90 minutes of meetings cost him four hours

"The expectation is 50 calls a day. But we're spending hours watching training videos and sitting in meetings. How am I supposed to hit 50 calls a day?"

That's a rep I coach a couple months into the sales job. We'll call him Marcus.

He wasn't complaining. He led with what he'd already done, 32 calls the day before, in the gaps he could find. He was asking the question like a guy trying to solve a problem, not create one.

So, we opened his calendar and walked through it.

Monday: 4.5 hours of internal meetings.

Tuesday: 3 hours of meetings, asked to watch 90 minutes of video training.

Wednesday: 3 hours of meetings, spread out over 6 hours with 30 minutes between each.

Thursday: Work with marketing to get a campaign going out.

The meetings were all legitimate, not obvious time wasters. The training was relevant. The campaign was real work that needed to get done.

Then we did the other side of the ledger.

For an outside sales rep doing higher level business development, fifty calls a day accounts for about 4-5 hours. You're calling a more targeted list, looking people up on LinkedIn, and identifying a relevant reason to call with some research before picking up the phone.

4-5 hours of calling, on a day that already had three hours of meetings and 90 minutes of training in it.

Fifty was never an aggressive number. It just didn't fit. And nobody in that business had ever sat down and added it up.

Even worse, the meetings weren't stacked, they were scattered. Wednesday's 3 hours of meetings were spread across 6 hours of calendar, which means the 3 hours left over came in 30-minute pieces. And you'll see in a minute what a 30-minute slot is worth.

Paul Graham co-founded Y Combinator, the startup accelerator behind Airbnb, Stripe, and Dropbox. In 2009 he published a short essay called "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule," and it's short enough to read in five minutes.

His argument goes like this.

Managers run on an appointment book. The day is cut into one-hour boxes and any box is interchangeable with any other. Something needs discussing, you find an open slot and drop it in. The cost of a meeting is one hour. That's it.

People who make things run on a completely different schedule. They need time in half-day units. As Graham put it: "You can't write or program well in units of an hour." It takes time to warm up, get into the flow, and the real results come 30, 60, 90 minutes in.

Drop a few 30-minute meetings in the first half of the day, and that half is largely shot. They can't get anything meaningful done in the 30-minute gaps.

The manager can't see it, because from his standpoint, every slot is equally valuable. He has no idea that 90 minutes of meetings threw off 4 hours of productivity.

Graham wrote it primarily about programmers. But it describes a salesperson's day precisely, and almost nobody organizes a sales team like it's true.

The default assumption is that salespeople live on the manager's schedule, because they're in meetings all day anyway. What's one more?

And the meetings aren't completely worthless. They add some context to help that person sell.

The sales guy should know what marketing is up to. Add him to the weekly marketing meeting. He should hear what's happening in the weekly L10. Invite him to that. You want to see how things are going and have a 30-minute window tomorrow? Shoot him an invite.

It's well intended, but what you can't see from that seat is the opportunity cost, for your salesperson and your business. The pieces of value he gets from being in those meetings are dwarfed by the cost of everything he didn't do during that time.

The meetings that make you money aren't the internal ones.

A manager creates value for the business in meetings with his own team. A salesperson creates value for the business in meetings with other businesses. Both of those are real work. They just can't happen in the same hour, and the P&L only shows one of them.

I'm not arguing salespeople shouldn't be in internal meetings. Pipeline reviews, call reviews, one-on-ones, training — that's how people get better, and I run all of it.

I'm arguing that a rep's calendar needs to be built like a developer's calendar. Long, protected, uninterrupted blocks. Because the work doesn't fit in the cracks.

Think about what happens in a 30-minute gap between meetings. Your salesperson pulls up the CRM. He finds where he left off. He reads the notes, recalls what happened with a particular account, who he talked to, what the prospect said. He picks up the phone, makes a call, leaves a voicemail, and sends an email. Ten minutes until the next meeting, not worth diving into a new one, so he pauses and waits for the next meeting.

