Welcome to The Sales Time Project. This is week one of a four-week look at the most underrated sales skill nobody puts on a resume.
Here is the premise I want to start with, and the one we built on all week.
Most sales advice you read is optimization advice. Better cadences, better tools, better scripts, better hooks. All of it useful. None of it useful at all if you are spending half your week on activities that have nothing to do with selling. You cannot optimize a system you have never truthfully measured.
So this week, we audited.
On Monday I asked you a question that probably stung a little. What if you didn't have a bad day? What if you had a busy day pretending to be a productive one? Most of us in sales are addicted to motion. We mistake inbox triage for progress. We confuse calendar density with sales activity. We end the day exhausted and somehow still behind on the only thing that pays: pipeline. The body felt the work. The number didn't change.
On Tuesday I gave you the exercise. Every thirty minutes, write down what you actually did. Not what was on your calendar. Not what you intended to do. What you did. Then at the end of day three, separate the list into a few buckets. Example? Revenue-generating tasks + conversations with buyers + advancing deals + opening new ones. The stuff that, if it doubled tomorrow, would visibly change your number.
Bucket: 1) Revenue-supporting: preparation, research, internal alignment that helps revenue happen. 2) Revenue-irrelevant: everything else, inbox triage past usefulness, meetings without an agenda, internal politics, performative busyness.
In my experience, when sellers do this exercise in earnest, somewhere between forty and sixty percent of their week lives in bucket two. Not because they are lazy. Because no one ever made them look.
Which brings me to Thursday and the story that started this whole frame for me.
A client I worked with last year came to me exhausted, missing quota for the second straight quarter. Forty-plus hour weeks. He told me he was slammed. We tracked his time together for one week. The number that came back was eleven. Eleven hours of actual selling in a forty-six-hour week.
The rest was real work, in the sense that it was tiring and effortful. But it was not sales work. It was Slack. It was an internal review that should have been an email. It was CRM hygiene that took ninety minutes because nobody had ever shown him the keyboard shortcuts. It was researching prospects he was never going to actually call, because dialing is uncomfortable and Googling feels like progress.
He wasn't lazy. He was busy. There is a profound difference, and most of us never learn it.
Busy feels like progress because it produces fatigue, and we equate fatigue with effort. But fatigue is not a sales metric. Revenue is. Conversations are. Pipeline is. Stop measuring yourself by how tired you are. Start measuring how many real selling minutes you actually got.
May I? Here is the homework I want you to carry into next week.
Pick one number. Just one. Selling minutes per day. Outbound dials. Live conversations. Whatever your role rewards. Track it for five business days. No judgment, no optimization, no spreadsheet wizardry. Just measure. At Sandler, we call the 7-Day BAT challenge (if you are wondering: B = behavior; A = attitude; T = technique).
Because next week, we are talking about ruthless prioritization, and you cannot prioritize what you have not measured ;-).
A note to sales leaders before I go. If your team is missing forecast and your instinct is to add more activity, more meetings, more enablement, more tooling...pause. Audit first. There is a real chance your team is already working too many hours on the wrong work. More effort on the wrong work is still wrong work.
Reply, comment, or message me. Tell me what surprised you in the audit. Tell me your eleven-hour confession. I read every one.
See you Monday.
Tati
