If your team is still doing manual research and admin, you’re not “saving money.” You’re paying with the only resource you can’t scale: TIME.
Blog Nr 3: Glattfelden, 28.01.2026
If you’re working in or responsible for sales, here’s a painful truth you should finally admit to yourself:
Your pipeline doesn’t die because your product isn’t good. It dies because your first touch happens too late. Or too early.
And yes, you only get one shot (see my previous blog nr 2) to catch a buyer while they’re actively looking.
The market, technology and demand is always changing. Buyers research on their own, delay talking to sales (or try to avoid them as much as possible) and expect fast ROI from the software they source. In most of the cases, prospects do their own research before even talking to you (they never admin, because they want to take out the best interests for themselves). At the same time, software buyers (especially sales automation & CRM) increasingly demand quick impact within several weeks or even immediately within a couple of days already.
So what’s the real competitive advantage? Yes, relevance. But only with speed & consistency all together.
And the easiest “speed metric” to operationalize is Time to First Touch.
What is Time-to-First-Touch (TTFT)?
TTFT = the time between a lead becoming “actionable” and your first "meaningful outreach".
“Actionable”:
“Meaningful outreach":
Most sales pros say prospects back out because the sales process takes too long.
TTFT is where “too long” often starts, before you even get a chance!
HeySali is built around one integrated workflow: Find. Prioritize. Close.
It combines the all pieces that typically sit in separate softwares:
And it’s designed to start fast: 14-day free trial, no payment method required. First results in 7 days.
When buyers avoid irrelevant outreach and prefer self-serve research, you can’t win with slow reactions and manual efforts. B2B buyers try to keep a rep-free buying experience or actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant or high outreach.
So the play is simple:
BE FAST. BE RELEVANT. BE CONSISTENT.
And stop paying the time tax.
Most people think the real bottleneck is to have “more leads.”
In reality, the bottleneck is response speed, because speed determines whether you ever get a meaningful conversation in the first place. Yet again, you don't want to be too early or too late.
Multiple studies show that the drop-off is brutal:
This isn’t about being “more aggressive” or "pushy". It’s about not missing the right moment when your buyer is mentally in "buying mode".
The lead lifecycle is even shorter because:
Random response time = random pipeline
Manual prospecting isn’t one task. It’s 15 small tasks across 6+ tools that takes hours (if you are lucky and if you are not interrupted from these efforts at all).
Here’s what the “tool relay race” looks like for most B2B companies and teams:
Then you tell yourself (or being told by your manager): “We need more leads.”
No. You need fewer broken steps.
If you’re small, you need clarity even more, because every missed lead hurts triple.
And it’s not rare to miss leads. You will not believe it, but a significant share of leads are never contacted at all. Some even misprioritized (as you think your other oppurtunity is way more urgent and interesting).
People feel this as “pipeline anxiety,” but it’s usually a systems issue:
Nothing is consistently capturing, enriching, prioritizing and pushing next steps.
TTFT gets blamed on “being busy.” But “busy” is usually fragmentation: too many tabs, tools, and micro-decisions (or even -managers).
Research on interruptions shows that after an interruption, people can take ~30 minutes on average to fully resume the original task.
Mentioned further above, sales work is interruption-heavy by nature:
So even if each tool switch feels tiny, the cognitive penalty stacks up.
If your work requires switching between:
…you’re not just losing time. You’re losing continuity, which kills speed, relevance and followup consistency.
In larger companies, poor data quality becomes a budget line. Poor data quality costs organizations millions per year on average and notes many organizations don’t measure data quality at all.
For management, the cost shows up differently:
Dirty data doesn’t just slow you down, it destroys your sales confidence. And when confidence goes down, follow-up volume goes down, too. Believe me, you don't wanna be there.
You don’t want “another tool”. You want these outcomes:
No, please, that’s not “enterprise.” That’s survival. Even more for small companies and teams.
Here’s a practical operating system that works when you don't have a sales team or rather a small company/team:
Rule #1: Your day needs a lead queue.
No queue: you spend your best hours deciding what to do.
Rule #2: You need one record per company/contact.
If notes and follow-ups are split across tools, you’ll lose deals.
Rule #3: Follow-up must be a default, not a decision.
If follow-up relies on memory or manual urgency depending on how you feel that day, it won’t happen consistently.
Run this once per day, same time, no exceptions:
This is how you build pipeline while still running the business and having no sales team.
HeySali is built as an end-to-end sales platform that combines:
And it’s priced according your demand, which matters if you’re allergic to paying for unused modules.
HeySali isn’t “more" or "another" software. It’s less switching and less manual effort, so TTFT becomes achievable.
No hype here, just realistic outcomes when your workflow is set right:
And the upside is not theoretical: if your response time improves, the likelihood of contact and qualification can increase dramatically based on lead response research.
I’m Can Bagriyanik, the Founder and Managing Director of HeySali, a brand of Glatt Digital GmbH (LTD/LLC) in Switzerland. I am building HeySali based on what I’ve seen in real sales environments: fragmented systems slow teams and revenue down. HeySali is a Modern Sales OS to help B2B teams move faster without losing control of data, pipeline, reporting and quality.