What expands a rep's selling capacity: more hours and activity, or greater effectiveness per motion?

Doug Adamic · Sep 8, 2023

A salesperson's effectiveness of movement, not hours worked, is what expands their capacity to sell more and earn more

If the rep leans on the playbook and follows the rules, they get more done in a day and can earn more even as territories shrink and quotas rise

Scope: assumes the leader has built a working playbook

18:29 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex

Doug Adamic · Sep 8, 2023

Reps who don't internalize the effectiveness mindset end up forcing deals and being dishonest with themselves about whether their activity actually advances their goal

Nobody wakes up wanting to work as hard as possible for as little payback as possible, so reps should evaluate each activity by whether it moves them closer to a bigger commission

19:59 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex

Harry Stebbings · Dec 13, 2023 · hedged

About eight calls with new prospects per week is the most a rep can do if they want to be genuinely prepared.

Scope: Harry is unsure of the exact number

5:41 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft

Harry Stebbings · May 9, 2026

Leverage, not raw volume, is what drives output — the same effort produces vastly more result once you have leverage

He used to send hundreds of sponsor emails with zero leverage; now with leverage the output from the same activity is far greater

Scope: drawn from his own experience selling podcast sponsorships

6:15 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify

Doug Adamic · Sep 8, 2023

When quotas rise and territories shrink, the only way for a rep to earn more is to go faster — lengthen your stride and quicken your step — and the leader's job is to remove what's blocking that

There is only one way to run faster regardless of tools or techniques; so diagnose what prevents it and remove those obstacles, then lean on tooling

Scope: manifests differently across teams

24:38 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex

John McMahon · Nov 28, 2025

A sales manager should default to ignoring internal paperwork and force anyone requesting something to justify why it's important, urgent, and how it helps reps sell more

His comp plan paid him when his reps sold, so anything not serving that was secondary; throwing out all the files and inbox paper and making people explain themselves taught him quickly what was genuinely important versus bureaucratic noise

34:37 20Sales: John McMahon on How to Hire, Train & Retain the Best Sales Reps | How Sales Changes in a World of AI | Sales Lessons from Snowflake and MongoDB | How to Create and Drive a Sales Process with Urgency

Matt Plank · Dec 20, 2024

Sheer work rate and hustle are a bigger competitive advantage in sales now than they were pre-COVID, because they used to be table stakes and are now less common

Before COVID everyone was in the office eight to six and grinding was simply what everybody did; now going a million miles an hour while you're in the arena differentiates you

Scope: means intensity of output while working, not working nights and weekends

64:13 20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank

Harry Stebbings · Mar 7, 2025 · hedged

Almost no salespeople actually do the extra self-directed work — staying late on Gong calls, seeking learning after hours, researching new AI tools for pipeline generation

That has been his own experience hiring

Scope: allows he may be hiring the wrong people; allows it may be a UK-specific effect

17:52 20Sales: Everything You Know About Sales Playbooks is Wrong | How to Hire and Train Your First Sales Hires | How to Crush Pipeline and Deal Reviews as a Team | How to Structure Sales Teams and Sales Comp Plans with Julian Teixeira, CRO @ 1Password

Harry Stebbings · Oct 23, 2024

New reps consistently prefer volume over depth in outbound, wanting to send a thousand messages instead of twenty well-crafted ones

4:31 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean

Carlos Delatorre · Jan 24, 2025

Excellence in pipeline generation roughly equals excellence in sales: a rep with a massive pipeline who fumbles parts of the sales cycle will still do well, while a rep who executes beautifully without enough pipeline will miss their number

Pipeline volume dominates execution quality in determining whether a rep hits quota

19:10 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness

Chris Degnan · Nov 10, 2023

Eight sales calls a week is the right number because it is the maximum that leaves time for follow-up and prospecting

Sales is a time-management problem: eight face-to-face calls still leaves room for follow-up emails, two to three net-new meetings, and prospecting

10:07 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake

Chris Degnan · Nov 10, 2023

The sales fundamentals that haven't changed are doing eight sales calls a week and becoming a student of what you sell.

52:14 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake

Sam Blond · Apr 12, 2024

Today's salespeople have gotten lazy — many work something like a 30-hour week waiting for leads — and that level of effort doesn't work at an early-stage startup

When he joined Brex in 2018 and at Zenefits, everyone worked 8am-to-midnight days and the business required it; separating and winning still requires that kind of hard work

67:34 Extreme hours and effort are required early stage