Why Sales Reps Are Spending Only 28% of Their Time Selling — And How AI Note Taking Changes That
Did you know that sales reps spend only 28% of their week actually selling?
That’s from Salesforce’s State of Sales report and it begs the question — if not selling, what are sales reps doing with the majority of their time? The answer is administrative work. Every sales call requires careful research and CRM updates, not to mention time spent on receiving coaching and feedback.
If sales reps and managers can spend less time on repetitive tasks, they can spend more time selling. That’s where a new generation of AI tools comes into play.
Beyond simply recording calls, an AI note taker can completely transform the entire sales workflow — from prep, to CRM tasks, to coaching, to sharing valuable insights with other teams.
You may already be using a conversational intelligence tool, but that’s not enough anymore. An organization-wide AI note taker takes care of both internal and external calls in addition to features that support the sales workflow.
In fact, according to HubSpot’s State of Sales report, 66% of sales professionals said AI can help them provide a more personalized experience and understand their customers better. As well, 63% of sales leaders said AI makes it easier for them to compete with other businesses.
What’s more, the same report found 81% said AI helps them spend less time on manual tasks, and 78% say it helps them be more efficient in their role.
That being said, there’s a plethora of AI tools available on the market — picking the right one can be difficult.
Charlie Bahamonde, Fellow’s Director of Sales, says the strategy now is to find tools with broader applications so you can do more with fewer apps. He says sales leaders are “not looking for a specific tool to solve a minor problem within a team, but looking for a tool that solves multiple problems across multiple teams or even an entire organization.”
An AI note taker is the solution. Read on to find out how Fellow can be your go-to software for sales meeting recordings, one-on-one coaching, and customer insight sharing across the company –– helping you consolidate all these different use cases into one easy-to-use tool.
Benefits of consolidating internal and external calls with an org-wide AI note taker
That HubSpot report found that 45% of sales professionals are overwhelmed by the amount of tools in their tech stack. That’s not surprising — there are more tools than ever available for sales teams, many of which feature AI.
According to that same report, “more than one in four say if their company reduced the number of tools they use, it would make them more efficient, they would spend more time selling, and have higher quality data.”
One strategy to reduce an unwieldy tech stack is to find a single solution to take care of both internal and external calls. An AI note taker, like Fellow, is the ideal tool for the job.
Fellow is an AI note taker that supports meetings from preparation before, to recording during, to follow-up after. Read on to see how it supports the sales workflow.
1. Be prepared for every sales call
There’s a mountain of prep work that goes into every sales call. Reps need to thoroughly research their prospect and their organization to understand their needs and painpoints. Reps also need to know every detail of any prior calls they’ve had with a prospect.
Fellow helps with sales call preparation in a few ways, starting with pre-meeting briefs. Before every call, Fellow generates a brief that captures the details of your previous calls with whoever you’re meeting with. As well, Fellow has attendee briefs — a breakdown of the professional history of your clients.
“Fellow helps centralize a lot of the information that reps would typically be clicking through on four or five different websites,” says Charlie, adding that it streamlines workflow to have that information in Fellow, the same tool being used during calls.
Additionally, reps need to know if anyone else on their team has met with a prospective client and what they discussed. With Fellow’s HubSpot and Salesforce integrations, all that information will be at hand.
“We pull up that key information next to your note for the meeting that you’re about to have with the customer. As well, you can click on that information to go directly to that record in your CRM if you’re looking to dig deeper,” says Shannon Lochead, Fellow’s senior product manager.
As well, every call in your calendar with Fellow generates a meeting agenda. Anyone associated with the call can contribute ahead of time, leveraging the pre-meeting brief, to prepare an agenda for calls.
Altogether, that means reps can start every call with all the context needed to proceed with confidence.
“In Fellow, we want to help you be prepared for your customer meeting with as little effort as possible on your end,” says Shannon.
2. Centralize all your notes and sales calls
The problem with not having a centralized tool for meeting notes is that everyone finds their own way to take them. Some reps might have dozens of Google docs, or still use a physical notebook, or have their own system for sticky notes. Some of those notes may make it to the CRM, and some may not.
As an AI note taker, Fellow becomes a central repository for meeting notes and a single source of truth. Fellow’s AI Copilot records every call its invited to, then afterwards generates meeting notes that include action items and decisions, as well as a human-level summary and transcription.
All that data is then placed into your organization’s recording library. That means reps can always refer back to prior calls, as well as share those calls with teammates to get them up to speed.
With all notes and summaries in one place, all reps and managers can be on the same page with every account.
3. Put a coaching flywheel in motion
That recording library is also a vital tool for sales managers to coach reps.
“A lot of my time is spent listening back to calls and having the rep share calls with me and then picking out commonalities and themes on what I’m seeing,” says Charlie. “Then we’re focusing our coaching calls on where those skills can be improved.”
