How a CEO spends their time on deals — when they engage, when they disengage, how they sequence — has more impact on revenue than most CEOs realize. Most spend their time on deals reactively, jumping in when called, with no overarching architecture.
The CEOs who spend their deal time deliberately produce more revenue per CEO-hour than the ones who don’t.
The Common Pattern (Reactive)
Most CEO deal involvement looks like this:
– Sales team calls when they need executive sponsorship
– CEO joins the call, brings whatever value they can in 45 minutes, exits
– Repeat across many deals, with no consistent prioritization
– CEO ends the week feeling like they spent a lot of time on deals without knowing if it was the right time
This pattern has a few problems. The CEO becomes a generic resource that any rep can call on. Their time gets used for deals that don’t actually need executive intervention. The deals that genuinely warrant CEO time may not be the ones that get it.
The Architected Pattern
The CEOs I’ve watched run deal time well architect it. Specifically:
1. They identify the 5-10 deals per quarter that warrant CEO time.
Not every deal needs the CEO. The deals that do are usually: top-10 strategic accounts, deals that are stuck and need executive escalation, deals where competitive pressure requires CEO-to-CEO engagement, and deals at thresholds that justify executive investment. The CEO knows which deals these are at the start of the quarter, not in the middle when reps escalate.
2. They engage proactively, not reactively.
The CEO reaches out to the customer’s executive sponsor before being asked to. Schedules a conversation. Builds the relationship outside any specific deal pressure. When the deal needs executive engagement later, the relationship already exists.
3. They protect time for deal work.
The CEO blocks specific time on the calendar for deal conversations — both internal reviews and external customer conversations. The blocks are protected. Other meetings work around them. The deal work happens because it’s been prioritized at the calendar level, not because it competes for time with everything else.
What a Good Week Looks Like
A CEO running architected deal time might look like this in a typical week:
- 90 minutes Monday morning: pipeline review with the head of sales, focused on the top 10 deals that need executive attention
- 30-45 minutes per day: one customer-executive call or in-person meeting
- 60 minutes Friday afternoon: review of the week’s customer engagement and adjustment for next week
That’s roughly 5-6 hours per week on deal work. Less than most CEOs spend, used more deliberately.
What to Hand Off
Just as important as what the CEO does on deals is what they don’t. Several activities CEOs often do that they probably shouldn’t:
Routine deal coaching. This is the VP of Sales’ job. If the CEO is coaching reps on standard deal mechanics, the VP isn’t doing their job, and the CEO is filling a gap they shouldn’t be filling.
Approval theater on standard discounts. If the discount is within normal range, the CRO or VP of Sales should have authority. Forcing standard discounts to the CEO clogs the CEO’s calendar with low-value decisions.
Customer conversations any senior person could handle. Not every customer conversation requires the CEO. Many require a senior leader who’s not the CEO. Defaulting to the CEO when a senior leader would suffice trains the customer to expect CEO engagement on every meaningful conversation.
The Diagnostic
Audit your last four weeks. What percentage of your deal time was on the top 10 deals versus on deals you didn’t choose? What percentage was proactive (you initiated) versus reactive (someone called you)? What percentage created lasting relationship value versus served a single transactional moment?
If the answers skew reactive, generic, and transactional, the architecture is missing.
CEO deal time is one of the most leveraged resources in any company. Spending it deliberately is one of the highest-leverage decisions a CEO makes. Most don’t make it deliberately. Which is why most CEO deal time produces less than it could.