Where a Sales Week Actually Goes

I watched a sales rep spend fifteen minutes on one email address.

It had bounced that morning.

So he opened LinkedIn to see if the person still worked there. Then he checked two coworkers to guess the email format. Then he updated the CRM. Then he reloaded the list into the sending tool. Then he added the person back into the campaign.

Fifteen minutes. One contact.

That team bounces 20 to 30 emails out of every 100 it sends.

The simple idea

A rep has about 40 hours in a week.

Only some of those hours are spent in front of a buyer.

The rest is setup. Find the account. Check if it fits. Find the right person. Find their email. Fix the email when it breaks. Log all of it.

Setup is not selling. But setup has to happen first, so it always goes first.

How it shows up

Three things we have seen this year, at three different companies.

One bounced address costs 5 to 15 minutes. Not because anyone is slow. Because the fix takes six steps across four tools.

A morning goes to qualifying. One team we work with can only pitch a company if that company has a bill big enough to be worth it. To find out, a rep opens a public records site. A lot of those sites have a CAPTCHA. So the rep works through them by hand, one browser tab at a time, before a single call gets made.

A list nobody can reach. A sales manager at another company can name about 2,000 companies he should be talking to. His team actively works about 20 at a time. He wants to be at 3,000.

Read that last one twice. The list already exists. The buyers are already known. The reps already close.

What we found

The gap is not effort and it is not motivation.

It is arithmetic.

Research happens one account at a time, by hand, in a browser. Two thousand accounts at fifteen minutes each is 500 hours. Nobody has 500 hours. So the team covers 20 accounts and the other 1,980 sit in a spreadsheet.

That is a speed problem, not a selling problem. Different problem, different fix.

Hiring one more rep gets you another 20 accounts. Fixing the research gets you the other 1,980.

How the fix works

Three moves, in this order.

Check emails before you send, not after they bounce. Checking up front is cheap. A bounce costs you the send, the rep's fifteen minutes, and a little of your sending reputation.

Do the research in bulk, overnight. The records lookup. The fit check. The is-this-person-still-there check. Those are rules, and rules run fine without a human watching. What takes a rep ninety minutes for one account can run against a thousand accounts while everyone sleeps.

Hand the rep a short list and a reason. Not 2,000 rows. Ten accounts, each with the one fact that makes it worth a call. Then the rep spends the morning talking, which is the part they are good at and the part you pay for.

None of this replaces the rep. It stops the rep from being the slowest part of the machine.

If your team can name far more companies than it can work, that gap is the opportunity. I would be glad to look at it with you.