Here’s Why You Need to Waste More Time

A couple of years ago, there was a boat show near my home, and I happened to have some free time. I’d been thinking about buying a boat for a while, and I thought it would be fun to wander a bit and see what was out there.

Something that really struck me at the time was that on every boat I boarded, there was a salesperson who wanted to tell me about the extraordinary features of their boat. They didn’t pause to get to know me; they simply launched into their pitch the moment there was an opening. This meant that they were consistently pitching me on features I didn’t care about, and leaving me to sort out what mattered to me, with very little real information to base my decisions on.

I wrote about that experience at the time, naming five bad assumptions those salespeople all made about me. But I got to thinking about it again recently when I read something Dave Brock posted on LinkedIn, about “wasting time” with customers. That article made me realize that those boat salespeople were so focused on efficiently conveying information, that they forgot the value of unhurried, “unproductive” time.

Speed Doesn’t Always Win

Imagine someone who goes to a boat show unsure what they want exactly but open to look. They’re attracted to the sleekest boats in the dock and board several of them to look around. On each boat, the salesperson gets excited at the potential sale and jumps right into pitching their features, focusing on how fast their boat is and how much horsepower its engine has. The buyer falls in love with one of these speedy boats, and goes home to tell their spouse they want to buy it.

The spouse says, “What are you talking about? That boat only has room for two people, and we have kids. And I thought you wanted to go on long expeditions. That one doesn’t have anywhere to sleep or cook meals or store our belongings.”

The buyer cools down fast. They realize they didn’t know what they didn’t know: That their spouse also had expectations and that they didn’t match their own. And the seller certainly didn’t know what they didn’t know, because they never asked. As a result, no one gets what they want and the status quo wins.

Unhurried Time Is the Engine of Discovery

Now imagine a different scenario, in which the salesperson, instead of taking the fast, efficient route straight to pitching features, slows down and gets to know the buyer. What if they “waste” time in an unhurried way, and learn that the buyer has a spouse and kids. They ask questions, and uncover the information that they, the seller, could not possibly have known without this unhurried time.

Together, they develop a shared mental model of what the buyer actually needs in a boat. It happens that they have another model that isn’t as fast, and not quite as sleek–but has enough bunks for an entire family, is fast enough to be fun, and includes other features the buyer didn’t even know they might want.

This salesperson tells the buyer to go get their spouse and kids, and bring them over to have a look at this model. The buyer comes back with their family, the kids fall in love with the little bunk beds with their portholes, the spouse falls in love with the comfortable captain chairs on the deck, and the buyer… buys.

The seller didn’t know what they didn’t know about the buyer’s situation until they asked. Until they had enough unstructured time to come to understand the human in front of them. And the buyer didn’t know what they didn’t know until the seller asked good questions that helped them understand what they really needed, and not what they thought they needed.

High Efficiency Can Kill Complex Deals

Brock’s post that got me thinking about this was a response to a piece by Vivek Murthy talking about the value of “wasted time” for building relationships. In it, Murthy says that a hyper focus on efficiency “can quietly hollow out the texture of our lives.”

The same thing is true in complex sales. When we get hyper-focused on automation and AI-assisted efficiency, we can hollow out the texture of the projects we work on and the humans we interact with. When we flatten each relationship into a series of “optimized” communications, we forget to have real conversations, to explore the lived texture of the project and how it relates to the buyer’s real needs.

When we get hyper-focused on efficiency, we hollow out the texture of our work.

We miss out on everything that we don’t know that we don’t know. And, worse, the buyer does too. We leave them swimming in a sea of information that they have no context to understand. A buyer might only purchase your software or product once or twice in their career. The salesperson representing that product might sell it several times a month. The salesperson is the expert, and the buyer and the seller both lose when the seller doesn’t take time to listen, respond, and help the buyer align their vision with a solution that truly meets their needs.

Without the texture of human connection, we find ourselves competing to be faster and cheaper and more efficient, to apply AI tools to reach more people in less time… instead of building shared value that help buyers make good decisions that are beneficial to them, and to us.

“Unproductive” Time Can Be The Most Productive Time

If you ask buyers if they feel that time with salespeople is productive, most of them will say no. Why is this? Because most sellers are so focused on being efficient, that they forget to make their conversations valuable to the buyer.

An effective selling team leverages their own knowledge and the power of unhurried time to facilitate high value conversations. Conversations that help the buyer ask the right questions, seek the right information, connect with the right stakeholders, and develop a shared mental model and solution that is aligned, clear, and easy to say “yes” to.

At a time when everything is accelerating in speed, with generative AI making communications lightning fast, and everyone rushing to be first, unhurried time can feel like a waste. But sometimes, the “wasted” time is actually the most valuable.

Think back. When was the last time someone on your sales team slowed down enough to really understand a buyer? And what was revealed in that conversation they couldn’t have known they didn’t know?