I’ve been watching the sales profession for over four decades, and lately, I find myself thinking about a conversation I had with my uncle who sold insurance door-to-door. He carried nothing but a leather briefcase, a fountain pen, and an intimate knowledge of every family on his route. He spent nearly all his time talking to people, understanding their fears about the future, their dreams for their children.
Today’s salespeople, armed with more technology than NASA had when they put a man on the moon, spend a startling portion of their day doing everything except selling. According to CSO Insights research, salespeople now spend only 41 percent of their time selling by phone or face-to-face, down from 46 percent just five years earlier. Think about that: as we’ve added more “productivity” tools, we’ve somehow made salespeople less productive at their core function.
This week, I interviewed Kartik Pasumarti, VP of Revenue & Operations from ShareCRM, and his insights crystallized something that’s been nagging at me. We’ve created what he calls “digital busy work” – a kind of technological hamster wheel where salespeople run faster and faster while moving further away from actual human connection.
The irony is uncanny. Every CRM promised to free up time for selling. Every automation tool claimed it would eliminate administrative work. Every AI assistant pledged to handle the mundane so humans could focus on relationship building. Yet here we are, with sales professionals spending only 41% of their time on actual selling activities, trapped in a maze of data entry, report generation, and system maintenance.
I’m reminded of something the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote about modern life – how we mistake motion for progress, activity for achievement. He said, “In a world where nothing is meant to last, it is safer to move than to stay.” Today’s sales teams are incredibly busy, frantically updating opportunity stages, logging call outcomes, and generating pipeline reports. But they’re doing less of what actually matters: understanding customers’ deepest problems and crafting solutions that transform businesses.
What struck me most about my conversation with Kartik was his description of ShareCRM’s “ambient intelligence” – technology that finally works the way we always hoped it would. Instead of demanding that salespeople adapt to rigid systems, it adapts to how humans naturally work. It listens to conversations, extracts insights, and updates records without anyone lifting a finger. It’s technology as servant, not master.
But here’s what really excites me: when I asked about results, Kartik mentioned that his clients save 15 hours per week – time that flows directly back into customer-facing activities. Fifteen hours. That’s not an incremental improvement; it’s revolutionary. It’s the difference between a salesperson being a data entry clerk who occasionally talks to customers and being a trusted advisor who occasionally updates a system.
The broader lesson here transcends sales. We’ve spent two decades digitizing everything without questioning whether digitization itself was the goal. We’ve confused the quantification of work with the quality of work. We’ve built systems that generate impressive dashboards while starving the meaningful human conversations that actually accelerate business.
Today’s most successful salespeople use AI powered CRM solutions like ShareCRM that creates up -to-the-minute playbooks to enhance their understanding of customer challenges.
The companies that will win in the coming decade will be the ones that use this modern technology to amplify human wisdom, not replace it. They’ll recognize that selling isn’t about managing data – it’s about managing hope, fear, expectations, ambition, and trust.
It’s time we reclaimed technology as a servant of relationships, not their master.
To view the interview with Kartik, click here: https://tinyurl.com/KartikInerview
To learn more about ShareCRM, click here: https://www.sharecrm.com/ To hear Kartik speak at the Global Revenue Acceleration Summit on June 25-26th register free today: https://tinyurl.com/KartikSpeaks
Today’s blog post is by Gerhard Gschwandtner, Founder and CEO of Selling Power.
