Your Slides are Killing Your Deals!

Here's something that should humble every sales leader who's bought the latest tech stack: Aristotle figured out persuasion 2,300 years ago. And his framework still works better than most of what we're teaching today.

I sat down with Frankie Kemp on the Thoughts on Selling podcast to talk about communication—specifically, why most technical people struggle with it and what to do about it. Frankie has an unusual background: acting school, award-winning comedy writing, NLP, and now she coaches technical specialists at major finance, pharma, and energy companies on how to actually connect with other humans.

Her secret weapon? A Greek philosopher and a willingness to tell clients to put their slides away.

The Three Pillars

Aristotle identified three pillars of persuasion: logos, ethos, and pathos.

Logos is your data. Your facts. Your bullet points. This is where most technical people live—and where most of them get stuck.

Ethos is credibility. How much you're believed, liked, and trusted. It's not ethics per se, though ethics plays into it. It's how you come across.

Pathos is emotion. The stories you tell. The feeling you create.

Here's Frankie's observation: "I'll never remember your bullet points. I'll never remember those bullet points. But if you just switch the slides off for a minute and tell a story that I can relate to, that's what I'm gonna walk out the room with."

Most technical specialists lean hard on logos—because that's what they value, and because they don't realize the other two pillars even exist. Salespeople, on the other hand, sometimes lean too hard on pathos and skip the substance entirely.

The best communicators use all three. And they do it in "little drops"—not all at once.

 

 Put Your Slides Away, Mikey

Frankie shared a story about a client—let's call him Mikey—who was pitching a massive bank. He'd been flown over eight times. "Show the slides again, Mikey. Show the slides again."

He was exhausted. And nothing was working.

Frankie's advice? "Put your slides away, Mikey. It's you they want to see."

She made three nonverbal adjustments with him. On the next attempt, he closed the deal.

Three adjustments. Multimillion pounds. That's the power of ethos—of how you come across—when the logos has already been established.

Reading Learning Styles in Real Time

One of the most practical frameworks Frankie shared was around learning styles: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. The insight isn't just about how people learn—it's about how they communicate and what they respond to.

Auditory people say things like "That sounds great," "We're in tune," "That rings a bell." They process through hearing.

Visual people say "I see what you mean," "I get the picture," "That looks fantastic." They process through seeing.

Kinesthetic people say "That feels right," "Let's walk through it," "I need to get my hands on it." They process through doing and feeling.

Here's the magic: if you match their language, you build rapport almost instantly.

Frankie gave an example of a client she was struggling to connect with. The conversation was civil but flat. No dovetailing. Then she realized: this person worked on the phone all day. Auditory dominant.

So Frankie wrote down three phrases—"It sounds like you were having a really tough time," "What you said really chimed with me"—and used them in the first five minutes of their next call.

The client's response: "Oh my gosh. You absolutely get it."

That's all it took.

Improv for Scientists

Frankie has been bringing improv training into technical organizations—including a major pharma company where she worked with MSLs (medical science liaisons) alongside actual scientists.

Why improv? Because it teaches you to be present, to adapt, to take care of your scene partner. And because it gets people out of their heads and into their bodies.

"We felt it," the scientists told her. "It wasn't theory."

That's the difference between knowing something and being able to do it under pressure.

The Real Purpose of Selling

We got into a riff on the purpose of selling. I mentioned Jeff Thull's line—"The purpose of selling is not selling, it's buying"—and how I eventually pushed back on that.

Because nobody says, "I want to buy a car. Great, I bought the car. I'm done." No—you want to drive it to work or take it to the track.

The purpose of selling is to help the buyer achieve an objective. The transaction is a means, not an end.

Frankie put it differently: "The purpose of selling is to recognize a need and then find a way of fulfilling it—and that might not be what you were selling last week."

People come to you with a solution in mind. Your job is to figure out what problem they're actually trying to solve. And then—maybe—take them somewhere better.

The Bottom Line

Communication isn't about being smooth. It's about being adaptable.

Know who you're talking to. Calibrate your message. Use all three pillars—logos, ethos, pathos—but don't try to dump them all in the first meeting.

Match their language. Watch their cues. And when in doubt, put the slides away.

Because at the end of the day, it's you they want to see.

---

Listen to the full conversation with Frankie Kemp on the Thoughts on Selling podcast.

Your Buyer Has Already Decided. They're Just Building Their Alibi.

The deal isn't stuck because of the business case.

It's stuck because someone on that buying committee is afraid — and the rep across the table is afraid too.