Marcus can make 10 calls in an hour when he's in a block. In a 30-minute gap he might get 2, badly. Hell, he might hope the second person doesn't answer so he doesn't show up late to the next meeting.

Sit down with your rep and do the arithmetic out loud. How long does the activity truly take, and how many hours exist on the calendar after everything else you've assigned. If the answer doesn't work, you have a math problem, not a performance problem.

Then:

Stack the internal stuff. Put meetings back to back on designated days rather than sprinkling them across the week. Graham's own fix at Y Combinator was to cluster all his meetings into set office hours and leave the rest of the day alone. Monday and Tuesday heavy, the rest of the week protected, works fine.

Block the call times out. Get dedicated call blocks on the calendar, marked as busy, and protect them like you would a meeting with a client — non-negotiable. And pick the times that are best for selling, not the times that fit around meetings.

Move to weekly targets instead of daily. Marcus's own suggestion, and it's a good one. Fifty a day turns every meeting-heavy Monday into a failure. Two-fifty a week lets him load the back half and hit the number.

Agree out loud on what breaks a block. Whether you're reading this as the manager or the maker, make it a point to have a candid discussion about what justifies taking a block of time on the calendar. A client emergency, sure. Somebody wanting to chat, no.

A blocked calendar that everyone ignores still adds no value to the business.

If your rep is in a lot of meetings because you're not sure he's doing the job, meetings won't fix the problem. Every hour you pull him in to check on him is an hour he can't spend doing the thing you're checking on. You've built a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What you want is visibility without the meeting. You don't call a meeting with your tech team to find out whether a ticket got closed, do you? You open the PSA and look. It's asynchronous communication.

Your pipeline should work the same way. A CRM you can open on your own time, a daily check, a spreadsheet tracker. Anything that doesn't cost the rep a block of his day. Then a regularly scheduled check-in with one question: anything in your way I can clear?

If you hired a real hunter, this is also what keeps him there. The last thing a good hunter wants is to sit in meetings all day.

Everything above assumes you've got reps. Plenty of you don't. You're the owner, and you're still the best salesperson in the company.

Which means you've got a harder version of this problem, because you're the maker and the manager at the same time — and the manager in you keeps booking over the maker in you.

Look at what a week does to you. Client escalation Monday morning. A vendor call. The L10. Your tech lead needs 20 minutes. Somebody wants to "grab time." A quote that has to go out. Every one of those is real, and most of them genuinely need you.

So the selling happens in whatever's left. Follow-up on a deal you presented three weeks ago, squeezed into the 25 minutes before a 2 o'clock. Outreach that gets pushed to Friday, then to next week, then never.

You already know what that does to a pipeline. It's the same thing it does to Marcus's call count.

The fix is what I call a perfect week, and you build it backwards.

Open a blank week on your calendar. Not next week — a blank one. Then place the blocks you'd put down if nothing else existed. When would you prospect? When would you do deal follow-up? When would you take first appointments? Where in the day are you sharp enough to run a discovery call?

That's your perfect week. Now go put those blocks on the real calendar, recurring, four or six weeks out.

And then let everything else stack up around them.

You've got to be proactive about protecting your time. No one else will do it for you. You can't decline your way into a real block of dedicated time. If you leave the time open and plan to protect it when something comes at you, you will lose — because the request always feels urgent and specific, and the empty block just looks empty. You have to claim it before anyone asks for it.

Nobody books over a meeting that's already there. They book over white space.

What bothered me about that conversation with Marcus was that the business had asked for a number, then built a week where the number couldn't fit — and if we'd never done the math, he'd have missed it, and the story would have been that he wasn't hustling.

Do the math. On your reps, if you have them.

Then open your own calendar and do it on yourself, because I'd bet money the selling time in there is whatever survived after everyone else got a turn.

Your calendar already decided how much you're going to sell this quarter. Somebody built it. Make sure it was you.

Adios,

Ray

P.S. — If this email didn't convince you of the makers vs. managers schedule, and Paul Graham's OG article didn't do it, give this video from Alex Hormozi a watch. He cites the same article for how he structures his own day: