Lead research is essential in modern B2B sales – but often a secret productivity killer. Time-consuming research, CRM maintenance and unqualified leads eat up hours in which your sales team not sold. The result: Instead of closing deals, manual tasks pile up. Managing directors in SMEs, in particular, are feeling the strain: Make sales more efficient want to, but don't want to hire new employees right away. Fortunately, a solution has emerged: Automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are revolutionizing lead research. In this blog article, you will learn in a practical way why new employees do not solve the core problem, as the Sales time today really distributed is which Time wasters in sales are particularly disturbing – and how automated acquisition profiles and AI-supported processes your Relieve the sales team and your Optimize sales processes Ready for the sales of the future? Let's get started!
When the sales pipeline is stalled, adding more staff sounds tempting as a quick fix. But additional sales staff rarely solves the underlying problem—they often just multiply it. Why? New employees cost a lot of time and money before they can perform. According to the Harvard Business Review, Costs of a new hire including training and fluctuation risk up to 100–300 % of an annual salary, and on average it takes 8 monthsuntil new employees reach their full productivity (Training new employees: How to get skilled staff on board!). Another study specifically in sales even shows: 42.5% of new salespeople need 10 months or moreto really contribute to sales (Sales Follow-Up Statistics and Process – The Power of Follow-Ups - IRC Sales Solutions). In short – simply bringing more people into the team means months of training and high investments, without immediately selling more.
While new sales employees first learn and administrative overhead, the real bottlenecks remain: too little time with the customer, but too much work in the background. Instead of hastily creating new positions, CEOs should first ask: “Why doesn’t our existing team already use 100 % of his time for sale?" The answer usually leads to inefficient processes – and that’s where automation comes in.
If you consider, what sales teams actually spend their working time on, it becomes clear where the lever must be applied. Recent studies paint a sobering picture: Salespeople spend only about a third (34 %) of their time with real sales, the rest is spent on other activities (Sales Follow-Up Statistics and Process – The Power of Follow-Ups - IRC Sales Solutions). An analysis of sales activities revealed, for example:
Only around 34 % the time of a sales employee remains for active sales discussions with customers – exactly what he was hired for (Sales Follow-Up Statistics and Process – The Power of Follow-Ups - IRC Sales SolutionsThis figure is alarming. It means that out of a five-day workweek, only two days are actually spent on sales activity; the rest is wasted on preparation, follow-up, and organizational tasks. Optimize sales process This means, above all, eliminating this imbalance. When you realize that there's more untapped potential here than an additional employee could ever bring, it becomes clear: It is not a lack of staff, but time wasters that are the real bottleneck in sales.
Which specific Time wasters rob your sales team of their day? Here are the most common Efficiency killer in everyday sales and why they are so hindering:
1. Manual lead research: Before a salesperson picks up the phone, they often spend ages gathering information about the lead – browsing company websites, checking LinkedIn profiles, reading articles. Research work is essential, but it consumes a huge amount of time. Every minute a sales manager spends Googling is a minute without customer contact.
2. Process unqualified leads: Nothing is more frustrating than putting a lot of energy into a prospect only to find out that no real potential Traditionally, many unqualified leads end up in sales, and employees struggle to separate the wheat from the chaff. This not only costs nerves, but also valuable hours lost to leads who are truly ready to buy.
3. CRM maintenance and administration: CRM is supposed to make life easier – but the Maintenance of customer data quickly becomes a time sink. Creating contacts, writing meeting notes, updating opportunities: These routine tasks are important for follow-up, but they take up an enormous amount of time for sales professionals. Studies estimate the proportion of time spent on data entry and documentation almost a fifth of working hours (Sales Follow-Up Statistics and Process – The Power of Follow-Ups - IRC Sales Solutions). Here, sales are virtually running idle.
4. Quotation and follow-up creation: After the customer meeting comes the follow-up. Setting up individual offer emails, creating PDFs, scheduling follow-up calls – it all adds up. Often, each follow-up is almost rewritten from scratchto make it seem personal. Without templates or automation, this creates additional effort with every lead.
These examples make it clear: The actual sales activity suffers, because there is too much manual work involved. For managers this means: Do you want to Make sales more efficient, you have to eliminate these time-wasters. And this is where smart automation solutions into play.
Imagine if your sales team had a detailed dossier on the potential customer on the table – without anyone having to spend hours researching. This is exactly what a automated acquisition profile. But what exactly is that?
An acquisition profile is a automatically created profile page via a lead (often the decision-maker in the target company) who has all the relevant information at a glance bundled. It contains, for example:
The highlight: No one on your team has to collect this information manually. An automated process handles lead research in the background. It typically works like this:
At the end, your salesperson will receive a compact briefing – like a personal cheat sheet page for each lead. This makes it well prepared for every conversation, can specifically address pain points and saves a lot of time in preparation.