We've trained an entire generation of sellers to lead with logic. ROI calculators. Total cost of ownership. Payback period. We've handed buyers every rational reason to say yes, then watched deals die in committee anyway. We call it "no decision." We blame the economy. We blame the champion who didn't have enough pull.

We never blame the fear. On either side of the table.

The spreadsheet comes later. The spreadsheet is the alibi.

 

 

Emotion Drives the Decision. Logic Defends It.

Here's what the research tells us — and what the best sales leaders already know in their gut: emotion drives decisions. Logic defends them.

Your buyer isn't evaluating your solution with a spreadsheet. They're evaluating it with everything that has ever happened to them in a job like this one. The failed implementation three years ago. The vendor who overpromised and underdelivered. The career risk of being the person who signed the check on something that didn't work.

That spreadsheet with the 14-month payback period? It's not the decision. It's the alibi. It's what they show the CFO after they've already decided — or decided not to decide. The ROI model doesn't move the deal. It gives someone permission to defend the decision they've already made emotionally.

This isn't a controversial idea in behavioral economics. It's settled science. But most sales organizations are still building their entire go-to-market motion around the spreadsheet — and wondering why qualified deals keep going quiet.

But Here's the Part Nobody Talks About

Your rep is doing exactly the same thing.

They rush to the demo because silence feels like rejection. They pile on slides because they don't trust the relationship to hold without the content propping it up. The buyer goes quiet — and instead of slowing down and asking a harder question, the rep sends another deck. More features. More case studies. More reasons why this is the right decision.

None of which addresses what's actually happening.

The buyer is afraid of making the wrong call. The rep is afraid of losing the deal. Two people at the table, both afraid, neither one saying so. The conversation stays at the surface — features, timelines, pricing — because going deeper feels risky for everyone involved.

Two people at the table, both afraid. Neither one fessing up. That's not a pipeline problem. That's a system problem.

Most sales methodologies treat this as a buyer problem. Get better at objection handling. Build a stronger business case. Increase executive alignment. All useful, all insufficient — because they assume the buyer is the only one who needs to change.

The best sales leaders I know understand something different: when deals stall consistently, it's rarely a talent problem. It's a system problem. The system hasn't given reps the language, the tools, or the psychological safety to have the real conversation.

The Five Reasons Deals Actually Stall

Not all stalled deals are stuck for the same reason. That sounds obvious until you watch a sales organization apply the same fix — more pressure, more activity, an executive call — to every stalled deal in the pipeline regardless of why it stalled.

Sometimes that works. Usually it doesn't. And when it doesn't, the cost isn't just the deal. It's the quarter.

We've identified five distinct reasons deals stall — and each one demands a different response. We call it STUCK™. When you know which of the five it is, you know what your rep needs to do differently. When you don't, you're guessing. And guessing is expensive at enterprise deal sizes.

The diagnostic question isn't "what objection do I need to answer?" It's "where is this buyer stuck, and what does my rep actually need right now?" Those are different questions. They lead to different conversations. And they produce different outcomes.

What the System Looks Like When It's Working

The organizations closing the deals that matter aren't the ones with the most aggressive reps or the most sophisticated comp plans. They're the ones who've built a system that reduces fear on both sides of the table — and gives their leaders the diagnostic tools to know what's actually going on inside a stalled opportunity.

That means pipeline reviews that inspect risk, not just activity. Coaching conversations that address what's happening in the rep's head, not just what's happening in the deal. Discovery that earns the right to go deep before it goes wide. And a shared language between rep and manager that makes it safe to say "I don't know what's actually going on here" without that being a career-limiting admission.

It means leaders who know the difference between a deal that needs more time and a deal that needs a different approach. Who can tell whether a rep is stuck on the mechanics of the deal or stuck in their own head about it. Who inspect outcomes, not optics.

None of this requires firing your bottom third. None of it requires a new CRM or a new comp plan. It requires a different game.

That's not magic. It's methodology.

The Right Game

For most of the history of enterprise sales, we've been playing two games at the same table. The rep is playing the seller's game — activity metrics, stage progression, close plans. The buyer is playing their own game — managing internal risk, building consensus, protecting their career.

Those games don't naturally align. In fact, the more aggressively the rep plays their game, the more threatened the buyer feels playing theirs. Pressure accelerates retreat. More deck, more quiet. More urgency, more committee reviews.

The shift — the one that changes everything — is when the rep stops playing against the buyer and starts playing with them. When the question changes from "how do I move this deal forward?" to "what does this buyer need to make a good decision?" When the rep's success and the buyer's success stop being in tension and start being the same thing.

Together We Win™ isn't a slogan. It's a different operating principle. And building a sales organization around it — from how you hire to how you coach to how you inspect — is what separates the teams that scale from the ones that stall.

