It's Not Just the First Meeting. The Process Is Broken.

Here's Why Last time I wrote about the fifth rep — the one seller out of five who earns a second conversation by guiding instead of pitching. But here's what keeps nagging at me: fixing first meetings won't fix your number. The first meeting failure is a symptom. The real issue is the system behind it. The Whole Chain Is Pointed the Wrong Way Think about the last pipeline review you sat through. What questions got asked? What stage is this? When does it close? Did they see the demo? Next steps? These are the questions that build your forecast — the number you commit upward, the number you never want to explain. So the pipeline review focuses on what makes the forecast feel solid: stage, next steps, close date, verbal commits, whether the rep is texting with the CFO. But here's what nobody asked: How will this customer benefit from what we're proposing? Who influences this decision and what do they care about? What happens to their business if they don't act? Is our rep connecting with these people — or running a process at them? When was the last time a manager asked a rep, "What is this buyer afraid of?" Not what objections they raised. What they're actually afraid of — the career risk, the political exposure, the possibility they'll champion this deal and it blows up in their face. This isn't soft thinking. Both sellers and buyers believe B2B purchasing is a rational process — collect data, analyze options, select the best one. Research from Google and CEB tells a different story: B2B buyers are actually more emotionally driven than B2C consumers. But they don't know it — and neither do your reps. So your reps address the rational concerns, because that's what buyers say matters. Meanwhile the deal is actually being won or lost on fear, trust, and confidence. None of which show up in the scorecard. That question doesn't come up. Not because managers don't care. Because nothing in the system prepares them to ask. And it's not just inspection. Enablement builds product experts — certifications, demo bootcamps, battlecards. Coaching centers on demos, objection handling, and positioning. Pipeline reviews track activity and deal mechanics. Enablement, coaching, and inspection all reinforce the same product-centric muscle. And then we wonder why reps show up and pitch. There's a deeper issue: the entire sales process is managed inside-out. Every question, every inspection, every coaching conversation is about what we're doing to the buyer. Did we demo? Did we send the proposal? Did we get the next meeting? None of it asks what's going on with the buyer — how their decision process is going, what they need from us, whether they're any closer to the confidence they need to say yes. I saw this on a deal I coached two years ago. Enterprise software, big logo, enthusiastic champion at headquarters. Every pipeline review looked great — demos completed, proposal sent, next steps confirmed. It was in the forecast as a commit. What nobody asked was whether the division leaders who'd actually use the platform were on board. They weren't — and nobody on our side had done the work to understand their world. The deal died. Not because we lost to a competitor. Because we were managing our process instead of understanding their decision. The dashboard said green. The reality was red. And someone had to explain why a committed deal just evaporated. It was a painful loss my coaching client still agonizes over. And frankly, I do too! We were both blindsided by the lack of support in the secondary divisions. We thoughtthat our champion at HQ had the ability to mandate. He didn't. Trust but verify. Or as Don Jose Ruiz says "Be skeptical. But be open." Traditional sales methodology drives the focus on inside-out selling, sales management and leadership. It dictates how you enable, how you coach, how you inspect — and what it dictates is inside-out. What's missing are the value selling components — the foundation of the Acelera Group Value Selling Framework — that flip the lens: the components that cause buyers to engage, to trust, to share what happens if they fail or succeed. Without them, the methodology produces reps who can present but can't connect, who can demo but can't discover, who can pitch but can't listen.

Where is Your System Breaking Down? The problem shows up differently in every organization. Five questions to find where it's breaking down in yours: What are we actually enabling? Product training — or the ability to understand a buyer's situation well enough to be useful in the first five minutes? Buyers already have the product information. What they need is someone who can help them think. What are our coaching conversations really about? Demo execution and next steps — or whether our rep knows how this customer will benefit and what they're risking to get there? What are we really inspecting? Stage and close date — or whether a rep has mapped the influence network, built a real champion, and can articulate the buyer's problem back to them? We're inspecting the dashboard. The deal is happening somewhere else. What does our culture reward? The big close — or the rep who did the hard research, had the real conversation, and walked away from a bad-fit deal? Culture governs what reps do when nobody's watching. Are leadership and enablement pulling in the same direction? Enablement teams often know what reps need but lack the air cover to deliver it. When leadership defines "ready" as "knows the product" and enablement knows it should mean "understands the buyer," that gap becomes the gap reps carry into every meeting. Oh, and a bonus question -- what muscle memory are we building/reinforcing in role play? Sorry...that's not fair...most tech sales organizations don't bother to conduct role plays...or deliberate practice as I prefer to call it.  Most organizations can't answer "the right thing" on all five. That's not a failure — it's a diagnosis. Once you see where the system is misaligned, you can start fixing it. When all five point toward the buyer, "together we win" stops being a slogan and starts being how deals actually get done. See What This Looks Like in a Real Deal I'm building this out in a book called Together We Win and sharing draft chapters as I go. The full book will be available later this year. The first chapter — The Fifth Rep — puts you in the room where the system breaks down. Fair warning: your next pipeline review might feel different after you read it. Read Chapter 1: The Second Meeting Tell me where I'm wrong. I mean it! — Lee