Quick answer: The average insurance agent spends about 35% of their working day actually selling. The other 65% goes to admin: prospect research, CRM updates, post-call notes, and internal reporting, according to Salesforce’s State of Sales research. For an 8-hour day, that’s roughly 5 hours lost to work that doesn’t require a license and doesn’t need to happen on the agent’s desk.
This isn’t a motivation problem or a discipline problem. It’s a workload design problem. An agent who spends 45 minutes researching a commercial prospect before a call, then another 20 minutes logging notes after it, has burned over an hour without saying a word to a client. Multiply that across a full pipeline and the math explains itself.
Where the time actually goes
- Prospect research. Pulling background on a lead before the first call: current coverage, household details, prior quotes.
- CRM updates. Logging every call outcome, moving stage, setting the next follow-up date.
- Post-call notes. Writing up what happened on a call while it’s still fresh, or falling behind and doing it in a batch later, which loses detail either way.
- Internal reporting. Pipeline reviews, activity logs, and the reports a manager asks for that don’t move a single deal forward.
- Scheduling and calendar management. Back-and-forth to land a time, or fixing a double-booking that shouldn’t have happened.
What this actually costs an agency
An agent selling 3 or 4 hours a day instead of 6 or 7 isn’t just less productive. They’re capped on how many leads they can realistically work, no matter how good the lead source is. Silkee’s data on sales VA support for insurance agents shows the agent who responds first to a new lead usually wins the business. An agent buried in CRM cleanup can’t be the first responder, regardless of how strong a closer they are once they get on the phone.
This compounds with the numbers already documented on the operations side. 51% of independent agency staff report feeling burned out, driven largely by workload increasing without a matching increase in staff. Sales admin overload is the same pattern showing up on the producer side instead of the CSR side.
What actually moves off an agent’s plate
None of the 5 tasks above require a license. A trained VA can run prospect research, keep the CRM current, draft post-call notes for the agent to review, and pull the internal reports nobody wants to build manually. Each of these maps to work already covered in Silkee’s task cluster: lead generation, lead qualification, pipeline management, and CRM management.
Moving an agent from 35% selling time toward the 50 to 60% range the Big “I” recommended back in 2010, and industry data still shows most agencies falling short of, doesn’t require working longer days. It requires moving the other 5 hours of tasks to someone whose full job is doing them well.
What this costs
Silkee’s sales VA support, covering the admin tasks above, starts at $899/month for part-time coverage. Compare that to the value of even 1 extra hour of daily selling time across a full year, and the math tends to favor delegation quickly, especially for an agency running on a handful of producers.
Common questions
How much time do insurance agents really spend selling?
Around 35% of a working day, based on Salesforce’s State of Sales research. The remaining 65% goes to admin work: research, CRM updates, notes, and reporting.
Is this different from CSR admin time?
Yes. CSR admin time covers policy servicing and client support work. Sales admin time covers the research, CRM, and reporting work tied specifically to the sales process, a different role, a different task set.
Can a virtual assistant actually recover this time?
For the non-licensed tasks, yes. Prospect research, CRM upkeep, and reporting don’t require a producer’s license, which means they can move to a VA without touching the parts of the job that legally have to stay with the agent.
What’s a realistic selling-time target?
Industry guidance from the Big “I” put 50 to 60% as the target for direct client engagement. Most agencies still run well below that, which is the gap a sales VA is built to close.
Want to see how many selling hours a sales VA could give back to your team? Talk to Silkee about sales VA support built for insurance agencies.