Over the last few years I've walked into a lot of B2B sales teams.
Different stages, different ACVs, different stacks.
Some are doing £5M ARR. Some are doing £50M.
Some run HubSpot, some run Salesforce, some run a spreadsheet pretending to be a CRM.
But when I sit down with the head of sales and ask what their reps actually did last week...
I almost always get the same answer.
So I figured I'd just write about it:
- Most sales reps spend less than half their week selling.
I mean it. Less than half.
Monday and Tuesday morning: building an account list.
Wednesday: researching those accounts.
Thursday: writing "personalised" messages.
Friday: forty emails sent, two conversations had.
Then on Monday they start again.
You're paying £70k for someone to copy-paste LinkedIn URLs into a CSV.
The selling happens in the cracks.
- A rep is most expensive when they're not selling.
The hourly cost of a £70k rep doing list-building is the same as a £70k rep on a discovery call.
One creates revenue.
The other creates a spreadsheet.
I'm always willing to bet that the highest-leverage hour of your rep's week is the hour they spend on the phone with a buyer.
Not the hour they spend in Sales Navigator.
- The "personalisation" a rep does by hand is usually worse than what a system does.
A human reads three LinkedIn posts and writes "loved your post on..."
A signal layer pulls hiring, funding, tech stack changes, and job changes across 300 accounts in parallel.
One of those is personalisation. The other is theatre.
- Hiring another SDR doesn't fix this.
It gives you another person doing the same admin, more slowly, for the first six months while they ramp.
The question isn't "do we need another rep".
It's "why is the rep we already have doing work a tool should be doing".
- Your best reps quit when they realise the job is admin.
The ones who stay are the ones who don't mind admin.
Think about which of those two you actually want on a quota.
- You can't forecast on activity that depends on a rep's mood.
Pipeline coverage is a system problem.
It's not a willpower problem.
If your forecast moves £200k either way depending on how Greg's Monday went, you don't have a forecasting issue, you have a process issue..
I share these because maybe one or more is happening on your team right now.
If your sales reps are in spreadsheets, you don't have a sales team.
You have an admin team that occasionally sells.
If you want a look at what your team is actually doing with their week, reply to this email with SEND and I'll send you an outbound efficiency calculator
Go crush it,
Tom