The average sales rep spends 60 percent of the workday on tasks that have nothing to do with selling, according to Salesforce’s 2026 State of Sales report. Prospect research, manual CRM entry, and lead routing eat the hours that should go to calls and closes. A new customer case study from ZoomInfo puts a number on how much of that burden AI-driven data automation can actually remove, and it is a bigger number than most vendors claim.
The evidence: a 90 percent cut in non-selling work
ResellerRatings, a user-generated content platform that serves more than 3,500 retail brands, told ZoomInfo that automating its lead management cut time spent on non-selling activity by 90 percent. Before the change, reps were searching the web for prospects and typing each one into the CRM by hand, a workflow where every hour spent on data entry was an hour not spent selling. ZoomInfo’s platform, integrated directly into the company’s HubSpot CRM, replaced that manual pipeline with automated data entry, lead scoring, and lead routing.
The company also reports that 19 percent of its closed-won business now traces directly to ZoomInfo-sourced records, and that new hires on its business development and customer success teams ramp in days rather than months, because the tool cuts down the time new reps spend researching competitors and learning the industries they sell into.
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Why this is a data problem, not a headcount problem
ResellerRatings is a lean sales organization by its own account, and the case study frames the win as one of standardization: ZoomInfo’s integration with HubSpot pipes clean, consistent data points into the CRM instead of leaving reps to reconcile whatever they found in a browser tab. That distinction matters. Most sales organizations do not have a talent problem when non-selling time balloons; they have a data-plumbing problem, where the CRM is only as good as the manual entry feeding it.
The category ZoomInfo is competing in
ZoomInfo sits in a sales intelligence and go-to-market data category that also includes revenue intelligence platforms such as Gong and Clari and sales engagement platforms such as Outreach and Salesloft. Each has staked out a different layer of the rep’s workflow: conversation analysis, forecast roll-ups, outbound sequencing. What the ResellerRatings result underlines is that the layer generating the most measurable time savings right now is the least glamorous one: getting accurate contact and account data into the CRM without a human retyping it. Data quality and routing do not headline product launches the way generative call summaries do, but they are the layer a lean sales team feels first.
What it means for the sales leader
The Salesforce figure, 60 percent of rep time going to non-selling work, is the baseline this case study argues against. It is what makes a single-customer result like ResellerRatings’ worth attention: it is a data point on whether that ratio is actually movable for a specific team, not just a number vendors quote in a deck.
A result this large also invites scrutiny rather than acceptance at face value. It is a vendor-published case study, and ResellerRatings is a single, small sales organization rather than an enterprise team with a more complex CRM footprint. The 90 percent figure describes time spent on non-selling tasks within this one team’s workflow, not an industry-wide average, and a RevOps leader should treat it as a ceiling case rather than a typical outcome. The more durable evidence in the case study is the mechanism: routing clean data directly into the CRM of record removes a specific, well-understood failure point, manual re-entry, that shows up in most sales organizations regardless of size.
For a revenue leader evaluating the sales intelligence category, the ResellerRatings result suggests three things worth checking in a vendor evaluation:
- Where the data lands. The win here came from a direct pipe into the CRM of record (HubSpot), not a separate dashboard reps have to cross-reference. A sales intelligence tool that does not write clean data straight into the CRM leaves the manual-entry problem in place.
- Ramp time as a KPI. ResellerRatings measured onboarding speed, not just deal velocity. Days-to-ramp is a more honest measure of whether a tool actually removes non-selling friction, because a slow ramp is non-selling time by definition.
- Attribution discipline. The 19 percent closed-won figure is a specific, sourced-to-a-tool attribution rate, not a vague productivity claim. RevOps leaders should ask any sales intelligence vendor for the same kind of hard attribution number before buying the pitch.
This is also a reminder that the “AI in sales” conversation has two very different tracks. One is generative AI writing emails and call summaries. The other, less flashy but arguably more consequential, is data automation quietly removing the busywork that has kept reps’ selling time capped near 40 percent for years. ResellerRatings’ result is evidence for the second track, and it is the track with a clearer, more measurable return.
What to do next
Sales and RevOps leaders sizing up their own non-selling time should start by auditing where reps actually lose hours: prospect research, manual CRM updates, or lead routing delays. Whichever step is manual is the step a data automation platform should be evaluated against first, and the ResellerRatings case gives a concrete benchmark, 90 percent, to hold a vendor’s promises up against.
ZoomInfo’s own case study on this result sits alongside its recent push into private-equity-backed RevOps alignment work and a broader pattern the company has followed in choosing data partnerships over building every layer of the stack itself, both signs that sales intelligence vendors are competing less on raw contact data and more on how directly that data removes manual work from a rep’s day.
Source: ZoomInfo
