Faster sales reps sell more

Gong Labs analyzed millions of sales interactions and found more responsive sales reps close more deals. According to Gong’s Director of Strategy, Sunny Huang, “Top reps are not just the most urgent. They’re the most consistent in their urgency.” 

This chart from one sales team (the names have been removed to protect the innocent) shows how often reps respond to customers within 24 hours. There is an undeniable connection between reps who respond to customers with speed and reps who close the most revenue 👇 (Rep 1 closed the most, Rep 9 closed the least) 

Is it causation or correlation? My gut says it’s causal. We can’t be sure but there are some things I do know: 

Momentum psychology is real: Buyer enthusiasm decays. Quickly delivering the email/quote/answers you promised keeps the dopamine spike from the call alive. You can replicate this psychology across almost any profession or market, including in stock price movements. 

Your job is to flip your champion from buyer to internal seller: Your initial contact must often pitch your solution to peers and bosses after your call. If your follow‑up lands in their inbox before their next meeting, you’re enabling your champion to sell your product better. You’ve become their partner in that effort. 

Responsiveness signals trust: Good sellers make sure buyers have skin in the game. If you’re asking for a meaningful commitment, they’re more likely to invest time and reputational capital if they believe you have their back. 

Micro‑commitment loops have always worked for me: A quick response lets you ask for micro‑next‑steps (e.g. stakeholder intro, internal doc access) while the buyer is still in “yes” mode, creating a virtuous cycle that helps move your deal forward. 

Competitors can’t keep up if you’re moving too fast: Fast follow‑ups shorten the window in which other vendors can sneak in and steal mindshare. 

President’s Club reps know and live this. And every buyer who’s ever waited three days for a meeting recap can attest: speed is a competitive advantage. I personally have a strong belief in speed as a differentiator. 

And yet, I have a question…

Broken sales math

This is my real calendar from last week 👇

When exactly am I supposed to create price quotes, build ROI presentations ,send follow-up emails, update the CRM, spend time on “personalized” outbound, build account plans, go to conferences, spend time building connective tissue with our team, prep for calls, complete security questionnaires… When?? Over the years it’s become an absolute frustration with “the system” that we all operate in. 

I love having a full schedule. Meetings are how I build relationships, uncover painful problems I can solve, and deliver “aha” moments with our product. Back-to-back-to-back-to-back is the best way to be. We’re lucky to have full calendars at Tango.  

But if you’re back-to-back, how do you achieve speed of action with prospects and customers, while still making time for everything else?

Sales reps have an activity / time calculus problem to solve on a weekly basis. For most sellers, the math simply doesn’t math.

For every 45-minute customer meeting, I generally have 45 minutes more work that needs to get done, quickly: 

• 15 minutes of pre-meeting research and prep work 
• 15 minutes of post-meeting CRM updates 
• 15 minutes to write a follow-up email 

If I need to send a price quote, introduce myself to a new stakeholder, or summarize a specific technical question for my sales engineer, it can be a lot more. 

Last week I had almost 25 hours of meetings. Take out 3 hours of internal meetings, assume a conservative 1:1 ratio of admin and follow-up time to meeting time, and you get 47 hours. That does not include lunch, coffee breaks, and commute, let alone time for prospecting, strategizing on deals with my team, or reflecting and learning. 47 hours is the bare minimum. Survival.

So - when do I update our CRM, build quotes, and write follow-up emails? The answer for me personally for years was to do it at night after I put the kids to bed, or Friday afternoon when things slowed down, or on the weekends. Am I OK working nights and weekends? I think this is fine sometimes, like end of quarter, but I don’t think it should be the norm. This isn’t because I don’t believe in the value of hard work, or in working a lot - I’m sadly a bit of a workaholic. Broken sales math creates a bigger problem: customers are left waiting. 

Slower sales reps sell less

Time kills deals. And it happens faster than we want to believe. This story from Brandon 👇 hit me hard because I thought of all of the times I waited a day or two to follow up after a great meeting. 

5 months ago we started something new that’s helping us move faster. 

Speed60 method explained

Speed60 compresses 4 core tasks into a single 60-minute block so customers get every follow-up we promised right after the meeting. 

1. Prep for my next customer 5 minutes
2. Meet with my customer 45 minutes
3. Create a price quote and get deal desk approval 5 minutes
4. Update my CRM and send a follow-up email 5 minutes

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I can already hear your brain and it’s retorts: “Chris, you’re full of shit. If I could update my CRM, create a price quote, get deal desk approval, and write a follow up email in 10 minutes I wouldn’t have a problem to begin with.” True 😁

To make this work, we use an important grouping of software tools - some you already have and 1-2 you may not be using yet:

• CRM (we use HubSpot) 
• Web conferencing (we use Zoom) 
• Meeting recorder (we use Grain) 
• CRM agent (we use Tango) 
• AI copilot (we use ChatGPT)  

Here’s a full breakdown of what I do at each step. 

Prep for my next customer

“Next play.” This was the mantra of CEO Jeff Weiner and our sales leadership team at LinkedIn when I worked there 10 years ago. It’s from the great Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski (Coach K). It’s a reminder that whatever happened on your “last play” - good, bad, ugly, someone cussed you out for cold calling them - is in the past. The most positive thing you can do is focus on your “next play”. Move forward with purpose. It’s a mantra that has helped me navigate difficult scenarios, and I repeat it to my teams today. 

