Tuesday, July 14, 2015

A Young Salesman’s Sad Epiphany by Etien D’Hollander


It was my second day on the job as a new pharmaceutical sales rep. I was young, keen and naïve, and really enjoying my new Cutlass Supreme company car. I had spent two weeks in product and sales training and I was ready to turn the world on fire! I was taking over a territory from a sales rep who had been promoted to a marketing position and was moving to head office.

It was his job to introduce me to the territory and show me the ropes. We had accomplished two sales calls in the morning - one to a Doctor who he was friendly with, and one to take inventory at a pharmacy and recommend a replacement order. It was now lunchtime and we went to a restaurant in a local Mall where, to my surprise, we met with a dozen or more other sales reps from a variety of industries. I was introduced to these reps, amid some jocularity, and had a nice lunch. After lunch, we all filed down to the mall theater and went to a matinee. That was my second day as a sales rep. When I asked my co-worker/trainer about our day, his response was “that’s why you get into sales, those are the perks”!

There were two lessons I learned that day:

1.      There are more perks in being a sales rep than a company car,
2.      This is an easy profession to be a stand out in, the bar is low - just do your job!

If you think this is an unusual or rare situation in the sales rep world, I think you would be surprised. The problem is - you don’t.

The Front Row sales reporting system is a unique app based system that promotes and enables real time sales reporting. A sales rep can complete and submit their sales report (They can also update an opportunity, create a task, etc. But for these analytics, we only looked at sales reports.) immediately after a sales call, in less than 60 seconds, from any mobile device. Over the last 5 years, we have processed over 10 million sales reports and each one of these is both date and time stamped and GEO Located (geographical location). These sales reports from our clients came from a variety of industries including, medical, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, business machines, construction, food/beverage, communications, trucking, insurance, finance, and more.  Recent analytics on these 10 million sales reports revealed some interesting stats…

1.    74.9% of sales reps worked less than a 5 hour day.  A typical day runs    from 10 A.M to 3 P.M

2.    Less than 6% of sales calls occurred between 12 A.M. and 1 P.M. Meaning for most sales reps a workday is 4 hours long.


3.    80% of sales reps were active between 10 and 11 A.M. as this was the most active hour of the day with 22% of sales calls occurring in that hour.

4.    Less than 5 % of sales calls occurred before 9 A.M.

5.    Less than 9 % of sales calls occurred after 4 P.M.



Front Row Sales Report.


Why don’t you come visit us, take a free test drive, and discover for yourself the power of Front Row Solutions