It is six o'clock on a Thursday. Your best salesperson has spent the afternoon rebuilding a proposal from last year's template, chasing a hotel for updated group rates and fixing three CRM records that someone entered twice. Two prospects who asked for a call this week are still waiting.
None of that work was wasted. All of it had to happen. But very little of it needed your best salesperson to do it.
This is one of the quietest costs in a travel business. It rarely shows up in a report, because the sales team looks busy and the pipeline looks full. What it actually shows up as is slower replies, thinner follow-up and deals that drift away while everyone is doing admin.
Where the selling week actually goes
In Salesforce's fifth State of Sales survey of more than 7,700 sales professionals, reps in India estimated they spend only 27% of their week actually selling. The rest goes into everything around the sale: data entry, internal requests, preparing documents and searching for information.
Travel sales teams know this pattern well. A corporate deal or a group booking comes with rate checks, supplier confirmations, policy questions and paperwork long before anyone signs. The selling is the smaller part of the job.
Selling in travel is getting harder
Buyers are also becoming more careful. GBTA's 2026 Business Travel Index shows business travel spending growing much faster than the number of trips, with companies becoming more selective about when people travel.
When buyers are more selective, the speed and quality of your response matters more. A proposal that arrives a day late, or a follow-up that never happens, now costs you more than it used to.
The admin hiding inside every deal
Before you can move work off the sales team's desk, you have to see it. Most of it falls into a few familiar groups:
- Research: finding the right contact at a prospect, checking their travel volume and recent news.
- Proposals: building decks and rate sheets from approved templates, and updating them for each client.
- CRM upkeep: logging calls, updating deal stages and merging duplicate records.
- Supplier checks: confirming availability, group rates and terms before a quote goes out.
- Follow-up tracking: remembering who needs a reminder, a revised quote or a thank-you note.
- Reporting: pulling pipeline numbers for the weekly sales meeting.
Each task feels small. Together, they eat the week.
What to move off your sales team's desk
The best candidates are tasks that follow a clear pattern and do not require a relationship. A trained support team can take on:
Prospect research. Building lists, verifying contacts and preparing a short brief before the first call.
Proposal preparation. Filling approved templates, inserting current rates and checking every number before it reaches the client.
CRM hygiene. Logging activity from emails and notes, keeping stages current and cleaning duplicates every week.
Follow-up scheduling. Tracking every open quote and making sure nothing goes quiet without a decision.
The principle is the same one we use for any process: hand over work that is regular, documented and easy to check. Our guide on what to hand over first, and what to keep explains the four simple tests behind that idea.
What your salespeople should keep
Some work should never leave the salesperson. The first conversation with a new buyer. Negotiating price and terms. Reading the room in a difficult meeting. Deciding which deals are worth chasing and which are not.
These moments are where trust is built, and they are what you pay good salespeople for. The goal of sales support is not to make your team smaller. It is to give that team more hours for exactly these conversations.
A simple rule helps here. If the task needs judgement about the client, it stays with sales. If it needs accuracy and consistency, it can move to support.
Set it up so nothing falls through
Moving tasks is easy. Making sure nothing gets lost in between is the real work.
Start with a short written process for each task: what triggers it, what the finished output looks like and how it is handed back. Our guide to writing an SOP someone can actually work from covers the format. Agree turnaround times, for example a proposal draft within one working day of the request.
Give the support team a single, shared view of requests, such as a simple queue in the CRM. When a salesperson asks for something, it should be visible, owned and tracked until it is done. Our article on a better exception queue shows how to keep stuck items in sight.
Finally, protect quality. Every proposal that goes to a client should be checked against current rates and terms. A fast proposal with a wrong number does more damage than a slow one.
Measure the time you get back
You will only know this is working if you measure it. Keep it light and practical:
- Selling hours: time your salespeople spend with prospects and clients each week.
- Response time: how quickly a new enquiry gets a first reply and a proposal.
- Follow-up rate: the share of open quotes that received a follow-up on time.
- Proposal accuracy: how many proposals needed corrections after review.
Compare these before and after for a few weeks. Our article on operations metrics that matter explains how to keep this from turning into another reporting burden.
Start with one week of tracking
You do not need a big project to begin. For one week, ask your sales team to note every task that took more than fifteen minutes and was not a conversation with a client. At the end of the week, group the list.
As an illustration, a corporate travel sales team of four might find that proposals take around six hours each per week, CRM updates another four, and supplier rate checks three more. That is more than a full working day per person, every week, spent away from clients. Even moving half of it would give each salesperson several more conversations a week.
Most teams are surprised by what they find. The same five or six tasks usually take up most of the time, and almost all of them pass the tests above. That list is your starting point, and it usually makes the first handover decision for you.
Dhiti supports corporate travel and hotel businesses with sales and marketing support, back-office operations, accounts and finance, and reporting, with more than 200 trained specialists. If your sales team spends more time on admin than with clients, we would be glad to talk.
Examples and suggested targets are illustrative, not Dhiti client results or contractual commitments. Adapt the approach to your process, risk and team.
