What Sales/Customer-facing Can Learn from Taking Charge of Adult ADHD
Carlos closed a great call with a promising lead on Monday, the kind of conversation that made the whole job feel worth it, and then didn't send the promised follow-up email until the following week, by which time the lead had signed with a competitor who'd simply replied faster. It wasn't the first deal lost to timing rather than pitch quality. Carlos was genuinely excellent in the room, warm, quick, persuasive, but the unglamorous tail of sales, logging the call, scheduling the follow-up, updating the pipeline, kept losing out to the next exciting conversation. His manager saw the pattern in the CRM data before Carlos admitted it: his pipeline told a story of strong openings and weak closings, and the gap wasn't skill, it was what happened right after he hung up the phone.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Why the best calls sometimes lose the deal
The energy a strong sales conversation demands can leave nothing in reserve for the executive-function-heavy task that follows immediately after, logging notes, scheduling the next touch, sending the promised material. It's not that follow-up doesn't matter to the salesperson; it's that the transition from an engaging live interaction to a solitary administrative task is exactly where the bridge between intention and action tends to buckle. Naming that transition as the actual point of failure changes what needs fixing.
Salespeople assume strong rapport alone should carry a deal, and treat follow-up as an afterthought rather than the moment that decides outcomes.
Before starting the next call, complete the follow-up task from the previous one, so nothing new begins until the last commitment is logged.
Capturing the promise before the next call starts
A promised follow-up that only exists in memory competes with every subsequent conversation for the rest of the day. Externalizing means logging the commitment into the CRM within minutes of hanging up, before moving to anything else, so the next action has a visible home instead of depending on recall hours or days later.
Notes get taken during the call but never transferred into an actionable, dated task, leaving good information stranded and useless.
Build a two-minute post-call ritual, log the note, set the next action, put a date on it, non-negotiable before the next call begins.
When lost deals become a confidence problem
A string of deals lost to slow follow-up rather than weak pitching can quietly convince a salesperson they're bad at the job, when the actual skill deficit is narrow. That misdiagnosis leads to over-investing in pitch technique while the real leak, the gap right after the call, goes unaddressed.
Managers coach on pitch skills when the CRM data points to a follow-up timing problem, wasting effort on the wrong fix.
Track time-to-follow-up as its own metric, separate from conversion rate, to see the real pattern instead of guessing at it.
Treating the pipeline as infrastructure, not memory
A sales pipeline works only when treated as the actual record of commitments rather than a supplement to memory. Building the habit of logging immediately, reviewing daily, and trusting the system over recollection isn't a one-time CRM training exercise; it's an ongoing discipline maintained deliberately as deal volume and complexity grow over a career.
The push to log everything immediately after a call can conflict with the momentum of riding a hot streak straight into the next conversation; protect two minutes for the log before the next call regardless, since a lost deal from a forgotten follow-up costs more than the momentum saved by skipping it.
Name one thing, honestly
Which recent deal slipped away not from a weak pitch but from a follow-up that came a day or two too late?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Track time-to-follow-up as its own metric, separate from conversion rate, to see the real pattern instead of guessing at it.