Your sales team is paying to not sell.
Most teams budget seller salaries to the dollar and treat the hours those sellers lose to admin as a rounding error. But administrative drag, the selling time paid closers and prospectors spend updating the CRM, researching accounts by hand, building lists, and stitching together internal reports, is a hard number with a hard price. You already paid for those hours as selling wages. This page prices the ones spent not selling.
One boundary: the only part of selling a system can't do is the live conversation, reading the room, building trust, closing the deal. Everything that feeds it, the research, the list building, the CRM hygiene, even the call prep, is work AI can increasingly carry, as long as the seller verifies every output before it reaches a buyer. When you estimate your hours, count everything a good system would take off your reps' plates.
The numbers below are planning assumptions, not benchmarks, so overwrite them with yours. The $113 and $54 hourly rates are fully loaded, each role's OTE divided by 2,080 working hours a year. The 20 hrs/week is a conservative starting estimate of selling time lost to admin. Tap any value to type your own.
Hello → Demo baseline: no rep spends more than 5 hours a week on admin. We replace heroics with infrastructure.
Pipeline generated by installed infrastructure. Closers working deeper. Prospectors running discipline. Closed at your rate.
This is what happens when revenue stops being held together by heroics.
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