Deliberate practice: get better at selling, not just busier

Deliberate practice is practice designed to improve one specific part of your performance. You aim at something just past what you can do now, find out straight away how each attempt went, and try again with a change. The psychologist Anders Ericsson named it with two colleagues in a 1993 paper, and its opposite isn't laziness. It's experience, the kind you get from doing the job the same way for years.

Picture two reps who've each been on the phones for eight years. One still opens every call the way she did in her first month. The other spends fifteen minutes most mornings on one weak spot, say the reply to "just send me an email", and moves to the next spot once it works. They both have eight years of experience, but only one of them has eight years of practice.

Here's a test you can run on any session. When it ends, can you name the one thing you were trying to improve, and do you know whether you did? If you can't answer both, you were working rather than practising.

Ericsson and Kyle Harwell's 2019 paper names four conditions, and every one has a version in a sales week:

1. Someone who knows what good looks like picks the part you can improve before you next meet. In music, where the research started, that's the student's teacher.
2. You can picture the goal. You know how the better opener sounds before you can say it.
3. The drill tells you how each attempt went, at once.
4. You make repeated, revised attempts that get closer to the goal.

The idea started in music. Ericsson and Harwell describe how the 1993 study compared the best violinists at an international music academy with less accomplished ones, and found the best had done more solitary practice while they developed: work between lessons on goals their teachers had set. The 1993 paper set that apart from work and from play, which people do for reasons other than improving one part of their performance.

Then came a book. Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, published in 2008, gave a whole chapter to the 10,000-hour rule and cited the 1993 paper as its evidence. Ericsson and Harwell's paper says the research never found a magic number, and that to win international piano competitions Ericsson's own estimate was nearer 25,000 hours. They add that Gladwell never used the term deliberate practice, and that his examples counted public performances and work as practice.

That's the part that matters if you sell. Most of your week is work. Every call is a performance in front of a buyer who's deciding something. It adds to your hours, but by Ericsson's definition it isn't practice, and hours alone don't make you better.

Ericsson and Robert Pool's 2016 book Peak sorts practice into naive, purposeful and deliberate, and what separates the last two is a teacher: Ericsson and Pool use purposeful practice for working to improve on your own, without one. The 2019 paper adds a fourth, structured practice, for the drills a coach runs for a whole group at once. Here's each one in a seller's week:

Most people who sell on their own do purposeful practice at best, and that's fine. When Ericsson and Harwell re-analysed the studies that met their criteria, practice went with better performance whether a coach guided it or not. A coach still helps, because a good one spots the part you can improve and knows a drill for it.

Yes, by less than the popular version promises, and only while you keep doing it.

In 2014, Brooke Macnamara, David Hambrick and Frederick Oswald published a meta-analysis in Psychological Science that covered every major field where deliberate practice had been studied. Across the studies they pooled, deliberate practice explained 26% of the differences in performance in games, 21% in music, 18% in sports, 4% in education and less than 1% in professions. Their conclusion was that practice is important, but not as important as had been argued.

Ericsson and Harwell answered that the meta-analysis used a much looser definition, one that took in team practice games and other activities the original never counted. Both sides agree that practice matters, and they still disagree on how much it matters and on what should count.

One study sits close to your job. In 2000, Sabine Sonnentag and Barbara Kleine took the idea into the workplace with 100 sales agents. The time each agent currently spent on deliberate practice went with their manager's rating of their work. The time they'd spent on it in past years didn't.

Music shows the same pattern. Ericsson and Harwell describe older expert pianists who had far more practice hours behind them than young experts, and played no better. Once their careers started, most of their practice went on keeping the level they had, and their recent practice predicted their playing better than their career total.

So your years in the job don't make you better. What you're practising this month does.

Pick one moment, drill it off the phone with feedback on every try, then take it to real buyers and check the number. Six steps:

1. Find the step that leaks: two weeks of a sales call log gives you a count for each step, from dials to deals. The lowest rate between two steps is your first candidate.
2. Shrink it to one moment, because "closing" is too big to drill and "the ten seconds after they say the price is high" is something you can rehearse.
3. Decide what good sounds like: write the target reply in one or two lines, or lift it from your best call last month or from the objection handling guide.
4. Build a drill that answers back: a colleague plays the buyer and gives you the objection ten times in fifteen minutes while you record yourself. For a written follow-up, draft three versions and read each one aloud.
5. Change one thing on every try. Saying the same words ten times is only rehearsal, so move the question earlier or cut the first sentence, and listen for the version that lands.
6. Take it live, then check: use the new line on every call that week and write one note on how each buyer reacted. On Friday, compare that step's rate with the fortnight before.