 If your pipeline is softer than it should be heading into the back half of the year, let's talk.

If your pipeline is softer than it should be heading into the back half of the year, let’s talk.

We work with Sales and enablement leaders at established and emerging tech and services companies who know something isn’t working but aren’t sure what to fix first. Start with the work we do at aceleragroup.com/services — then book 30 minutes at meet.aceleragroup.com and let’s take a look at what’s stuck.

Lee Levitt

Principal, The Acelera Group

Thoughts on Selling™

meet.aceleragroup.com

That's Interesting, Tell Me More...

Gong research suggests that top reps talk less, ask more questions.

But...it's not the number of questions, it's the question style. Customers spend more time answering these questions.

Top reps don't hop from topic to topic after each answer. They stay on a single thread for three or four turns. They hear something interesting and they pull on it. "Tell me more about that." "What happened next?" "Why do you think that is?" This is what triggers the longer answers -- it forces the buyer to think, not just recite. The rep is demonstrating that they're genuinely engaged, and the buyer responds in kind.

Tim Hurson calls this "staying in the question" -- the discipline of resisting the first adequate answer and continuing to probe. In Think Better, he describes how ideas and insights come in thirds. The first third is obvious, top of mind, what everyone already knows. The second third is more considered, more strained. The third third is where the breakthroughs live -- where you've exhausted the easy answers and are forced to see the problem in an entirely new way. Most reps live in the first third. They get an answer, check the box, and move on. The fifth rep stays. They push into the second third, and then the third. The deepest truths -- the ones that actually determine whether this deal happens -- don't surface until the easy answers are spent.

Questioning is a behavior. Curiosity is the engine that powers it.

You can ask a hundred questions from a checklist without being curious. And prospects can feel the difference. One feels like an interrogation. The other feels like a conversation where someone is actually trying to understand their world.

How do you know that your reps are asking great questions? Inspection? Coaching? Role playing?

There's No Such Thing as a Deal

 

 Open your CRM. Every row is a deal. Every pipeline review is about deals. Every forecast rolls up deals.

And none of it is real.

A "deal" is a mental construct — a line in your system, not a thing in your customer's world. Your buyer didn't wake up this morning thinking about your deal. They woke up thinking about a problem they can't solve, a decision they're afraid to make, a career they're trying to protect.

The moment you call it a deal, you've centered yourself. Your pipeline. Your forecast. Your quota. The buyer becomes a supporting character in your story.

Watch what happens when you remove the word.

"The deal is stalled." → The buyer isn't stalled. They're afraid. They're overwhelmed. They need help they're not getting.

"The deal died." → Nothing died. A person decided they couldn't move forward — because nobody helped them through the wall.

"I'm working three deals." → You're working with three human beings. Each one has a different fear, a different ambition, a different definition of success. The moment they become "deals," you stop seeing that.

Think of your buyer as a marathon runner. They committed to the race. They trained. They showed up. And now they're at mile 16, legs burning, lungs screaming, and they can't see the next water stop. What they need is hydration, direction, and someone who believes they can finish.

What they get is an email that says "just checking in."

Here's the thing about mile 16. The runner doesn't need more water. They need to remember why they signed up for the race. The finish line picture on the fridge. The person they're trying to become. The why got them to the starting line. The why gets them through the wall.

Your buyer had a why. Something wasn't working — a process breaking, a competitor gaining ground, a strategic goal slipping away. That why got them into this evaluation. Then the fear set in, the committee pushed back, the implementation looked heavy, and the why got buried under logistics and risk and "just checking in."

The rep's job isn't to push harder. It's to help the buyer reconnect with their own why. That's the oxygen.

Instead, they tear their bib off and walk off the course. DNF.

Not because they couldn't finish. Because nobody showed up to run alongside them.

That's what your CRM calls "no decision." I call it abandonment.

The best reps I've ever worked with don't think in deals. They think in people. The pipeline is a byproduct of how well they're helping those people navigate a hard decision.

There is no deal. There's only a buyer trying to figure out if you're the one who can help.

Your Best Leads are Going to Waste!

In our latest Thoughts on Selling podcast episode, "Your Best Leads Are Going to Waste," we had a fascinating discussion with Javier Lozano Jr. about the critical intersections of sales, marketing, customer success, and the burgeoning power of Artificial Intelligence. This blog post expands on those themes, exploring how AI can be leveraged to identify and fix those frustrating leaks in your sales pipeline, transforming it into a predictable and profitable engine for growth. We'll be dissecting how analyzing the very words spoken in sales calls can unlock a treasure trove of insights, leading to sharper messaging, more efficient sales cycles, and ultimately, significantly higher conversion rates.

