Theme Sections. Thousands of hours spent with sales professionals and sales leaders reveals a central challenge to sales effectiveness: our failure to distinguish between “urgent” and “important.” This relates to customer issues, as well as our own internal organization issues, with the inclination to devote too much time and energy to urgent. We all agree that urgent matters are unavoidable; as we know “stuff” happens. These problems are usually tactical, logistical or some prisoner-of-the-moment issue. Important issues are strategic in nature. For example, extinguishing a fire is urgent; preventing fires is important. One can also see that time spent on the important issues will prevent urgent issues down the road. And so it goes in the sales profession. A personnel change at your client can create a crisis.