Why drill off the phone at all? Live calls teach slowly. You hear the price objection a few times a week, and every miss costs a lead. In a role-play you meet it ten times, and a miss costs nothing. In ActivityTracker, run the drill as a 15-minute focus session on that one task, and when the timer ends, put the line that worked in the private note only you can see.

Match the leak to the drill:

Ericsson's name for what experts build is mental representations. A musician holds the sound of the finished piece in their head, so they can hear where each attempt falls short and aim the next one. The 2019 paper says experts keep refining these representations, and that's what gives them more control over how they perform.

A seller builds them the same way. Play back a strong call and pause it at the moment that matters, the buyer's first push-back. Say what you'd do next, then hear what the rep did. Each pause-and-guess trains your ear, and your ear is what tells you, mid-call, that a buyer is hesitating before they say so.

For written follow-ups, borrow Benjamin Franklin's method. In his Autobiography, Franklin describes teaching himself to write from a volume of the Spectator. He jotted short hints of what each sentence said, set them aside for a few days, rewrote the essays from his hints without looking, then compared his version with the original to find his faults.

Do it with the follow-up message that earned your best replies, or one a colleague swears by. Note the job of each line, wait two days, rewrite it from your notes, and set the two side by side. The gaps show you what your own messages are missing.

Mei didn't make more calls. She made the same calls with one moment rehearsed ten times every morning before a buyer heard it, and that moment went from 1 meeting in a fortnight to 6.

The original definition puts a teacher at the centre, so get one if you can: a manager, or a peer who's better than you at that one step. Without one, you're still not alone: Ericsson and Harwell note that solo practice is hardly ever free of outside help, whether that's an occasional coaching session, people further along or a book on how to practise. Build your feedback from four sources, fastest first:

• A colleague playing the buyer. Instant, and they'll say when your question sounded rehearsed.
• A recording of your own half. Listen for the one thing you drilled and ignore the rest. Check the rules where you work before you record anyone else.
• The buyer's reply. Slower, but it can't flatter you. Write one line after each conversation on how they took the thing you were testing.
• Your weekly numbers. Slowest of all, and the only one that tells you the change paid.

Short, at a fixed time, every weekday. Music practice in Ericsson's research often ran on a weekly rhythm: one lesson a week, then practice at a regular time each weekday. As students got better, their daily practice grew from 15 or 20 minutes to 4 or 5 hours by the time they reached the academy.

You aren't training for a concert hall, and you have calls to make. Fifteen minutes before your first call block is enough to start. Full attention matters more than length, so stop when your focus goes, and save the longer drill for the day a big meeting is coming.

Put it where you'll see it. In ActivityTracker a routine can run every weekday at a set time, and if it isn't done by then, the Telegram assistant nudges you and the routine keeps a streak.

Ericsson's four conditions are a job description for a sales manager. In your next one-to-one with a rep:

1. Listen to one of their calls and pick the moment they can improve before you next meet. One moment, not the whole call.
2. Play them a call where it's done well, so they can hear the goal.
3. Set a drill with feedback on every try: you as the buyer, ten rounds, or a recording they review against the good call.
4. Check it on a call next week, then set the next moment.

Put the drill on your one-on-one agenda so it gets asked every week. The team role-play still has a place, but it's structured practice: one script for everyone, tuned to nobody. The gains sit in the individual drill.

• Counting dials as practice. A hundred calls is volume, and it only teaches you something when one thing changes and you check it.
• Drilling several skills at once. Change your opener and your close in the same week and you can't tell which one worked.
• Practising what you're already good at, because it feels productive. Aim at the step with the lowest rate instead.
• Practising without feedback, which leaves you guessing. Even one written line after each try beats none.
• Only practising on live buyers. Every miss costs a lead, and the moment you need comes up only a few times a week.
• Stopping once it works. Keeping a skill where it is counts as maintenance, so pick the next leak.

Today, pull your counts for the last two weeks and circle the step with the lowest rate. Write the one line you'd want to say at that moment. Tomorrow, before your first call, give it fifteen minutes and ten tries, and change one thing on each try. Use it on every call for a week, then check the number.

• Anders Ericsson and Kyle Harwell, Deliberate practice and proposed limits on the effects of practice on the acquisition of expert performance, Frontiers in Psychology, 2019, read 28 October 2026
• Brooke Macnamara, David Hambrick and Frederick Oswald, Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions: a meta-analysis, Psychological Science, 2014 (abstract), read 28 October 2026
• Sabine Sonnentag and Barbara Kleine, Deliberate practice at work, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 2000 (abstract), read 28 October 2026
• Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Project Gutenberg, read 28 October 2026