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CRM hygiene

What An MBA Didn’t Teach You About Sales

The sales profession is challenging. You need to work hard at it to succeed. You need to learn from the best. You need to improve your skills continuously. If you think you can sell since you are a hit at parties and have a lot of friends, you may soon find that you are a failure as a salesperson. Blunt truth:

because the sales profession is so hard, you have to focus on doing everything in sales very well, or you will be considered a failure.

I call this blog, Skinned Knees because I try to relate all of the learning that I have done over the past 4+ decades (while skinning my knees in the learning process).

I hope that you learn from my mistakes so that your business will grow!

The Producer Mindset: Tech-Led, Human-Centric Selling for Faster Pipeline Velocity

Administrative drag is not an inconvenience. It’s a structural failure in modern B2B sales that quietly taxes performance, slows pipeline velocity, and degrades your ability to show up sharp for buyers.

The pattern is predictable. You earn a hard-won meeting with an executive. You know you need a tailored deck that speaks to their priorities. Then reality hits: marketing is backlogged, design is unavailable, and you’re left formatting slides at night like a part-time desktop publisher. That’s the sales tax: time and energy spent on non-selling work that steals capacity from revenue generation.

This is the Tollbooth Effect in action. You build momentum in discovery, then you hit the system’s plaza: CRM updates, meeting notes cleanup, searching old folders for case studies, and wrestling with presentation software. The deal cools while you “pay.” Your edge dulls, not because you can’t sell, but because the operating model forces you into manual labor at the worst possible moment.

The fix isn’t working harder. It’s changing the role you play in the workflow.

In the Producer Mindset, your highest value isn’t typing, formatting, or slide layout. Your highest values are judgment, strategy, and human connection, and those can’t be automated. Technology should lead on mechanics while you stay accountable for truth, tone, and impact. This is a tech-led, human-centric approach: AI accelerates the work, but you control the meaning.

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Admin Drag Is Killing Your Sales Capacity: How to Reclaim Selling Time With AI

Episode 23 of “AI Tools for Sales Pros” is built around a reality most leadership teams have started to feel in their gut. Buying AI does not increase revenue. It might increase activity, content volume, and dashboard noise, but revenue generation improves only when you reclaim selling time and redeploy it into the actions that move deals forward.

The executive version of the problem is simple. Your tech stack cost keeps rising. Your board wants proof that those investments translate into pipeline quality, cycle-time reduction, win-rate improvement, and improved margins. “Are we getting value?” is the polite question. “Where is the revenue?” is what they ask when patience runs out. This is a revenue management problem, not a software problem.

Most B2B companies are operating with a hidden productivity ceiling. Salespeople spend roughly a third of their time on revenue-producing work. The rest disappears into administrative drag: CRM updates, transcript cleanup, internal coordination, re-entering data across tools, searching for collateral, chasing security documentation, fixing records, and managing handoffs. None of that is value selling. Most of it is friction disguised as “process.”

A useful way to see it is the Tollbooth Effect. One approval feels reasonable. One form feels harmless. One handoff feels like good governance. Together, they turn selling into paperwork. The rep has a strong discovery call and a clear hypothesis. Momentum is real. Then they hit the toll plaza: systems require updates, internal teams need briefings, fields need to be filled, and the same information gets retyped because two systems disagree on the truth. By the time the rep finishes paying the tolls, urgency has cooled, follow-up becomes generic, and the deal loses its edge.

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