Are You Available - Or Valuable?

Some of the best ideas I’ve ever had don’t come to me in meetings or in conversations. They come to me when I’m on my early-morning walk or during the middle of the night. This happens so often that I keep a legal pad on my nightstand. I’ve often wondered why our best ideas seem to show up during our downtime. Maybe the bigger question is: Do we carve out enough downtime to allow those ideas to show up?

I recently read an article by Mathias Goyen titled The Tyranny of Availability. His premise caught my attention: In today's hyperconnected workplace, we can easily begin confusing responsiveness with value. The person who immediately answers every email looks engaged. The person who responds to every text looks committed. The person whose calendar is packed from morning until night looks productive. But are they?

There’s a significant difference between being available and being valuable. I think salespeople and content creators may be particularly susceptible to confusing the two. We pride ourselves on responsiveness. A client, team member or manager emails—we answer. The phone rings—we pick up. Someone needs a revised proposal—we revise it. There’s a problem—we jump in and solve it. Those are good things. Great sellers should be responsive but somewhere along the way, responsiveness can become the job rather than something that supports the job. Our inbox becomes our to-do list. Our phone determines our priorities. Other people's requests consume our calendars. We become incredibly busy. And incredibly available. We feel out of control because we are. We’ve surrendered control of our priorities to whoever reaches us next.

Here’s the question I’ve been asking myself: If you're constantly responding, when are you thinking? Thinking requires something responsiveness doesn't: uninterrupted time. Time to look at a client's business—or our own—and ask, What aren't they seeing? Time to research their industry. Time to think about the competitive threats they may not recognize. Time to discover an opportunity nobody has brought them. Time to ask whether the campaign you're recommending is actually the best solution—or merely the easiest one to sell. Time to develop an idea that makes your client say, “I hadn't thought about that.” That's value.

The challenge is that responsiveness is visible. Thinking isn't. Nobody sees you spending 30 uninterrupted minutes researching a client's business. Nobody applauds because you blocked time on your calendar to develop three new ideas for an important account. But they'll notice the result.

Goyen makes another fascinating observation: AI may actually make this problem worse. Technology allows us to respond faster, produce polished communications faster and accomplish routine tasks faster. As those capabilities improve, speed becomes an increasingly poor measure of the quality of thinking behind the response. That creates an enormous opportunity for sellers. Don't use AI simply to do more. Use it to create the space to think better.

Let AI summarize the research. Let it help organize information. Let it handle the first draft. Let it perform some of the repetitive work that used to consume your time. Then invest the time you save in something AI cannot replace: your judgment, curiosity, creativity, experience and understanding of the human being sitting across from you.

Your clients don't need another person who can answer their email in 90 seconds. They need someone who understands their business well enough to occasionally say: “I've been thinking about you, and I have an idea.” Be responsive. Be accessible. Be dependable. But don't confuse being available with being valuable. Because your greatest contribution to your customers may not happen while you're answering them. It may happen on a quiet morning walk—or even in the middle of the night with a legal pad on the nightstand.

What do you think?

Think Big. Make Big Things Happen.

Jeff Schmidt is the SVP of Professional Development. You can reach him at Jeff.Schmidt@RAB.com. You can also connect with him on X, YouTube and LinkedIn.