A while back I was working with a sales team, and during a break one of the reps looked at me and said, “I don’t know how you expect me to prospect. I just don’t have enough time.”
It wasn’t a complaint. It was a frustration. And, honestly, I don’t think anyone else in the room disagreed with him. If you’ve spent any time in inside sales, you’ve probably felt exactly the same way. There are days when you leave the office wondering where the hours went.
You know you worked hard. You know you were busy. Yet somehow the one thing you intended to do, the thing that actually grows your pipeline never happened.
Instead of telling him he was wrong, I asked him to walk me through his day.
- He’d started by cleaning up Salesforce because he’d been meaning to get to it.
- Then he answered email because there were a few things that couldn’t wait.
- Before making his first call, he wanted to learn a little more about the company, so he spent some time on their website.
- That led him to LinkedIn, which reminded him there was another contact he should look up.
- Then there was a product meeting.
- Someone needed help finding an old proposal.
By the time lunch rolled around, he’d been moving nonstop. Then I asked him how many sales conversations he’d had.
He looked at me for a second, smiled, and said, “None.”
Nobody laughed.
Mostly because I think everyone in the room saw themselves.
I’ve seen it in hundreds of salespeople over the years, and if I’m being completely honest, I’ve seen it in myself. We have an amazing ability to stay busy. In fact, we’re so good at it that we can get to the end of the day feeling completely exhausted and still not have done the work that matters most.
The two things you can completely control in sales are how you spend your time and your attitude, choose wisely.
Notice it doesn’t say you control your customers. It doesn’t say you control whether someone answers the phone or whether a deal closes this month. It says you control how you spend your time.
That’s a much bigger responsibility than most people realize.
Salespeople rarely waste an afternoon doing nothing. We waste it doing things that feel like selling without actually being selling.There’s a difference.
Research is important. Updating your CRM is important. Internal meetings have their place. Preparing for a customer conversation absolutely matters. But if every one of those activities happens before you actually talk to a customer, something is out of balance.
I sometimes wonder if we hide in preparation because preparation feels safe. Once we make the call, we no longer feel in control. The customer is. They might say yes. They might say no. They might not answer at all.
Maybe that’s why it’s so easy to convince ourselves that one more thing has to happen before we pick up the phone. One more article. One more company to research. One more email to answer. One more update before we start.
The problem is that “one more thing” has a way of following us all day.
So this week, don’t track how busy you are. Pay attention to something much more important. Every time you switch to another task, ask yourself one simple question.
“Am I doing this because it needs to be done…or because it’s easier than making the next call?”
I don’t think there’s a salesperson alive who hasn’t been guilty of that at one time or another. I know I have.
The good news is that once you recognize the pattern, you can change it. You don’t have to stop preparing. You don’t have to ignore your CRM or your email. You simply have to make sure those activities support selling instead of replacing it.
At the end of the day, your pipeline doesn’t care how busy you were. It reflects how you chose to spend your time and that’s one of the two things you completely control.
Choose wisely.