The Problem with Leaky Pipelines and Misaligned Teams

We've all been there. You've got a sales team hustling, a marketing department churning out content, and yet, the revenue numbers aren't where they should be. It feels like water slipping through your fingers – a leaky pipeline. But what's really causing these leaks? Often, the root cause isn't a lack of effort, but a fundamental misalignment between departments and a failure to truly understand what's working at the coal face of sales interactions. Marketing might be generating a high volume of leads, but if those leads aren't qualified or don't align with the company's ideal customer profile, they become dead weight. Sales might be having conversations, but if the messaging isn't resonating, those conversations don't move forward. This disconnect creates a cycle of frustration, finger-pointing, and wasted resources. In our podcast episode, Javier powerfully articulated that if sales and marketing aren't aligned on revenue, it's not just a pipeline problem; it's a structural one. The emphasis needs to shift from departmental metrics like MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) or activity numbers to the shared goal of closed-won deals.

The Critical Link: Why Sales and Marketing Must Share Revenue Goals

For too long, sales and marketing have operated in silos, each with their own set of KPIs and objectives. Marketing aims to generate leads, and sales aims to close them. This creates a natural tension. Marketing may feel pressure to deliver quantity, while sales may feel pressure to work with leads that are not a good fit. When these teams are not intrinsically linked by the same ultimate goal – revenue generation – the pipeline inevitably suffers. Javier's point about shared revenue goals is paramount. When both teams are incentivized and measured by the success of closed deals, the dynamics shift. The focus moves from "my department's success" to "our company's success." This fosters a collaborative environment where marketing can gain valuable insights into what types of leads are most likely to close, and sales can provide feedback on the quality and conversion potential of those leads. This closed-loop system, where feedback flows seamlessly between teams, is essential for optimizing the entire revenue generation process. Without this alignment, you're essentially trying to build a strong house on a shaky foundation.

Leveraging Customer Success as Your Most Powerful Marketing Asset

One of the most eye-opening aspects of our discussion was the redefinition of Customer Success as a core marketing function. Too often, customer success is viewed solely as a post-sale support activity. However, Javier argues, and I wholeheartedly agree, that our happiest customers are our most potent marketing asset. The language they use to describe their positive experiences, the problems your product or service solves for them, and the benefits they derive are the purest forms of social proof and product positioning. These are the words that truly resonate with prospects because they come from someone who has already navigated the same journey. Think about it: what's more compelling than a testimonial from a satisfied client? This is where AI can play a crucial role in distilling these insights. By analyzing customer success interactions, support tickets, and even case studies, AI can identify recurring themes, pain points addressed, and value propositions articulated. This information can then be fed back to marketing to refine messaging and to sales to equip them with compelling, customer-backed talking points. Ignoring the wealth of information within your customer success function is like leaving your most powerful marketing collateral on the table.

AI's Role in Sales Enablement: Uncovering What Truly Closes Deals

This is where we get to the heart of how AI can revolutionize your sales process. Sales enablement traditionally involves providing reps with the tools, content, and training they need to be effective. However, much of this enablement is based on assumptions, anecdotal evidence, or broad market research. AI, particularly through the analysis of sales call transcripts, offers a data-driven approach to sales enablement that can uncover what is *actually* working. Imagine feeding hundreds, or even thousands, of recorded sales calls into a sophisticated AI language model. This AI can then identify patterns and themes that may not be obvious to the human ear or even to experienced sales leaders. It can pinpoint specific phrases, questions, objections, and value propositions that consistently lead to positive outcomes – progressing the deal, securing a meeting, or ultimately, closing the sale. This goes beyond simply identifying good or bad calls; it’s about granularly understanding the mechanics of successful sales interactions. This is not science fiction; this is the present reality of how forward-thinking organizations are leveraging AI to gain a competitive edge.

Practical AI Applications: Sharper Messaging, Shorter Cycles, Higher Conversions

The insights gleaned from AI-powered transcript analysis translate into tangible benefits across the sales funnel. Let's break down some practical applications:

