By Shawn Johnson. Published October 1, 2026.
The short answer. Your least experienced sellers spend less of the week selling than anyone else on your team. They also get the least feedback on their customer conversations. Salesforce surveyed 4,050 sales professionals. The average seller spends 40 percent of the week selling. The youngest group spends 35 percent. The gap is about two hours a week of manual data entry. Call to CRM closes part of it. The rep calls a number after a meeting. June asks the team's own qualifying questions. The conversation runs three to five minutes. Structured notes land in the CRM the company already uses.
What did Salesforce actually measure?
Salesforce published its seventh State of Sales report in February 2026. The survey covered 4,050 sales professionals across 22 countries. It was fielded in August and September 2025.
One detail matters before any of the numbers do. Salesforce sorted its findings by generation, not by tenure. On most field teams those two groups overlap heavily. They do not match exactly. So read this as a finding about the youngest sellers on your team. That is usually the same group as the newest, but not always.
The headline number is time. The average seller spends 40 percent of the week selling. Gen Z sellers spend 35 percent. Salesforce puts the difference at about two full hours a week of manual data entry. More senior reps spend those hours researching prospects and building relationships instead.
Salesforce, The Productivity Gap, State of Sales 7th edition
Why do newer reps lose more time to data entry?
Because they have fewer shortcuts.
A rep in year twelve knows what goes in a record and what does not. He knows which four fields his manager reads. He knows which eleven nobody opens. He writes the update in six minutes, because he has written it nine hundred times.
A rep in month eight does not have that. He sits in the lot after his last stop and tries to decide what mattered. The typing is slower because the judgment under it is slower. The judgment is slower because he has not built it yet.
That is not a motivation problem. The job hands its most judgment heavy paperwork to its least experienced person. Then it asks him to do it alone, at the end of a long day.
Do newer reps also get less coaching?
Yes. This is the part that turns a workload problem into a compounding one for the rep.
In the same survey, 46 percent of the youngest sellers rarely get feedback on their sales conversations. 47 percent say they do not get enough practice before customer calls.
Then comes the finding that names the cause. Asked what most holds their development back, the youngest sellers name lack of manager time. Every older generation names something else: lack of access to data and insights.
Read those together and a shape appears that nobody designed. The rep with the smallest library of patterns carries the heaviest paperwork load. He also gets the least feedback on the conversations that would fill that library.
What does this cost a sales organization?
Salesforce reports that this group is the most open to leaving of any generation. They name lack of advancement as the main reason.
Backfill and re-ramp are expensive, and they never appear as a line item. A territory goes quiet during the search. The replacement takes months to get productive. Meanwhile the arrangement that produced the departure is still running.
How do you fix it without adding manager hours?
Two changes that are really one change.
Take the typing off the rep who is slowest at it. And produce something the manager can coach from without booking time.
A short guided debrief by phone does both at once. The rep calls a number while the meeting is still fresh. June asks the team's own qualifying and risk questions. She asks the same ones after every visit. The conversation runs three to five minutes. Structured notes land in the CRM the company already runs.
Two things follow. The rep stops spending an hour a week deciding what to write, because he is answering questions instead. And the manager opens Monday with what the rep actually said in the room. He does not spend half the session reconstructing it.
There is a second effect, and it is the one that compounds. A rep who answers the same five questions after every meeting starts hearing those questions during the meeting. That is how a newer rep builds judgment faster. Not from more training events, but from the same questions after every single visit.
None of this is a claim about results at a customer. CallJune has one signed design partner and no published outcome data. What is described here is how it works: the manager gets feedback to the rep sooner, because the record exists sooner.
FAQ
Why do newer sales reps spend less time selling?
The paperwork falls hardest on the people with the fewest shortcuts. Salesforce found the average seller at 40 percent of the week selling. The youngest group sits at 35 percent. That is about two hours a week of manual data entry.
Is slow ramp a coaching problem or a workload problem?
Both, and they feed each other. The rep loses hours to data entry. The manager has no record of the meeting to coach against. So the feedback that would speed the ramp never happens.
How do you give newer reps more coaching without adding manager hours?
Change what the coaching starts from. A short guided debrief after each meeting produces a structured record the same day. Then the manager reviews what the rep said, instead of spending the session reconstructing it.
Does this require the rep to learn a new app?
No. The rep calls a phone number. There is no app, no login and no typing. The newest person on your team has nothing new to learn.
Source: Salesforce, The Productivity Gap, State of Sales 7th edition, published February 3, 2026. We fetched and verified this page live on September 30, 2026. The survey covered 4,050 sales professionals across 22 countries, fielded August through September 2025.