So, when I’m zen and ready to go, I open my Tango CRM agent and click the meeting prep automation and Tango: 

• Extracts pre-defined inputs from our CRM records (contact, company, deal, and quote) and previous calls and emails with the customer
• Inserts those inputs into a pre-written prompt and then 
• Opens ChatGPT and types in the prompt for me

Then GPT delivers a customized, succinct report of just the things I care about. The whole thing takes about 2 minutes. 

I used to do this step with just GPT, but I like using Tango for a few reasons:

• It pulls information from all of internal systems so the ChatGPT prompt is smarter
• It standardizes our current best prompt across all of our sales reps. When we come up with a new idea, I just type it into the Tango automation and everyone on the team gets it instantly - without even realizing it. 
• It does all of the clicking, typing and tab switching for me so it’s quite a bit faster than me doing it myself. 

Meet with my customer for 45 minutes

AI meeting recorders have had a profound effect on B2B selling for one simple reason. Before, you had to take notes during your customer calls or risk letting critical details slip through the cracks. Now, I stay completely engaged in the conversation and focus on asking the right questions instead of writing down answers. Our call recorder summarizes key points and organizes them according to general MEDDICC discovery categories. 

To my surprise, I still meet a lot of sales teams who aren’t using AI to summarize their calls. In the past, Gong and Chorus were the only options and they were quite expensive. But in the last 5 years lots of options have popped up - many of them very affordable - so there’s no excuse today not to use one of these. 

Update my CRM and send follow-up email

This is where I used to get really backed up. 

For context, I’m not one of those salespeople that complains about our CRM. I speak to sales operations managers every day saying “sales reps don’t use our CRM because they don’t understand the business value.” Not me. I understand the importance of everything we do in our CRM. And yet I still found myself procrastinating this work every day 😁. Honestly, I hated it. 

Today, I just run the “post-call follow-up” automation in my CRM agent and Tango: 

• Organizes call notes and next steps according to our custom MEDDPICC prompts
• Analyzes all of the current customer context and suggests whether my deal is ready to progress to the next pipeline stage
• Identifies risks and creates tasks for me to follow-up on them
• Previews everything for me so I can add or edit anything it missed 

I like using Tango, instead of manually copying and pasting everything from Grain, because the Tango agent:

• Maps every detail to the precise field automatically 
• Ops team is constantly updating our CRM properties, the process and the Tango automation but I don’t need to know
• Gives me suggestions and warns me of risks BEFORE I take any action that has management or customer visibility

It takes 2 minutes and it feels good to get it out of the way. Plus now everything is fresh on my mind for the 2-3 critical inputs I need to look at carefully. Brandon’s point about forgetting everything the next day doesn’t just apply to customers. Of course your MEDDPICC notes are going to be vague if you enter them the next day. You’ve forgotten all of the little details by then. 

An amazing sales enablement leader I know, Joey Papania, calls it “the forgetting curve.” Studies show people on average forget ~50% of new information within an hour and ~75% after 24 hours. 

The forgetting curve hurts the quality of your follow-up emails too. Without exact pains, numbers, and verbatim quotes, your recap emails end up reading like a template, which isn’t doing you or your champion any favors. 

Tango writes follow-up emails for me too. It uses a custom prompt as a template but the AI incorporates key points from the call so every email is highly customized. I’ve had several customers reply and say “I’m amazed you wrote this so quickly.” 

I’ve used other sales email tools - some are good - but I like Tango because it keeps everything inside HubSpot and Gmail so there’s no separate user interface I need to deal with. 

PRO TIP: Measure “Responsiveness” i.e. after a meeting, how many minutes does it take for your team to follow-up, OR, when an email is received, how many minutes does it take to reply. You can’t improve what you don’t measure so we track the minutes from Zoom hang-up to “recap email sent” and discuss it in every team meeting.  It’s one of our “north star” metrics.  

Create a price quote and get deal desk approval

If responsiveness is the pulse, time-to-price-quote (TTPQ) is the blood pressure - it’s the #1 leading indicator of your responsiveness and an area that most teams need to improve. Why measure this one particular item separately from all of the other follow-up deliverables? Because the price quote represents a critical, often frustrating part of the process for customers. They’re used to sales reps playing games and putting up obstacles between them and the information they want. We have limited but not complete pricing on our website so our goal on the sales team is to get pricing to customers ASAP once we have enough information. 

When it’s time to send pricing, I click the “create quote” automation in Tango and the agent:

• Analyzes the call as well as past calls and emails and suggests products the customer is interested in. 
• Autofills Company and Contact information into the quote for me. 
• Guides me through the process of clicking all of the right buttons and selecting all of the right options so I don’t forget anything. 

The biggest barrier to getting a quote out for some teams is deal desk approval. A good deal desk function is a value add - helping sales reps strategize and solve problems, while also protecting the company from risk. But most deal desks teams I’ve seen are understaffed so it can take days to get approval - especially if there’s any back-and-forth. Queue Slack thread nightmares. 

This is why I like Tango: Our RevOps and Finance teams trained Tango on all of our standard discounting and bundling scenarios so I can get an approval in real-time on about 70% of my quotes. The other 30% still go to our Slack channel for manual approval but I get a much faster response now because they aren’t overloaded. 

Let me know what you think

I would love to hear from you. Do you agree faster sales reps sell more? Are you tracking time-to-price-quote? What tools are you using to speed up CRM updates and respond to customers faster? 

I'm sharing our Speed60 playbook on Thursday, July 10th at 10am Pacific. Every process, prompt and automation we use. Register and I'll send you all of the resources, even if you cant make it live.