• Sharper Messaging: The AI can reveal the exact language that resonates with your ideal customers. This means marketing can refine its ad copy, website content, and email campaigns to mirror the language prospects are using and responding to. Sales reps can be coached to adopt these proven phrases and talking points, leading to more impactful conversations. If AI consistently shows that a specific benefit statement or a particular way of handling an objection leads to a positive shift in the conversation, that becomes a cornerstone of your training and enablement materials.
• Shorter Sales Cycles: By understanding which questions prompt the most progress and which information needs to be delivered at specific stages of the sales process, AI can help optimize your sales playbook. If calls consistently stall at a certain point because a key piece of information is missing or an objection isn't being addressed effectively, AI can flag this. This allows for proactive adjustments to the sales process, ensuring reps have the right information and approach at the right time, thereby accelerating deal progression.
• Higher Conversion Rates: Ultimately, sharper messaging and shorter sales cycles contribute to higher conversion rates. When sales reps are equipped with the most effective language, understand customer pain points deeply, and navigate the sales process efficiently, they are far more likely to close deals. AI helps move beyond guesswork and intuition to a data-backed strategy for improving sales performance. This can also extend to lead scoring, where AI can analyze the content of initial interactions to predict a lead's propensity to close, allowing sales teams to prioritize their efforts more effectively.

This is precisely the kind of transformation Javier discussed when he highlighted how feeding call transcripts into language models can reveal what's truly closing deals, leading to these improved outcomes. It's about moving from "what we think works" to "what the data shows works."

Measuring Pipeline Quality: Introducing the HIRO Metric

A common challenge in sales is the inability to accurately measure the *quality* of the pipeline. You can have a pipeline full of opportunities, but if they aren't likely to close, it's a false sense of security. This is where Javier’s introduction of the HIRO metric – High Intent Revenue Opportunities – is a game-changer. HIRO is a powerful diagnostic tool that goes beyond simple lead volume. It focuses on the percentage of opportunities that are genuinely moving towards a closed-won state. Javier suggests that a healthy pipeline, one where marketing is delivering quality leads and sales is executing effectively, should see a conversion rate of above 25% for these High Intent Revenue Opportunities. If your conversion rate dips below this threshold, it's a strong indicator that either the leads you're receiving are not high quality, or there's an issue with your sales process or enablement. This metric forces a critical examination of where the leaks are truly occurring and provides a clear benchmark for success.

Diagnosing and Fixing Your Pipeline: Where to Focus Your Efforts

Once you've identified a leaky pipeline, the next step is to diagnose the root cause and implement targeted fixes. Simply throwing more resources at the problem without understanding the underlying issues is rarely effective. Javier emphasizes the importance of a diagnostic approach, identifying the two or three key priorities that will move the needle. These often fall into categories like Revenue Operations (RevOps) gaps – inefficiencies in the systems and processes that support the revenue engine – or positioning problems – where the value proposition isn't clear or compelling. By focusing on these core areas, organizations can avoid the trap of trying to fix everything at once and instead concentrate their efforts on the interventions that will have the most significant impact. AI can be a powerful ally in this diagnostic process, helping to identify bottlenecks, areas of friction, and ineffective communication patterns within sales interactions.

Conclusion: Building a Predictable and Profitable Sales Engine with Data and AI

In our conversation on "Your Best Leads Are Going to Waste," we embarked on a journey to understand the interconnectedness of sales, marketing, and customer success, and how the intelligent application of AI can transform these functions into a cohesive and powerful revenue-generating machine. This blog post has expanded on those crucial points, illustrating how a leaky pipeline is often a symptom of deeper issues like departmental misalignment and a lack of data-driven insight into what truly drives conversions. We've explored the practical applications of AI, particularly in analyzing sales call transcripts, to unlock invaluable knowledge about effective messaging, optimized sales cycles, and ultimately, higher conversion rates.

The HIRO metric provides a tangible way to measure pipeline quality, enabling businesses to pinpoint where their efforts are most needed. By embracing data and AI, organizations can move beyond guesswork and intuition to build a truly predictable and profitable sales engine. The future of sales enablement is not just about providing resources; it's about intelligently harnessing the power of data to refine every aspect of the sales process, ensuring that every opportunity is maximized and every lead has the potential to become a loyal customer.

Thank you for joining us on this exploration, and we encourage you to listen to the full episode for even more actionable insights.

 

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

Your Existing Customers Are Your Growth Engine. So Why Are You Ignoring Them?

 

Here's a number that should keep every CEO up at night: 73% of revenue comes from existing customers. Not new logos. Not the deals your sales team is chasing right now. The customers who already trust you enough to write you a check.

And it gets worse. According to Ebsta's 2024 analysis, 52% of net new revenue also comes from existing customers. When you do the profit math, nearly 100% of profit — sometimes more than 100% — is generated post-sale. Companies routinely need to generate 130% of their profit from existing customers just to cover the cost of acquiring new ones.

So where does the investment go? Into new business sales. Every time.

