It's 6.15pm. The last client call finished an hour ago. You've got three follow-up emails to write, a proposal to tweak and notes to type up. And a CRM that wants every field filled in before it will let you close the deal.
The actual selling took forty minutes. The admin will take the rest of the evening.
Dave Brown leads go-to-market for Outreach across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. At aiblLIVE in London on 20 October, he summed up that feeling in one line.
"No salesperson in the history of the world has ever said, 'You know what, I wish I spent more time in my CRM.'"
The grunt work tax
Dave called it the grunt work tax, and he had the numbers.
Salesforce surveyed more than 4,000 sales professionals for its State of Sales research, published in February 2026. The average seller spends just 40% of their time actually selling. The rest goes on everything around it: research, admin, meeting prep, updating systems.
Dave added his own estimates for how the rest of the week goes. Somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour and three quarters researching a single account. Hours each week on meeting prep and on updating the CRM. Those are his figures, and Outreach sells the fix, so take them as a rough picture. But anyone who has sold anything will recognise it.
Research is no use without action
The most useful part of Dave's talk was a principle.
Research and reports are great, he said, "but it kind of means nothing without any action."
Lots of AI tools produce reports. Dashboards. Summaries of what your prospects are up to. Most of them get read once, if at all. Dave argued that the research should show up at the exact moment someone is doing the task. Writing the email, preparing for the call, deciding who to ring next. Information that arrives at the right moment gets used. Information that arrives in a weekly report gets filed.
He also said something every business owner should tape to the wall. "Your output is only ever going to be as good as your input."
And in the Q&A, when someone asked how to trust AI to update the CRM, his advice was sensible. Start with a person approving every update. Only switch the automation on once it's proved it gets things right.
When the owner is the salesperson
In a small business, the person selling is often the owner. You're also the marketer, the bookkeeper and the person who fixes the printer. So that 40% is probably generous.
The usual answer is to work longer. A better one is to give the grunt work to something else. AI is now good at a lot of it. Turning a call recording into notes and a follow-up email. Drafting a proposal from those notes. Pulling together what you need to know about a prospect before a meeting. Reminding you who you said you'd call back.
None of that replaces the conversation. It gives you more time for it.
What would it mean for your business if you got back even half a day a week from admin?
More calls with people who might buy. Better follow-up, because it actually gets done the same day. Evenings that belong to you again. For most small business owners that's worth more than any fancy new feature.
Maybe it's time you tried it after your next sales call. Record a two-minute voice note of what happened, and ask an AI tool to turn it into tidy notes, next steps and a follow-up email. How long would that take you, compared with your usual way?
