- In a large Salesforce survey, sales reps said they spend about 28% of their week selling. Prospecting and conversations with interested buyers both have to fit into that time.
- Research on lead follow-up and on salesperson prospecting points the same way: when sellers carry everything, some leads go unworked, and finding customers and converting them may draw on different strengths.
- The evidence is indirect. No study I found tests a separate outbound function against sellers who do everything, and one line of research finds benefits in sellers who combine roles.
- Separation helps when the handoff carries context and information about what happened after the meeting flows back to the people running outbound.
For more than eight years in sales, I was responsible both for finding new conversations and for carrying them through to a signed deal. Getting useful support with the first part was a problem I struggled with myself, and it is a big part of why I built MSGA. This article looks at what research says about splitting those two jobs, and where it stops short.
How much of a seller's week goes to selling?
Salesforce's State of Sales survey of 7,775 sales professionals in 38 countries, fielded in 2022, found that reps spend about 28% of their week selling. Most of the rest goes to administrative work such as deal management and data entry.
The survey doesn't say how much of that selling time goes to prospecting. Still, prospecting and conversations with interested buyers have to share the same limited hours. An hour a closer spends building a list or writing first messages is an hour that doesn't go to a meeting or a negotiation.
Why do leads go unworked?
In a 2013 Journal of Marketing article, Sabnis, Chatterjee, Grewal and Lilien describe a "sales lead black hole": the roughly 70% of marketing-generated leads that sales reps don't pursue. Studying 461 reps at four firms, they connect it to competing demands on reps' time.
Two of their findings matter here. Reps follow up more often when leads are prequalified, and experienced reps respond more to the quality of prequalification than to managers tracking their follow-up. My reading is that sellers act on leads when someone has already checked whether a lead is worth their time.
Are prospecting and closing different skills?
Gopalakrishna, Crecelius and Patil (Journal of Business Research, 2022) looked at two parts of acquiring new customers: finding leads and converting them. They found a trade-off between the two. Less experienced salespeople were more effective at prospecting, while experienced salespeople were better at converting leads into customers.
The sample was insurance agents, not B2B sales teams, so for B2B the result is a signal rather than proof. It does suggest that the two parts of the job may draw on different strengths, and that the person best placed to close a deal is not automatically the best person to start the first conversation.
What does switching between the two cost?
Psychology research on task switching adds another angle. Rubinstein, Meyer and Evans (2001) found that every switch between tasks costs time, and that the cost grows with the complexity of the tasks.
These were laboratory experiments, so they don't measure a seller's week. My hypothesis is that the same mechanism applies to a day split between researching new accounts, writing first messages and preparing for late-stage meetings, because each of those asks for a different context.
What doesn't the research prove?
None of these studies tests the setup directly: a separate outbound function handing interested contacts to closers, compared with sellers who do everything themselves. And one line of research points the other way. DeCarlo and Lam (Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 2016) studied salespeople's orientation toward winning new customers versus developing existing ones. They found that salespeople who do both earn higher profits when they are customer-oriented.
That study is about acquisition versus account development, not prospecting versus closing, but it is a useful warning. Splitting the work has its own cost: context can get lost at the handoff, and the people starting conversations may stop seeing what happens to them.
| Study | What it shows | Limits |
|---|---|---|
| Salesforce, State of Sales (2022) | Reps spend about 28% of their week selling | Self-reported survey; prospecting time not broken out |
| Sabnis et al. (2013) | Many marketing leads go unworked; prequalification increases follow-up | Marketing-generated leads, four firms |
| Gopalakrishna et al. (2022) | Trade-off between prospecting and conversion; experience helps conversion | Insurance agents, not B2B teams |
| Rubinstein, Meyer and Evans (2001) | Switching between tasks costs time, more so for complex tasks | Laboratory tasks, not sales work |
| DeCarlo and Lam (2016) | Sellers who combine acquisition and account development can earn higher profits | Different split of roles; the counterpoint |
What should a separate outbound function hand over?
If outbound is a separate function, the handoff decides whether the separation helps. For a closer to focus on conversations with interested leads, meetings and closing, they need to receive:
- interested contacts that meet criteria agreed in advance,
- the context of each conversation: why it started, what the person said and what problem they may be trying to solve,
- a clear line of responsibility, so it is obvious where outbound ends and the closer takes over.
Information also has to flow back. The people running outbound need to know which conversations turned into real opportunities and which should never have been booked. Without that, outbound gets optimized for meetings rather than deals, which is the problem I wrote about in my notes after ApolloNEXT.
How do you decide whether to separate outbound from closing?
The research doesn't give a universal answer, so I would start with your own team:
- How much of your closers' week goes to finding and starting conversations?
- Which leads go unworked today, and why?
- Who on your team is better at starting conversations, and who at moving them to a signed deal?
- What context does a closer need to take over a conversation without starting from zero?
- How will information about what happened after the meeting reach the people running outbound?
At MSGA we take on the work up to the handoff: choosing companies and people, starting conversations, handling replies and passing on interested contacts that meet agreed criteria, with context. Negotiation and closing stay with the client's team. That split was missing when I was selling, and it is the reason MSGA works this way.
Salesforce, State of Sales: survey of 7,775 sales professionals in 38 countries, fielded August 24 to September 30, 2022. salesforce.com
Sabnis, G., Chatterjee, S. C., Grewal, R., and Lilien, G. L. (2013). The sales lead black hole: On sales reps' follow-up of marketing leads. Journal of Marketing, 77(1), 52-67. The 70% figure is stated in the article's abstract. doi.org/10.1509/jm.10.0047
Gopalakrishna, S., Crecelius, A. T., and Patil, A. (2022). Hunting for new customers: Assessing the drivers of effective salesperson prospecting and conversion. Journal of Business Research, 149, 916-926. doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2022.05.008
Rubinstein, J. S., Meyer, D. E., and Evans, J. E. (2001). Executive control of cognitive processes in task switching. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27(4), 763-797. Summary: apa.org
DeCarlo, T. E., and Lam, S. K. (2016). Identifying effective hunters and farmers in the salesforce: A dispositional-situational framework. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 44(4), 415-439. doi.org/10.1007/s11747-015-0425-x
The studies above were read through their abstracts and publisher summaries. None of them tests a separate outbound function directly; the connection to that question is the author's interpretation.