Stop working harder

The problem is you, not your diary

We’ve collectively let ourselves be seduced by the idea that productivity is a matter of speed. More done in less time. Even more meetings, more tasks ticked off, more emails answered. But when I ask someone what they achieved that day that genuinely mattered, for their customer, for their team, for their own purpose, it usually goes quiet. That has nothing to do with tools. It has to do with clarity, or rather the lack of it.

A sales manager in the IT sector I was coaching discovered, after a simple week of tracking his activities, that he spent an average of 2 hours a day manually updating spreadsheets. 2 hours. Every day. Because it had always been done that way. After a simple Zapier connection between his CRM and his reporting tools, he had that time back. He used it to listen better. To have the conversations that actually mattered.

Listening is a skill you have to protect

There’s no finer quality in sales than real attention. And we sabotage that quality ourselves, by using meetings as typing practice. While a customer is talking, we’re taking notes. We hear the words and miss the hesitation in the voice. We record what’s said and not what’s meant.

There’s a reason my own motto is I don’t listen to what you say, but I do hear what you mean. Those two things are rarely the same. A customer who says “we’re considering solving this internally” often means something quite different. Maybe he has doubts about budget, maybe there’s internal resistance, maybe he simply doesn’t trust yet that you understand his situation. If you’re taking notes at the moment he says it, you miss it.

I use tools like Otter.ai or the transcription inside Teams to write conversations up automatically. Because I want to listen better. If I no longer have to type, I can watch. I can notice the silences, feel when someone hesitates at a question I’ve just asked, and that’s exactly where the real conversation starts.

Afterwards I use a fixed structure to turn the transcript into a compact summary: what was the core need, which doubts came up, what was agreed, and which questions are still open? That summary goes straight into my CRM. No retyping, nothing forgotten, no “I’ll write that up later”. It’s simply there, so the next conversation builds on what you already know and your customer notices that nothing got lost.

Preparation is the difference between a conversation and a good conversation

One of the most underrated investments in sales is proper preparation. The real kind, rather than skimming the website and getting the name right. What’s going on at this customer? What do I already know from earlier conversations? Which trends in his market keep him awake at night?

Preparation used to mean printing the website and reading your contact’s LinkedIn page in the car park. It can go much further now. I use AI tools as a sparring partner before an important conversation, feed in the customer context, the earlier notes, and what I want to achieve. Then I ask: which critical questions should I put? Which objections can I expect? What might I be overlooking?

The result is that I’m sharper. That I’m not caught out by a question I could have seen coming. And that my customer notices I’ve gone into his world, which is maybe the strongest signal of respect you can give.

Respect, as every good sales professional knows, is the basis of trust. And trust is the basis of every deal worth having.

Decide without dithering, follow up without forgetting

Procrastination, in my experience, is rarely laziness. It’s almost always fear. Fear of the wrong choice, of a missed opportunity, of regret. The irony is that putting it off is itself a decision, and nearly always the worst one.

I use a simple rule of thumb: if a decision takes less than 2 minutes, I make it there and then. Answer the email, confirm the appointment, reply to the short question. If it takes longer, I book a fixed slot for it, 10 minutes maximum. No more. Because more time rarely makes decisions better. It only makes them heavier.

Closely related, and something I see plenty of sales teams neglect, is the follow-up. A good conversation without fast, personal follow-up is like a perfect first date you never call back. The customer is enthusiastic, the energy is there. Then silence. In the time a customer spends waiting for your proposal or summary, he’s already spoken to 3 competitors. Following up within 24 hours is the minimum. And the quality of that follow-up, specific, personal, built on what he said, is the difference between “nice conversation” and “deal in the making”.

Protect your deep work the way you’d protect your best customer

There’s a kind of work that genuinely moves you forward. Not the emails, not the recurring meetings, not the admin. I mean the conversations you prepare, the strategies you think through, the analyses that put you a step ahead in the market. That work asks for concentration. Real concentration. Not the kind you have with your phone on the table while you keep half an eye on the notifications.

I block fixed slots in my diary for that sort of work. 90 minutes minimum, because it takes about 20 minutes before you properly drop into concentration. Shorter blocks are wasted effort. Phone away, email closed, unreachable. If someone wants to book a meeting in that slot, I say no. Not to be difficult, but because I’ve learned you can only do your best work if you actively protect it.

The field sales role used to arrange that by itself: you sat for hours in the car or at a customer, and that time was free of office interruptions by definition. Now those boundaries have gone, you have to rebuild them yourself.

From deal to delivery, the handover everyone forgets

There’s a gap in many sales processes that few people see until they’ve fallen into it. The moment a deal closes, a new risk starts: the handover. Data entered again by hand, invoices created manually, follow-ups forgotten. That costs time, money, and sometimes customers who were enthusiastic a moment ago and are now waiting 2 weeks for an onboarding email.

The connection between your CRM and your ERP doesn’t have to be complicated. A signed contract can update the deal status automatically. The invoice can be generated automatically. The welcome email goes out by itself. All of it as protection for the human relationship, so your team can focus on what customers actually value: attention, insight and involvement, including after the signature. Because the real customer relationship only starts at that point.

Productivity as a choice, not a race

Everything I’ve described here comes back to one underlying principle: choose deliberately where you put your time, energy and attention. Tools can support you in that, and they’re no substitute for making the choice. They amplify what already works, and they amplify what doesn’t just as hard.

The sales day of today offers possibilities we’ve never had: you can know your customer better than ever, follow up faster, prepare more sharply, and hand off admin almost entirely. All of it is worthless if you don’t know what you’re using it for. The best salespeople I know aren’t the ones with the most tools. They’re the ones with the clearest picture of what they want to achieve, and they drop everything else consistently.

So the real question is why you want to be more productive, and what you’ll do with the room you win.

Because in the end it’s about working more effectively.

So where does your day actually go?

That’s the question I opened with, and it’s worth answering before you buy another tool. Most teams I ask have never tracked it for a week.

Happy to go through it with you: where your team’s hours really land, and which one is worth reclaiming first. Get in touch and tell me what your week looks like.