I watched my son in the garden last Saturday morning. He had won Player of the Season for his hockey team the week before, and here he was, on his own, practising a new shot. Over and over. No coach watching. No teammates to impress. Just him, a ball, and something specific he wanted to get better at.
I stood at the window for a few minutes before he noticed me. And I found myself thinking: that’s it.
That is the thing that separates people who improve from people who plateau. Not the sessions everyone attends. Not the training that gets scheduled and ticked off. The hours nobody asks for.
The day job fills the time
In a consultative B2B sales world, the pressure is constant. Customers, targets, pipeline reviews, forecast calls. There is always something with a name on it and a deadline attached. That is the job. And it fills the available time with impressive efficiency.
In that environment, nobody is going to create the space for you to develop. Your manager is under the same pressure. Your company will send you on a course occasionally, and that course will be useful in the way most courses are useful: broadly, temporarily, and not specifically enough to close the gap you actually have.
The question is not whether development time will be created for you. It will not. The question is whether you claim it yourself.
What intentional investment actually looks like
It is not a podcast on the commute. It is not a book bought and half-read on holiday. It is not scrolling through content about consultative selling on a Tuesday lunchtime.
It is a Saturday morning sitting with a framework for better discovery questions. Working out what each question is designed to do. Thinking about how it applies to your specific accounts and the conversations you keep having. Writing two or three questions you will actually use next week.
It is an evening working through what goes into a business case. Learning which financial metrics matter to a CFO. Understanding what a payback period is and how to calculate it for your type of solution. Not because the current role demands it today. Because you know that when you can have that conversation fluently, you are in a different room from the seller who cannot.
It is one specific capability, worked on consistently, over weeks. Not a development programme. One thing, until it moves.
What it cost and what it gave back
Early in my career I decided I wanted to move into people leadership. My mentor was clear: wanting to lead was not enough. I needed to demonstrate, before anyone would trust me with a team, that I could actually develop others.
So alongside a full-time account manager role I enrolled in a part-time MBA. Four years. Evenings. Weekends. I also took on two mentees and invested seriously in those relationships: reading about how to coach, adapting my approach, showing up consistently even when it was inconvenient.
None of that happened instead of performing in my role. It happened alongside it. The cost was real. Less time with friends. Fewer free evenings. A sustained commitment to something with no guaranteed return.
What it gave back was something I had not fully anticipated. The MBA was not just a qualification. It was the thing that changed how I felt walking into rooms with other managers. I stopped feeling like I was catching up and started feeling like I belonged there. That confidence did not come from doing the day job well. It came from the investment alongside it. Deeper. More transferable. Mine, regardless of what happened next.
The distinction worth making
Working hard in your role and investing intentionally outside it are not the same thing.
Both matter. Performing well is the starting point, and it is expected. But in consultative environments, it is not what sets people apart over time. What sets people apart is the parallel investment: hours spent on one specific capability, deliberately, when nobody required it.
The sellers who close the gap between where they are and where they want to be are not necessarily working harder in the role than those who do not. They are doing something different outside it. They have identified one capability that is genuinely limiting their performance, and they are investing their own time in it, consistently, until something shifts.
Learn more on how to identify your personal gaps
One thing at a time. The day job is too full for anything else. Pick the capability that is actually in the way, not the most comfortable one to work on. Invest in it specifically. Wait for it to move before picking the next one.
The hours belong to you
My son did not need anyone to tell him to practise that shot on Saturday morning. He had a clear picture of what he wanted to get better at and he went and worked on it. That clarity made the time easy to claim.
The same applies in consultative selling. Vague development intentions fade quickly under the pressure of the day job. Specific ones do not, because you know exactly what you are doing and why it matters.
Somewhere in your week, there are hours that belong to you. The question is what you do with them.
If you want to know which capability to invest in first, the MyAcumen assessment gives you a specific picture across skills, motivation, personality, and how others experience you. Find the right assessment for your role or team