I had a conversation with Alex Raymond on the Thoughts on Selling podcast recently that crystallized something I've been feeling for years. Alex is the founder of AMplify, host of the Account Manager Secrets podcast, and he just published a book called The Growth Department. He's spent the last decade studying how companies grow through their existing customers — and his conclusion is blunt: most companies are blowing it.

The Varsity Team and the JV Squad

Alex uses an analogy I can't stop thinking about. We treat the sales team like the varsity team. They get the best coaches, the best playbooks, fancier uniforms, a nicer bus, nicer changing rooms. The account management and customer success teams? They're the JV squad. An inexperienced coach. Ratty hand-me-down uniforms. A smelly locker room. And then leadership says, "How come they're not performing at the same level?"

It's a structural problem, not a talent problem. The people in post-sales roles are often the hardest workers and most customer-centric people in the entire company. They drive more revenue than the salespeople in many cases — they just don't talk about it. But without the playbooks, training, tools, and leadership investment that sales gets, they're left twisting themselves into pretzels to get renewals across the line and keep customers happy.

And here's the cruel irony: when they succeed through sheer heroics, leadership doesn't see valor. They see a bunch of people running around putting out fires. The respect for the team goes down, not up.

The Recurring Revenue Myth

One of the most dangerous ideas in business today is that recurring revenue is automatic. Alex calls it a myth, and he's right. Just because revenue is structured as a subscription doesn't mean it shows up without effort. But executives hear "recurring" and assume it's on autopilot — which gives them permission to hire less experienced people, invest less in their development, and treat the entire function as an afterthought.

In the early days of SaaS, we knew better. Even on a 24-month contract, we'd say we have to earn the customer's usage every month. That mindset has been replaced by complacency, and the results are showing up in churn rates everywhere.

Keep, Grow, No Surprises

Alex offers a framework that's simple enough to fit on a napkin and powerful enough to reorient an entire post-sales organization. The job of account management is to help your company win. You do that three ways: keep the customers that sales brought in the door, grow the ones with the most potential, and make sure there are no surprises.

That's it. Not NPS scores. Not CSAT dashboards. Not being a liaison with the product team. Those are trailing indicators. The real job is keeping, growing, and eliminating surprises — and delivering profit back to the business.

The $1 That Changes Everything

One of the most surprising data points Alex shared comes from Greg Daines, who has analyzed massive datasets on why customers stay or leave. The minimum threshold to get a customer excited about renewing isn't some blockbuster ROI number. It's basically $1 of measurable improvement.

Why? Because once a customer sees a dollar of progress, they can imagine the path to ten, a thousand, a million. They feel justified in their decision. They want to keep going. And here's the kicker: even customers who see negative results stay twice as long as customers where you don't report value at all. Showing up with the truth — even when it's ugly — beats silence every time.

The Path Forward

This conversation reminded me of Jane Scott, one of the best CSMs I've ever worked with. Jane was the glue that held the Xerox account together at Oracle. She knew the metrics, she knew the people, she knew what mattered. She's what happens when you invest in post-sales talent and let them do their job.

Every company deserves a Jane Scott. But you don't get one by treating post-sales like the JV team.

Alex's book The Growth Department lays out the blueprint for changing that — for building the scaffolding that account management and customer success teams have never had. If you're a CRO, a VP of sales, a founder trying to scale, or a CSM wondering why nobody seems to care about the work you're doing, go read it.

The path to long-term, durable, profitable growth doesn't run through your next cold outreach campaign. It runs through the customers who are already here.

Listen to the full conversation on the Thoughts on Selling podcast.

The Mirror Test: Why Your "Sales DNA" is Costing You Deals

 

We have all heard the advice: “Know your customer.” But according to Carole Mahoney, author of Buyer First, the person you really need to know is the one looking back at you in the mirror

.In our recent conversation on the Thoughts on Selling podcast, Carole shared a story that perfectly illustrates why so many deals stall -- not because of the buyer, but because of the seller’s own psychology.

The Car Salesman Who Talked Himself Out of a Commission

Last year, Carole decided to buy a new car. She is a decisive buyer; she did her research online, found the exact make and model she wanted, and drove to the dealership ready to sign.

She test-drove the car. She liked it. She told the salesperson, “I’m pretty sure this is what I want to do.”

Then, something baffling happened. The salesperson looked at her and said, “I’m sure you want to go home and think about this.”

Carole corrected him: “No, I’m pretty sure.”

He insisted: “No, no, no. I understand this is a big purchase and you want to go home and think about it.”

He literally talked her out of buying the car. Carole left, drove to another dealership, found the same car, and bought it from them instead.

How You Buy is How You Sell

Why would a salesperson sabotage a sure thing? Carole calls this the “Cognitive Behavioral” side of sales: “If you buy that way as a salesperson, you will sell that way as a salesperson.”

