How much time are you actually wasting?

I had an interesting conversation with a CRO last week—his team was using 14 different tools for their sales motion.

14.

He thought having more tools meant more efficiency, but his team was spending more time (and money) managing tools than talking to customers.

SDRs and AEs are juggling:

• One tool for prospecting

• Another for prospects research

• A third for LinkedIn automation

• Something else for tracking Intent

• Another thing for personalization

• Yet another for scheduling

Each context switch costs 23 minutes of productive time. Between checking extensions, remembering your dogsname123! password and first grade teacher’s name security question, copy and pasting the same info 4 times, and switching between 57 different tabs, 40% of productivity lost to tool management and 2.5 hours per day are spent just logging in and updating systems.

This isn't efficient. It's insanity. The cognitive load of managing all these tools is crushing your output.

How to get that time back

Demo…better

The average sales demo is 45 minutes long, but research shows that human attention spans drop significantly after 18 minutes, decision fatigue sets in after seeing 4+ features, and most buying decisions are made in the first 8 minutes.

So why are you trying to show every feature, every integration, every use case, and every bell and whistle??

Your prospect is probably checking their phone by minute 20.

Think of it like this: If you were at a restaurant and the chef came over to tell you his grandmother’s inspiration behind the dish and the 4 pivots he had to make when recipe testing and then how the first version was good but too time consuming and then listed out every ingredient and technique used in the dish, you might want to jab him with your fish fork. Instead a good chef does their job and then serves the perfect dish at the right time.

The same goes for good demos:

First 5 minutes: Connect their problem to your solutionNext 10 minutes: Show only the features that solve that specific problemFinal 5 minutes: Clear next steps

Stop relying on old playbooks

Standard operating procedures worked when the world moved slower. When you could rely on the same sequence, same cadence, same script.

But rigid systems kill the one thing that matters most in sales: authenticity.

Look at the data:

82% of buyers say sales feels scriptedResponse rates dropped from 30% to sub-1% in last decadeAverage of 18 touchpoints needed to book a meeting (up from 8)

Old-school sales playbooks are like old cookbooks: They assume every situation is identical.

"Always follow up in 3 days." "Always use this template." "Always show these 5 features."

That doesn’t work when it comes to modern sales. Everyone has a million dietary restrictions—you need to adapt and customize while maintaining quality and consistency.