time, analyse the customers a company serves and see if they can be serviced effectively without any wasteful travel. There are essentially two kinds of customers - repeat or existing customers - who have placed at least one order, and new customers who have to be targeted for business development (to acquire the customer or increase the share of business).

Repeat customers

Repeat or existing customers have already demonstrated their confidence in the company’s brand by purchasing from it. Still, maintaining the relationship through continuous contact is important. With limited time, most salespeople leave out a large dormant customer base from their regular contact schedule. But the good news is that since product demos and expert selling skills are not required, a good portion of these interactions can be conducted over the phone, reaching a much larger base than what travel can accomplish! These phone beats can be done by a separate team that focuses on reaching out to the entire customer base at a pre-defined rhythm. Travel for physical meetings must be done by the field sales only when the customer specifically requests it.

This approach requires sales with an existing customer base to be handled by groups of two teams of resources working in tandem – internal sales and field sales. But the advantage is that most transactions (including the closing of sales) are handled by the internal sales partner through direct customer interactions. And since the field salesperson has only scheduled meetings, set up by the internal sales partner, with a definite agenda, his travel is more focused and rewarding.

New customers/new products to existing customers (business development)

Selling to new customers or developing a new business takes longer and involves multiple in-person meetings with the customer. This also requires a higher degree of expertise to understand the customer’s requirements, knowledge of the company’s products, and selling skills. At the same time, approaching every new customer requires a cold call. The expert salesperson, however, finds cold calls very unpleasant.

Here again, tasks related to the ‘cold call’ phase – setting up the meetings and making the sales call can be divided. Centrally located campaign coordinator/s can develop the database, filter potential opportunities via email or phone interactions, and schedule visits for the expert salesperson to woo the customer. This team can also handle all the non-sales activities needed to support business development. Once a new sale is finalised, the customer can be handed over to the team servicing repeat customers.

When internal sales activities are conducted as per this process and sales visits are pre-scheduled, the sales funnel will be a lot more transparent than it currently is. Monitoring of the sales tasks can be done by checking the progress of orders in the funnel. Each order can be mapped to the various stages of the sales funnel using any standard CRM package. If a task is marked as stuck, help can be provided proactively for speedy issue resolution. Efforts should be made to improve the flow from lead generation to billing. Improved flow will, over time, reflect as an increase in sales.

Changing the paradigm

At the very core of this new paradigm is the disciplined focus on removing barriers that limit sales effectiveness. The goal is to maximise the capacity of the sales function by reorganising processes and driving a shift in mindset about what constitutes real sales. When multiple roles - centralised back-end, internal sales teams, field salespeople, and business development managers - work in sync, sales productivity can leap forward while also improving service quality. Sales will no longer be seen as a ‘black box’ but as a transparent and well-coordinated process. Since this approach is expected to unlock significant capacity, the company may even find itself with surplus salespeople. It also creates opportunities to redefine and consolidate branches and geographical territories.