Sales Leaders Manage the One Thing We Can’t Create More Of: Time
If you’re a sales leader, the one thing you’re managing every day is time. It’s the one thing you can’t make more of.” – Stu Pike, VP & COO, ServiceNow APAC
Everyone feels busy. There’s always more meetings, more systems, more handoffs, more reporting, and crucially, more people involved in every deal than ever before.
Yet despite all that activity, many organisations aren’t moving any faster.
In our latest Get Amplified podcast, Stu Pike, VP & COO at ServiceNow APAC, explains why. After more than 30 years leading sales organisations, he’s convinced the biggest obstacle to growth isn’t effort, it’s friction. And most of that friction is designed into the way we work.
Most sales motions weren’t built for today’s buyers
Many go-to-market organisations still operate as a series of disconnected functions. Marketing generates leads. Sales qualify. Solutions consult. Customer Success takes over after the contract is signed. Each team does great work, but every handoff creates an opportunity for knowledge to disappear.
Customer context gets lost and discovery conversations get repeated. Internal teams spend more time catching each other up than helping customers move forward.
All of this takes time and is slowing deals down. Teams are working harder to become more effective. As Stu puts it, we often design our operating model around our organisational chart rather than around how customers actually make decisions.
The simplest question every leader should ask
One of the most practical ideas Stu shares is to take your customer journey and map it from first conversation through to value realisation. Then ask one question at every handoff:
“What does the next person not know that the previous person does?”
Every answer exposes friction. Maybe it’s buying history, or the customer’s real business challenge. Maybe it’s political context inside the account. Or simply lack of understanding why the opportunity exists in the first place. Those knowledge gaps are slowing down deal momentum. It’s also where AI can make the biggest difference.
AI isn’t the strategy. Removing friction is.
There’s no shortage of AI tools promising to transform sales, but technology alone doesn’t solve poor processes. Stu argues that the opportunity isn’t simply automating work. It’s preserving customer context so every conversation starts further ahead than the last.
Instead of asking customers to repeat themselves, teams can build on previous conversations. Instead of spending hours researching accounts, information arrives when it’s needed. Instead of managers chasing CRM updates, AI can help maintain cleaner, more complete data that improves coaching and forecasting. Done well, AI raises the performance floor across the organisation, making great insight available to everyone rather than just your highest performers.
Adoption starts with people, not technology
Many AI programmes fail for exactly the same reason as other transformation projects. Leaders focus on deploying software instead of changing behaviour.
Stu sees three broad groups in every organisation:
- The early adopters who embrace new technology immediately.
- The curious majority who need examples and encouragement.
- The sceptics who aren’t convinced change is necessary.
The biggest breakthrough rarely comes from formal training. It happens when someone the team respects demonstrates how AI genuinely helped them save time or improve customer conversations.
That creates trust. And trust spreads adoption much faster than mandates ever will.
Better leaders spend less time inspecting and more time coaching
One of the most interesting shifts AI enables isn’t for sellers, it’s for managers.
Much of today’s sales management still revolves around inspecting deals. Are CRM fields complete? Has the opportunity progressed? Have the right approvals happened?
If AI can automate much of that administrative work, leaders gain time to coach, to develop people and to help teams think more strategically about customers instead of simply reviewing pipeline. That’s where performance really improves.
Time is the competitive advantage
Ultimately, Stu believes AI should never replace human relationships. It should protect them. Every hour saved on administration becomes another hour spent with customers.
For sales leaders, that’s perhaps the most important measure of success. Because while organisations can hire more people, buy more technology and create more process, none of us can create more time.
Maybe that’s the metric we should all be optimising.
Want to hear the full conversation?
Listen to the latest episode of Get Amplified with Stu Pike, where we explore why the future of sales isn’t about adding more activity, it’s about removing friction, designing around the customer, and giving your teams back the one resource they’ll never have enough of: time.
