“Hey, just one quick question. Can you tell me this one thing? Just this.” For 25 years, the salespeople I mentored filled my calendar with that sentence. Three minutes here, five minutes there. All the time. Customers and urgent problems came first, and then I had to deal with this as well. Every question broke my train of thought. It drove me crazy.
There is a number for this, too. Gloria Mark of the University of California found that people get back to interrupted work only after 23 minutes on average, doing everything else in between. The question takes three minutes. The interruption takes 23.
They weren’t being annoying. They wanted to check with me before making a mistake. The problem was that my calendar was the only place where the answer lived.
This autumn I tried to move the answers out of my calendar and into a machine. The first person the machine had to onboard wasn’t the new salesperson. It was me.
At FrodX, we handed the onboarding of our new Kinetara salesperson to Claude. First, it went through 16 of my recorded meetings, along with our proposals and presentations. Then it came back with questions I should have been able to answer in my sleep. How much does the package cost? What is a pilot? How much discount can a salesperson give without me?
For some of them, I had three answers. Our proposals contained three different price lists. One Wednesday evening, I made 28 decisions I should have made years ago.
That’s when it became clear to me: AI doesn’t onboard the newcomer first. It onboards the company. A newcomer who studied a folder of old proposals didn’t learn the price from three price lists. They learned that price was a matter of mood.
For twenty years, the US-based Bridge Group has measured how long it takes a salesperson at a B2B company to reach full quota. This year, it’s 6.2 months, the longest in the history of their research. And that is in years when companies were buying CRMs, calling tools and AI assistants, and hiring more experienced salespeople: today they ask a new hire for 3.7 years of experience on average, a year more than in 2022.
The tools sped up access to data, not to knowledge. The CRM tells you that a customer received a proposal. It doesn’t tell you why the price in it was different from the one before.
If you’re a CEO who still sells, and sells well, you know this ceiling. Your method works. But it lives in one head, and that head has a calendar.
The sequence hasn’t changed: first you watch, then you work alongside someone, then you do it on your own. What has changed is what you learn from. Instead of a folder of old proposals, the new salesperson gets five recorded meetings, one for each industry they’ll be targeting, with the chapters marked. Instead of anecdotes, they get objections with my answers, word for word. We pulled 11 of them out of the recordings in a single day. For 25 years, that knowledge arrived drop by drop, three minutes at a time. Instead of “ask Igor”, they get a CRM that holds the full history of every deal.
And they get a twin: a mentor in their own Claude that reads the knowledge base of my rules. When they have a question, they don’t wait for a free slot in my calendar. They ask, and they get the answer right away. Whatever the twin doesn’t know, it sends to me. My answer goes into the knowledge base, and next time it knows. They get the answer sooner. I get my train of thought back.
For the first time, I can also see what a newcomer asks, and when. If they ask the same thing about the pilot three times, the problem isn’t them. The problem is the knowledge base.
We have recordings of meetings. We don’t have a single recording of a cold call, even though “we have a receptionist, thanks” will be the sentence the newcomer hears most often. So I sit in on the first calls. After each one, the newcomer takes a minute to dictate what they heard and how they answered. Material that didn’t exist anywhere is being built as we go.
Will a salesperson like this become productive faster? Will they be better? I don’t know. I’m betting on a third option: they won’t pick up the mistakes we kept making for years. They won’t learn three price lists. In 90 days, I’ll write about whether the bet paid off. I’m measuring how many questions the twin answered on its own, how many reached me, and how many proposals the newcomer prepared without my corrections. With numbers, even if they aren’t pretty.
“Just one quick question” will keep coming. Just not into my calendar.
igor.pauletic@frodx.com
P.S. The Bridge Group figures are American. I couldn’t find Slovenian ones. If you have them, write to me.