With all calls recorded in one place, managers can watch reps’ calls and identify strengths and areas for improvement, and reps can do the same. Plus, with Fellow, it’s easy to find particular learning moments from calls and create clips to highlight. For example, a sales manager could clip an opportunity to improve, then include that clip in their next one-on-one with that rep.
“Having all of that information centralized in one place not only streamlines and increases greater efficiency, but then also allows you to share that information with your rep ahead of time,” says Charlie.
This is where the flywheel comes in. All within Fellow, reps and managers can:
- Prepare for sales calls
- Execute sales calls
- Provide coaching and feedback
- Use that feedback to prepare for the next call
Fellow creates a continuous cycle of feedback and improvement, building up reps expertise to close more deals.
4. Cut down on admin time
As we said earlier, administrative tasks are one of the reasons reps are only able to spend 28% of their time actually selling.
One of those tasks is updating the CRM — a time-consuming, but vital process.
“If a rep doesn’t have his information up to date, and you’re managing a whole bunch of deals, then it’s hard to keep track and understand where you should be focusing and what the priority items are,” says Charlie.
Fellow can help there, too. The HubSpot and Salesforce integrations mean your CRM information is available within Fellow, and switching over to that CRM just takes a single click.
As well, you can set up your Fellow notes to follow common sales frameworks, including BANT, MEDDICC, and SPICED. Then, you can set up Fellow to automatically send all those notes to the CRM.
“That means when you’ve set it up, you can set it and forget it. You can go between your different calls, have them recorded by Fellow Copilot, and those notes from the call are automatically sent to Salesforce and HubSpot,” says Shannon.
Not only that, but Fellow’s AI creates suggestions to automatically fill in CRM fields based on the call transcript.
“With a couple of clicks, I can update those fields in Salesforce so I don’t need to go into Salesforce to find the right records and manually make those updates, saving you a ton of time,” says Shannon.
Charlie adds that this is one of his team’s most heavily-used features because it reduces context switching and lets reps stay in the Fellow environmemnt.
5. Break down silos within your organization
Sales calls aren’t just valuable to the sales team — they’re valuable to your whole organization.
The insights from talking directly with customers provide important insights to teams like marketing, who need to understand customer needs, and to customer success and support, who will handle accounts once sales closes the deal, or to product for new features to add.
“Sales is kind of on the front lines with customer interactions. I think there’s a whole host of pieces of information for various accounts that you need to get in front of other departments or teams,” says Charlie.
The problems with some conversational intelligence tools is that all that valuable information never makes it past the sales team. With an AI note taker like Fellow, all those calls can do more good by being shared with the wider organization.
With Fellow, other teams can have access to sales calls and clips. Fellow users can create custom channels within the org-wide library to contain, for example, the best examples of calls that highlight customer pain points. These channels also have custom permissions settings, so only the people who you want to see it will have access.
Or, for example, if there was a moment within a call a rep wants to share with marketing, they can simply clip that moment and send it.
“A lot of times we’re playing a game of telephone. We’re interpreting what the customer said, and then sharing that with product, and they’re interpreting it. All you need to do is just clip that information out and proactively share it with the team members who should be getting in front of it,” says Charlie.
Common objections to AI sales tools
It’s understandable that some sales professionals may have some reservations about AI tools. The rise of AI has brought up questions about privacy and legality, and we’ll address those here.
First, you may be wondering about the rules of recording a meeting. Recording rules vary by region, with either all parties or just one party needing to consent to being recorded.
With Fellow, there are no surprises. The AI Copilot only attends meetings to which it has been invited, and when it appears an attendee or host must admit it to the call. When Copilot joins, it will be seen as an attendee, as well as send a message to all attendees that the call is being recorded. If you need to remove Copilot, that’s no problem. Simply remove it from the attendee list or stop the recording from the Fellow app.
You can read more about Fellow’s Copilot and consent here.
The next question is around the privacy of your meeting data. With Fellow, no meeting data is ever used to train AI models. As well, your recording library is protected by permission settings. Recordings, transcriptions, and summaries are only available to those who were in attendance, unless you choose to share more broadly to your organization’s library.
With Fellow, you can use AI for your sales calls with confidence knowing that your data is protected and that your customers know when a recording is taking place.
Consolidate your sales tools with Fellow
There’s no doubt that AI tools are the future of sales. The trick is finding the right tools that simplify workflow, break down silos, and speed up the sales process without needing to add a dozen new tools to your tech stack.
Fellow is a single AI solution that provides diverse value to sales team, allowing them to do more with fewer apps while still hitting their goals, and while supporting both internal and external calls.
Book a one-on-one meeting with a meeting expert to understand how you could switch from your current conversational intelligence tool to Fellow.
