For years, we have treated time as the scarce resource. For most sellers and leaders, the scarce resource is judgment and attention.
Stated differently, we have misunderstood what productivity means.
I’m deluged daily with prospecting emails and things in my feed about “saving time.” For years, we’ve had increasing automation, mostly oriented to saving time. Today, I get pitched AI products that save time. I don’t have to take the time to do research or prep before that customer call. I don’t have to do the follow ups or action plans. I don’t have to update CRM. And there is all the time these AI tools save us in outreach.
Despite this, we are not seeing much improvement in performance. We find customers increasingly disengaged. With all these time saving tools, people seem just as busy but are producing less.
As I look at how sellers are spending their time, even with these AI tools, they are spending too much time on things that aren’t likely to produce results. Take outreach, rather than narrowing our outreach, hyper focusing it on orgs that have a demonstrated need to do something now, orgs in our ICP, the opposite is happening. Outreach is broadening.
And while most of that outreach is automated, it still takes seller time. They are doing things they never should have been chasing or wasting time on before.
Or let’s look at qualified deals. Too often, we are wasting too much time on the wrong deals. They may be real, but they will never be real for us and should have been disqualified. Even though we automate as much of the process as possible, we are spending time on deals we never should have spent time on. And based on our research, we spend twice as much time losing a deal than we do winning one.
I could go on, but you get the point. Too much of the time we are saving is time we should never have invested in at all!
Then there is another misunderstanding we have about time. Stated simply, the “busywork” is usually not busywork. Having an AI tool give us the research and call prep for a customer, may save the time spent in doing this, but it reduces our capacity to understand what is really happening. We walk into a meeting having never been able to develop a perspective. Or when the customer says, “tell me more,” we don’t know how to go more deeply into the conversation.
This busywork is critical to developing our judgment, yet we are automating those activities away.
We have built management systems that reinforce these behaviors. We measure activity, so sellers respond with activity. Then they leverage the tools/technologies enabling them to scale those activities. Yet through all of this, we are producing less and less. Declining win rates, lengthening sales cycles, fewer people achieving goal, and on and on.
If time were the scarcest resource and these tools fix that, why are they producing the outcomes that are the opposite of what should be produced?
It is because we are solving the wrong problem. Time is not the problem, judgment and focused attention are the problem.
We are failing to invest in developing our judgment and capability to achieve our goals.
Part of it is we do not have the time. Funny how that works.
Part of it is we have spent years designing judgment out.
Let’s focus on freeing up time so we can invest that in developing judgment.
Where do we start?
The wrong place is finding ways to automate what we are currently doing. Instead, the starting point is “What do we stop?”
One of my most popular workshops with leadership and sales teams is titled, “Sh*t we have to stop!” It is nerdy work, but we can accomplish it quickly. It sorts through all the activities, meetings, everything we spend our time on.
As we see groupings, we start asking questions, “Why are we doing this? What would happen if we could stop it? Are we doing the things that have an impact?
It is amazing how much comes up. A lot is stuff people have always done, but we do not know why we are doing it. A lot is our “react/respond” mechanism for crises that aren’t crises, but we make them so.
People are always stunned with how much time they waste on these things, things they can stop immediately. In one session, we determined these things took roughly 30% of people’s time.
For what’s left over, the next question is “who should be doing this?” Not surprisingly, we found poorly defined roles and responsibilities. People were doing things that were better done by others whose job was to do those things. Different people would be doing redundant work, and then there were things falling through the cracks—things someone should have been doing, but nobody was.
None of this was malicious, it is just that everyone was so busy, they weren’t asking themselves, “Is this something someone else should be doing?”
This clears up a lot of the problem.
Upon completion, they are left with a clear definition of the work that had to be done and who was responsible for doing that work.
Now the participants have determined what is important to do, who does it, and they have eliminated all the stuff that kept them from finding the time to do it.
It is only at this point that we can introduce the automation and AI question. Where and how do we leverage these tools now?
In doing this, something remarkable happens. We can look at how these tools save time in low judgment work. But we can move much further looking at how we use these tools to build capability and judgment. We can start using these tools not to do the work for us, but to help us improve our thinking.
For example, rather than having AI do the research, producing a briefing document for the customer call, we might use AI to challenge the seller. A debate might cover: What is really happening with this account and customer? What evidence do you have to support this? What don’t you understand? What does the customer really care about….?”
In the first case, we’ve produced a seller that can follow the script, but struggles when the customer says, “Tell me more.” Or “That’s not important to us.” While we have saved time, we have wasted the time that is most critical, time spent with the customer.
In the second case, we are developing a more capable seller. A seller prepared to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation.
Careful readers will push back. “Dave, the second alternative takes so much time!”
I have two responses to this. If we are not taking the time to do this; if leveraging the AI scripts is not producing the desired outcomes; then what are we saving?
But the critical point is, yes, this does take more time. But if we have done the right work upfront, eliminating work that does not need to be done, reassigning work that should be done by others, we have reclaimed a huge amount of wasted time. So we now can invest the time required to produce the desired outcomes.
When we look at individual and organizational performance, our goal is not to save time. Our goal is to develop the capability to do the work that matters, then to create the capacity to do it well.
For sellers, this means avoiding the “give me the answer” trap, focusing on developing your capability to engage customers in high impact conversations. It means building your judgment in focusing on what is important.
For managers, the focus becomes coaching the thinking, not focusing on the activity metrics. Change the questions from “how many calls have you made,” to “what’s most important to the customer now?” Work with your people to reclaim wasted time and then protect that reclaimed time. Model these behaviors yourself, both in the sh*t on your calendar that you stop and how you are using AI to help you think differently.
For leaders, the advice for sellers and managers also applies to you. Reassess your key performance metrics, focus less on activity, look at measures around the quality of engagement and exercise of judgment. A simple example would be dramatically improved pipeline quality, which should lead to improved win rates. People will be spending time on deals that matter.
As you evaluate buying new tools, there are new questions. Does it build capability or replace it? This is a fundamental design decision impacting organizational performance.
For everyone, there is likely to be a short-term dip in productivity. Building capability takes time. But once you start developing this, productivity will accelerate in ways that we have not seen with our focus on time.
We do have a scarcity problem at every level in the organization. It’s not time, it’s our judgment and capability.
Afterword: This AI generated discussion is stunning. Several phrases, “Time is just a Red Herring,” “Scaling failure,” “AI should not be your Butler, it should be your sparring partner,” really stick me. Be sure to listen to this.
