Dear SaaStr: What Does a Typical Day Look Like for a SaaS Sales Rep? How much of it is prospecting, cold emails or cold calls, reaching out through network, giving demos, trying to close deals, etc.?
Here’s my experience directly and indirectly for inside sales AE, from about $1m to $50m in ARR or so. (In the very early days it will be different):
- Generally, almost 0% of time on cold calls and cold emails once the engine is running, especially for inside sales reps. A lot of folks talk about “full stack reps” that do all their outbound themselves, and do inbound, and do whatever it takes. Those do exist for sure. But 90% of SaaS sales reps aren’t that. They mostly just work on leads given to them. (Don’t shoot the messenger here). For most reps, if any cold calling is done, it generates at best 10-15% of the revenue, and is often done by SDRs, not the inside sales reps. Also, once you have scale, lead qualification for smaller (and sometimes larger too) deals is generally done by entry-level lead qual reps, not account execs.
- Probably 40% of the time is spend managing existing leads. This is emails and reachouts for next steps, demos, follow-up on leads, deep dive calls (see below), sometimes flights, trying to increase the odds of a close.
- Probably 40% of the time is spend with new leads from that month, from qualification to moving them down the pipeline. Demos, learning calls (what are next steps), selling to power, etc.
- Probably 20% is administrative/internal/non-revenue works for them. Working on / negotiating terms. Putting together a pitch. Managing their CRM inputs (reps hate this). Helping out their peers with questions. Learning about new features. Helping on billing, renewals, etc.
To be more specific:
- In a high-functioning inside sales org, reps do about 3-4 demos a day. More than that is exhausting and takes up too much of the day. Less than that is a sign your sales team is … unoptimized. I often see reps doing just 1 real demo a day in orgs that aren’t well managed, optimized, or just plain don’t have enough leads.
- Reps often do 1 “deep dive” call a day on average with multiple stakeholders at the prospect, which may or may not include a deep demo customized to their needs. These deep dive calls are usually post-demo and closer to the close. They take more time to prepare, at least for the good reps.
- Our reps generally received 100-150 inbound leads a month for SME space (much less for six figure + enterprise deals). Once you’ve been in the saddle a while, you can see that that compounds, so after six months, if even 50% of the leads you’ve gotten each month are still alive, you’ve got 300-400+ live leads to manage … a lot … so doing cold calling, and low in general, lower ROI work won’t make sense … so it just won’t happen …
- Field sales is different — in theory. They need to spend 20-50% of their time working the big fish in their territory, semi-prospecting into a list of named accounts. Even so, at the end of the day, they spend as much time as they can with high quality in-bound interest … the ROI is higher … generating basically the same ratios as above after a while.
And a few things to reflect on:
- Distributed reps have a lot more side hustles. It just is what it is. But understand they may be spending 10-20 hours a week on them. You can trust your best, of course. But why it’s important to track how many activities a day.
- If you have sales work on renewals, they’ll spend a ton of time there, especially if the commissions are strong. Why would you work on B-tier leads, let alone do outbound … if you could get paid to do renewals already in hand?
- 90% of reps will run the same playbook as their last role. So ask what it was. If they never did outbound, they won’t start for real at your startup. If they’ve never truly sold to multiple stakeholders? 90% won’t do it next time. Ditto on travel, etc.
Sam Blond, ex-CRO of Brex, and I did a deep dive on “Full Stack reps” here. He made it work, in part, at Brex. But only because they started there on Day 1. Try to get reps used to doing only inbound deals, to do outbound too? “Hopeless”
And why it’s so critical to track how many activities a day reps do. Unless you measure it, it’s almost always less than they think. Or you’d expect.
(image from here)