That salesperson likely needs time to “think it over” before making a big purchase. Because that is his reality, he projected it onto Carole, assuming she must feel the same way.

This is part of what Carole calls your “Sales DNA.” It includes hidden weaknesses like:

• Need for Approval: The deep-seated need to be liked, which prevents you from asking tough questions or saying “no” to a bad-fit prospect.

• Money Discomfort: As Carole notes, people would rather talk about religion, sex, or politics than money. If you are uncomfortable discussing budget in your own life, you will choke when asking a prospect for theirs.

• Non-Supportive Buy Cycles: If you are a bargain hunter who always needs to “shop around,” you will inevitably accept those same excuses from your prospects.

Coaching the DNA Shift

For sales leaders and enablement professionals, fixing this requires more than just telling a rep to “be more confident.”

You cannot inspect quality into a product, and you cannot demand confidence from a rep who is wired to seek approval.

Here is how Carole suggests coaching this behavior out of your team:

• Inspect the Thought Process, Not Just the Outcome: Don’t just tell a rep what they did wrong. When you review a call where a rep missed a buying signal or caved on a discount, ask diagnostic questions: “What was going on in your head when you said that?” or “Where does that reaction come from for you?”. You have to make them conscious of the subconscious belief driving the action.

• Role Play “Saying No”: If your reps struggle with Need for Approval, they are likely “happy ears” sellers who can’t disqualify bad leads. Run role-play exercises where the only goal is to say “no” to a manager or a prospect. If they can’t set boundaries in practice, they won’t do it in a live deal.

• Check Your Own Mindset: Carole’s data shows that managers with negative beliefs about sales are 355% more likely to pass those limitations onto their team. If you are a manager who fears conflict, you are likely coaching your reps to avoid it too!

The Fix

The bad news is that you can’t out-train your Sales DNA with new scripts or CRM hacks. The good news is that these are learned behaviors, which means they can be unlearned.

Carole’s advice is simple but challenging: Start changing how you make decisions in your own life. Practice saying “no” to small requests to get over your need for approval. Stop agonizing over small purchases.

So, the next time a deal stalls, don’t just look at the pipeline. Look in the mirror. Are they really “thinking it over,” or are you just waiting for them to do what you would do?

Sales Leader & Enablement Action Items

Here are three high-impact action items specifically for Sales Leaders and Enablement professionals to implement immediately.

1. The “80/20” Onboarding Audit (Enablement Focus)

• The Problem: Most onboarding programs are backwards -- they focus heavily on product features, internal processes, and systems, with the buyer tacked on as an afterthought.

• The Action: Audit your current onboarding curriculum. Shift the balance so that 80% of the content is focused on “Buyer Immersion” -- understanding their world, their problems, and their psychology.

• The Goal: Equip new hires to have a meaningful business conversation by the end of their first week, rather than just knowing how to demo the product.

2. Implement “Sales DNA” Assessments for Hiring (Leadership Focus)

• The Problem: Hiring managers often rely on “industry experience” or the new hire’s rolodex, which are not predictors of success.

• The Action: incorporate a sales-specific assessment that screens for “Sales DNA” traits -- specifically Need for Approval, Money Tolerance, and Emotional Control. (Many savvy sales leaders use specific tools like those from the Objective Management Group to catalog skills and attitudes of their successful sales people and then build predictive hiring profiles to ensure high quality recruiting. When I engaged them for my own team I was quite surprised at the level of detail in the hiring profile!)

• The Twist: Don’t be afraid to look outside the industry. Consider candidates with “hospitality DNA” (like waiters) who have naturally high empathy, curiosity, and the ability to read a room.

3. Train Managers on “Cognitive Behavioral” Coaching (Leadership Focus)

• The Problem: Most managers confuse “coaching” with “telling.” They tell reps what they did wrong (the outcome) rather than exploring why they did it (the belief).

• The Action: Train your managers to stop asking “Why did you lose that deal?” and start asking diagnostic questions like “What was going on in your head when you hesitated to ask for the budget?”

• The Goal: Fix the root cause (the belief system) rather than just treating the symptom (the behavior). Managers who master this supportive coaching style are 1,000% more likely to build high-performing teams.

Yes, this is a different way of selling, and your leadership, management, coaching and enablement activities must change to fully deliver bigger results.

I’ve been selling, managing, coaching and enabling this way for twenty years. In large companies and small. For big deals and smaller transactions. It works.

Want to discuss your operational issues? Grab an hour for us to talk. I guarantee you it will be time well spent!