The theory sounds good – but how do you put it into practice? The good news: You don't have to be an IT company to implement such automation in sales. Today, there are numerous Tools, which also SMEs optimize your sales process Here are some approaches and examples:
Make (formerly Integromat) & Zapier: This No-code automation platforms are real game changers for SMEs. They allow you to link different apps and services together, without programmingA practical example: When a new lead is entered into the CRM, Make automatically start a process: 1) take the company name and visit the company website, 2) pull relevant data from the website (e.g. via API or scraper), 3) simultaneously via a Zapier integration 4) find the decision-maker's LinkedIn profile, 5) consolidate all information into a Google document or CRM note field. This happens fully automatically in minutes.
AI services (e.g. Relevance AI): Specialized AI tools help to gain smart insights from raw data. Relevance AI For example, it can analyze, categorize, and even score texts. Suppose you have 50 new leads from a trade fair: An AI could analyze the website texts of these 50 companies and automatically identify the most promising leads – for example, those who most frequently use words that match your ideal profile. This way, your team will focus first on the highly relevant prospectsinstead of working through all 50 at once.
CRM workflows & Co.: Modern CRM systems often have built-in automation. For example, you can define that a "profile report" is generated and sent to the sales team via email when a new contact is created. It's also possible to trigger emails to the team when certain criteria are met ("Lead XY just visited our pricing page for the third time"). Tip: Many marketing automation tools or web analytics offer notifications of a kind that can be integrated into the distribution system).
It is important to start small: Identify an annoying manual step and automate it with a tool workflow. Even a few hours of saved research time per week and employee add up. Moreover, your team will quickly appreciate the new possibilities – because they will realize that they more time for selling have.
What would he look like Sales of the future in your company? Imagine a sales process that is maximally efficient: Each employee spends most of his time in direct customer contact, supported by digital assistants in the background. Routine tasks practically run automatically. Utopia? Not at all – many of these scenarios are already feasible today.
In the Sales of the future your sales manager always enters the meeting fully informedDuring the trip to the customer, for example, he studied the automated acquisition profile on his tablet: All the latest information is at hand, and relevant news of the day has been added directly. He knows exactly what challenges the customer is currently facing, which products might interest them, and what was recently discussed. This allows him to personalized and at eye level instead of wasting time with standard pitches.
In short, the sales of the future is data-driven, proactive and perfectly preparedHuman strengths – relationship building, negotiation skills, creativity – are coming to the fore again because tedious preparatory work is automated. Companies that invest in such process optimizations today not only gain an efficiency advantage, but also a head start in Customer satisfaction: Customers feel when a contact person is really your business understands, instead of just selling blindly.
After the initial contact, perhaps the most important phase begins: the Follow-upThis is where the wheat is often separated from the chaff in sales. However, many salespeople are hesitant or simply have too much on their plate to consistently follow up – a fatal mistake, as this leads to wasted sales opportunities. Statistics show that around 80% of deals are only concluded after at least 5 follow-up contacts (31 Must-Know Sales Follow-Up Statistics for 2024 Success - Peak Sales Recruiting). But 44% of sales staff give up after the first follow-up (Sales Follow-Up Statistics and Process – The Power of Follow-Ups - IRC Sales Solutions) – there is enormous potential here!
The solution: Automate your follow-ups so that no one will be forgotten, without appearing like mass spam. Here are a few tried-and-tested tips to help you achieve this:
Use personalized templates: Automated does not mean impersonal. Good follow-up systems allow for variables and modules. For example, the email template automatically Name, company name and an individual reference used – the latter can be, for example, the Website snippets from the acquisition profile (“Your comment on your website about Innovation X made me curious…”). Such details make the email seem human, even though it comes from a template.
Timing and tracking by AI: AI can help find the ideal timing – for example, optimizing the sending time when open rates are highest. It can also identify which formulations resonate well. Modern tools analyze whether a customer interacts with an email (opens, clicks) and adjust further communication accordingly. For example, if the recipient doesn't open the email, the system automatically sends another one a few days later. slightly changed subject line, which promises more attention.
Stay authentic: It is important that despite automation of the Tone fits the company cultureAvoid overly rigid, standard phrases. Write follow-ups as you would speak in person. Feel free to test different approaches (A/B testing using a tool) and see what works best. If the recipient feels like they're contacting a person who's genuinely interested in them, it doesn't matter if the email was sent automatically.
With such automated, but warm-hearted With follow-up processes, you kill two birds with one stone: Your team stays persistent and on top of every lead – without additional manual effort – and the leads still feel individually cared for instead of being pressured by a marketing machine. This increases the conversion rate, without having to employ more staff.
Finally, here is a short Checklist for you as a managing director – Measures you can start with immediately to improve your to relieve the sales team and your to optimize the sales process (without having to hire new people):
With these steps, you will initiate a change that will massively relieve the burden on your existing sales team and at the same time increase the closing rate – without a single additional sales force to have to adjust. The Future of sales doesn’t start in five years, it can start today: by implementing smart processes that turn your sales team into real Productivity Champions do.
Traditional sales work is reaching its limits in a digital B2B world: Too much time is spent on lead research, data maintenance, and repetitive follow-up. Simply hiring more salespeople would be expensive and inefficient – instead, existing teams work smarter, not harder. Modern Automation and AI provide the tools for this. From automated acquisition profiles to intelligent follow-up workflows – there are numerous levers to Productivity in sales dramatically. The result: Your team can focus on what no machine can replace – real sales advice and customer relationships.
