How B2B Sales Teams Waste Time & What Top Performers Do Differently

Ask any revenue leader where they lose deals, and you’ll hear the usual suspects—pricing, competition, timing. But dig deeper, and there’s one silent killer nobody talks about enough: time.

Time lost to approvals. Time wasted on CRM hygiene. Time burned on creating decks, chasing docs, or aligning with marketing.

We don’t always feel it. But it’s bleeding out pipeline, quota, and sanity of sales teams. And it’s not just a workflow issue—it’s a business problem. A cultural one. And yes, a tech one.

So today, we’re calling it out. We’re unpacking the hidden cost of internal drag in B2B sales—and why the real answer isn’t another dashboard, but a re-architecture of how we execute.

The Productivity Crisis We Don’t Talk About

Let’s start with the numbers.

B2B salespeople spend only 33% of their time actually selling. The other 66%? It's eaten by internal processes, admin, and meetings that feel productive but don’t move deals forward​.

That means if your team works an 8-hour day, over 5 hours go to non-revenue-generating tasks. Multiply that across a quarter, and it’s easy to see why sales cycles stretch, deals slip, and quotas get missed.

“We saw reps spending nearly 30% of their week just cleaning up CRM or writing follow-up notes. It’s not that they didn’t want to sell—it’s that the system made it hard to do so.” —Navin Prasad, VP RevOps @ 1Password​

Where the Time Goes (And Why It Hurts)

1. Admin Is a Sales Tax

Let’s be real—nobody got into sales to be a note-taker. But that’s exactly what many sales professionals become.

Current stats show reps spend 14.8% of their week on admin tasks. That’s nearly a full day every week not spent selling​.

Break it down:

• CRM updates
• Internal follow-up emails
• Writing call summaries
• Manual data entry
• Proposal generation

None of these activities close deals or drive revenue growth. But all of them are required to run the business. That’s the paradox.

“After a call, it can take a rep 8+ minutes to write everything down. Multiply that across 5–6 calls a day, and you’ve lost close to an hour—every single day.” — Ashley Wilson, COO @ Momentum​

2. Internal Complexity Is Deal Kryptonite

Sales reps themselves say 20% of stalled or lost deals come from internal policies and complexity​. That’s not just inconvenient—it’s lethal.

Too many tools. Too many steps. Too many cooks. The sales process becomes more about navigating your company than helping the customer.

And when reps feel burdened, conversion rates plummet—12% lower, on average, than teams that are not wasting time.

Momentum sees this constantly. We’ve had customers like Demandbase flag deals at risk not because the buyer was hesitant—but because legal couldn’t move fast enough.

“Deals don’t die in competitive bake-offs. They die in internal chaos. If we can’t move fast, we don’t win.” — Mark Turner, VP RevOps @ Demandbase​

The Document Drag

Let’s talk documents.

• 28 hours per month—that’s how much time reps spend searching for, recreating, or managing sales docs​.
• Proposals, contracts, invoices—they’re necessary. But the process is broken.
• Files live in siloed drives. Templates aren’t standardized. Collaboration is clunky.

This isn’t just inefficiency. It’s deal friction. And reps feel it.

Momentum changes that by letting templates live in workflows—not folders. We auto-populate proposals, push insights from calls into next-step emails, and surface the right info, at the right time, inside the rep’s Slack or CRM.

It’s not just faster. It’s done.

Sales and Marketing: Still Not Synced

You’ve heard this one before—but the problem hasn’t gone away.

9 out of 10 B2B leaders say sales and marketing strategies need tighter alignment​. But the divide persists:

• Marketing pushes MQLs that aren’t ready
• Sales ignores leads because they don’t trust the score
• Product launches get announced… with no feedback from customers

Momentum bridges this with enterprise listening. We surface what buyers are actually saying—objections, interests, timing signals—and feed that data to both teams.

Now, instead of debating funnel definitions, everyone sees the same truth: the voice of the customer.

The Expanding Sales Cycle

Here’s where it all hits home.

37% of deals now slip past the expected close date, and 75% of reps missed quota in 2024. The sales cycle is 20% longer than it was just a year ago.

That’s not because buyers suddenly got harder. It’s because internal friction added time. And time kills momentum.

A one-month delay can reduce your close rate by up to 60%. That’s how fragile pipeline velocity is right now.

So why aren’t we fixing the workflows?

Because most companies are still trying to track the problem, instead of solving it.

The Technology Trap

Ironically, some of the tech stacks designed to help—like CRMs—ends up adding burden.

Reps are expected to log every note, tag every field, and generate their own follow-ups. But when they don’t, leadership loses visibility. So more dashboards get built. More reminders sent. And the loop continues.

“75% of reps say they’d be more productive if they spent less time on data entry.” — Hubspot Study​

Momentum flips the model:

• We extract data from calls and emails using AI
• We write directly into Salesforce with no rep input
• We trigger Slack alerts for risk, next steps, or feedback

The result? Reps sell. Ops teams analyze. Everyone wins.

The Solution: Execution Architecture

So how do we reclaim selling time?

1. Automate the Admin

Auto-fill your CRM. Auto-draft your emails. Auto-trigger your workflows. It’s all possible. You just need tools that think in systems, not tasks.

Momentum does this with features like:

• AI Signals: Sends alerts based on what actually happened in calls
• Autopilot: Updates fields, forecasts, and notes without asking reps to lift a finger
• Smart Summaries: Captures the full conversation, pushes it to Slack, and syncs with Salesforce

2. Simplify Internal Complexity

Stop stacking approvals. Start enabling reps.

We’ve seen companies reduce deal friction by 20% just by:

• Removing redundant checkpoints
• Standardizing documents
• Giving leaders visibility through automation—not meetings

It’s not about cutting corners. It’s about cutting waste.

3. Align Around Customer Truth

No more MQLs for MQL’s sake.

With Momentum, both sales and marketing teams see:

• What buyers care about
• When timelines shift
• Where deals are blocked

It’s not a shared dashboard. It’s a shared understanding.

Time Is the Most Expensive Thing You’re Wasting

You can’t scale quota attainment if your sales representatives spend 66% of their time doing something other than selling.

You can’t improve lead generation, win rates and retention if your deal cycles stretch because internal policies can’t keep up.

And you can’t fix sales productivity and revenue problems if the root cause is buried under admin noise.

Momentum exists to solve this. We’re not another tool. We’re an execution engine. Built for GTM leaders who are ready to reclaim time—and turn it into revenue.

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