The findings from Proudfoot Consulting's seven-country, 12-sector 2003 productivity study suggest that salespeople generally spend only 10% of their time actively selling. But the automotive sector is ahead of the rest, with 17%.

In addition to too little time spent selling, once salespeople in all sectors do focus on active selling they are only half as efficient as they could be, according to Proudfoot. The report shows they are particularly weak in two of the most important elements of selling - asking the right questions in order to understand the customer's business and needs, and securing the deal.

The survey, entitled 'Missing Millions - how companies mismanage their most valuable resource', is based on more than 10,000 hours of observation of people at all responsibility levels going about their daily work, and comprises 1,440 analyses of companies in seven countries: Australia, France, German, South Africa, Spain, UK, USA.

The latest Proudfoot productivity study (2003) found that globally, productivity is only at 61%, more than 20 percentage points below optimum productivity (85%) but is improving steadily (in 2002 productivity globally was 59%). The study also found that poor management is responsible for over two-thirds of this wasted time.

The full survey can be downloaded from www.proudfootconsulting.com .