How William Shifrin Helps Sales Reps Win Back Their Selling Time

Introduction

The average sales rep spends just 30 percent of the week actually selling. That figure comes from Salesforce’s State of Sales report, which surveyed about 5,500 professionals in 27 countries. The other 70 percent vanishes into admin tasks, data entry, research, and CRM upkeep.

What’s striking is how little this has changed. Between 2022 and 2024, selling time rose only about two percentage points, even after years of heavy spending on sales technology. The gap also separates the best reps from the rest. Forrester research found that reps at teams beating 90 percent of quota spend about 34 percent of their time selling. At weaker teams, that figure is closer to 23 percent. In other words, how you spend your time is part of how well you perform.

For William Shifrin, that problem sits at the center of his entire workday. He’s an enterprise account executive who sells an AI and data platform at a major tech company. His view is that, time in front of customers is a seller’s scarcest resource, and almost everything else is overhead to cut. How he protects that time is a useful guide for anyone facing the same 70 percent.

Why The Time Gap Is Really A Performance Gap

It’s easy to treat admin work as a normal cost of the job. The data says otherwise. When top performers spend ten or more percentage points of their week in front of buyers than their peers do, the message is clear. How you spend your time drives results. The reason is obvious once you see it. Selling is the only activity that directly brings in revenue.

Logging notes, updating deal stages, hunting for a contact’s details, and rewriting the same email for the tenth time are all necessary. But every hour spent on them is an hour not spent on calls, relationships, or moving a deal forward. Over a full quarter, that adds up fast.

William Shifrin has taken this to heart, and it shapes his calendar by default. “Any time during my schedule I have open, I’m prospecting unless there is a really outstanding item,” he says. He doesn’t plan every minute the way some reps do, but the idea is the same. Open time is selling time, and anything that eats into it gets questioned.

Turning Admin Work Into Selling Time

William Shifrin manages about 700 accounts. At that volume, handling each one by hand is simply impossible. Like every seller, he felt the constant pull of CRM updates, research, and email drafting, the work that quietly swallows most of a week. His challenge was to stay personal across hundreds of accounts and hit quota every quarter, without letting admin work crowd out the live conversations that actually close deals.

So he built a workflow that automates and speeds up low-value tasks. He uses large language models to draft personalized outreach quickly. He automates CRM updates where he can. And he runs structured, sequenced outreach, so follow-ups show up on schedule instead of relying on memory. For each target account, he picks four to eight key people, loads them into the CRM, and lets a custom sequence handle the timing.

William Shifrin hits his quota every quarter while keeping his outreach genuinely personal. By shrinking the admin layer, he keeps more of his week free for the relationship work that, in his experience, separates a closed deal from a stalled one.

The Two Ways AI Buys Back Time

William Shifrin‘s strategy leans heavily on AI, but in specific ways. The first is CRM and workflow automation. “Updating the CRM can be automated,” he says, “so the amount of time you can save so you’re really focused on being in front of customers.” Data upkeep is one of the biggest silent drains on a seller’s week. Automating even part of it hands hours straight back to selling. The second is faster personalization. The old tension here was brutal. A truly personal message might take 15 minutes to write, which limits how many a rep can send.

Mass-automated messages are fast but get ignored. William Shifrin solves this by using AI to write tailored, opinionated messages quickly. He keeps the personal touch that earns replies and removes the drafting time that used to make it unsustainable. “There’s more clicking,” he admits of the hands-on approach, “but I think it’s a better way if you have a good message.” This matches what the wider industry expects. Sellers believe AI assistants will sharply cut the time spent on research and email drafting, so they can do far less of it by hand.

Time Management Is A Skill

One of William Shifrin‘s main points is that managing time well is a skill you can learn, and that newer reps tend to underrate it. “Time management is so important,” he says when asked what advice he’d give people earlier in their careers. “There is a volume aspect to this, and using your time properly is part of that.”

He’s honest that he doesn’t follow the strictest version of calendar planning, where every minute is assigned in advance. His system suggests, guard open time, default to prospecting, and let something interrupt only if it’s truly urgent. The key is to treat unstructured time as an asset to invest. He also pairs speed with measurement. He tracks his outreach closely so his effort flows toward what actually converts. The goal is to make sure the time he recovers goes into the activities that pay off most. Speed without direction just produces more low-value work.

More Time For The Human Work

For William Shifrin, winning back selling time serves something he sees as the real edge in a market flooded with automation, that is, human connection. As automated messages fill every channel, a prepared, genuinely helpful conversation becomes rare, and rare is an advantage.

That’s the logic tying his whole approach together. Automate the busywork, recover the hours, and pour them into discovery, trust, and relationships. “People buy from people they like,” he says. The 70 percent problem matters because solving it makes room for the work that wins.

Conclusion

The 70 percent problem is one of the most stubborn and costly realities in modern sales. Years of new tools have barely changed how much of a seller’s week reaches an actual customer. And the data shows that the reps who close that gap tend to outperform the ones who don’t. The lesson is to cut the low-value work that crowds out the high-value work.

William Shifrin‘s approach comes down to a simple rule. Automate or speed up anything that doesn’t need a human. Protect open time as selling time. Measure what converts. Then reinvest the saved hours into relationships. Any seller can do this, as long as they treat their calendar as a portfolio rather than an inbox. In a profession being reshaped by automation, the winners will be the ones, like William Shifrin, who use those tools to buy back time and spend it where it counts, which is, in front of the customer.

FAQs

Why do salespeople spend so little time actually selling?

ANS: Salesforce’s research blames the roughly 70 percent of non-selling time on admin work, CRM data entry, research, and email drafting. These tasks are necessary but don’t bring in revenue, and they pile up fast, especially for reps with large account books like Shifrin’s 700 accounts.

How much does selling time really affect performance?

ANS: Forrester data shows reps at teams beating 90 percent of quota spend about 34 percent of their time selling, compared with roughly 23 percent at weaker teams. Time and results are closely linked, which is why Shifrin treats open time as selling time by default.

What’s the best way to use AI to reclaim selling time?

ANS: Shifrin focuses on two things, automating CRM updates and routine tasks, and using AI to write personalized outreach quickly. Together they target the biggest admin drains and return hours to live customer conversations, without losing the personal touch.

Does Shifrin recommend scheduling every minute of the day?

ANS: No, he prefers a lighter system. Protect open time, default to prospecting, and let only a truly urgent item interrupt that. The mindset matters more than the method. Treat unstructured time as something to invest on purpose.

Isn’t faster outreach just more spam?

ANS: Only if speed replaces relevance. Shifrin pairs faster drafting with personalization and analytics. He uses AI to write tailored messages quickly while tracking which ones actually lead to meetings. The aim is to reinvest saved time into outreach that’s genuinely relevant.