The Rigor Mandate: Closing the Dangerous Gap Between Sales Strategy and Field Execution

 

The new sales year has arrived with predictable friction. Targets have increased, efficiency is demanded, and the margin for error has evaporated. In response, many sales organizations are witnessing a familiar, panic-induced regression in the field: reps reverting to high-volume, low-quality activity, hoping to brute-force their way to quota.

As Sales Leaders and Enablement professionals, we know that activity does not equal progress. The spray-and-pray approach is not just inefficient; it burns total addressable market and commoditizes your brand.

The difference between hitting the number this year and missing it will not be a new tech stack or a clever marketing campaign. It will be the ability to close the gap between high-level strategy and daily field execution. This requires a systemic shift toward rigor—moving the entire organization from a culture of "trust and hope" to one of "evidence and validation."

To achieve this, Sales Leadership and Enablement must align around a unified operating system that connects how we inspect deals, how we engage customers, and how we build infrastructure.

Here is the blueprint for closing the execution gap.

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Part 1: The Leadership Mandate—Evidence-Based Inspection

The foundation of rigor begins with how Sales Leaders manage the pipeline. Too often, forecast calls are exercises in creative writing, fueled by "happy ears" and rep optimism. We accept statements like "the meeting went great" or "they love the platform" as proxies for deal progress.

They are not.

To instill rigor, leaders must shift from coaching efforts to inspecting evidence. If a rep claims a deal is real, they must be able to prove it.

Implementing the Deal Inspection Guide

We must standardize what a "qualified opportunity" looks like. We recommend utilizing the Sales Leader Deal Inspection Guide. This tool is designed to combat the statistic that 84% of deals are lost in the first meeting due to poor discovery.

The Guide forces leaders to look for specific "Red Flags" across critical dimensions:

• The Pain: Is the rep solving a quantified business problem, or just pitching features?
• The Mechanics: Do they understand the prospect's legal and procurement process, or are they guessing?
• The Urgency: Is there a compelling event forcing action on a specific date, or just general interest?

The "What Must Be True" Test

The ultimate mechanism for pipeline integrity is the "What Must Be True" (WMBT) logic gate within the Inspection Guide. This removes ambiguity. For a deal to be committed for the quarter, specific binary conditions must be met: Is the paperwork currently with the signature authority? Is the timeline shared in writing by the client?

If the answer is "I think so," the deal is not real. Leaders must ruthlessly enforce these gates.

Mapping the Terrain

Crucial to this inspection is the Influence Map. Deals today are rarely single-threaded; they involve committees of six to ten stakeholders. A pipeline review that doesn't examine a visualized Influence Map is incomplete. Leaders must demand to see who the Economic Buyer is, who the detractors are, and where the empty seats at the table sit. If a rep cannot map the political landscape, they are flying blind.

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Part 2: The Rep Operating System—From Interrogation to Co-Creation

If leaders demand evidence, reps need a new operating system to gather it. The traditional "20 Questions" style of discovery feels like an interrogation to the modern buyer and rarely yields the deep insights needed to pass the Inspection Guide.

Rigor in the field means shifting from asking generic questions to bringing a point of view.

Anchoring with the Business Value Hypothesis

Reps should never enter a high-stakes meeting without a documented Business Value Hypothesis. Instead of showing up and asking, "What keeps you up at night?", a disciplined rep uses research to state:

"Because [Company X] is experiencing [External Pressure], you are likely struggling with [Specific Business Cost]. We believe our approach to [Capability] can help you achieve [Measurable Benefit]."

This hypothesis serves as the anchor for the meeting. It shifts the dynamic from a sales pitch to a mutual discovery session, where the rep invites the client to validate, correct, or co-create the solution. This is how you gather the evidence required by leadership.

Managing the Relationship Bank Account

Executing this level of strategic discovery requires earned trust. Reps must understand the concept of the Relationship Bank Account.

Every interaction with a prospect is a transaction. When a rep asks for a meeting, data, or an introduction to power, they are making a withdrawal. If they haven't made sufficient deposits first—by sharing relevant insights, adding value without asking for anything in return, or demonstrating deep understanding of the prospect's business—the account is overdrawn, and the door slams shut.

A rigorous rep uses their Influence Map to strategically make deposits with key stakeholders across the buying committee before attempting a withdrawal.

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Part 3: The Enablement Pivot—The Supply Chain Approach

Finally, this level of rigor cannot be sustained if Sales Enablement operates in a silo. Too often, Enablement produces "Random Acts of Content"—decks, trainings, and tools that are disconnected from the reality of what managers are inspecting.

Enablement must pivot from being a "content university" to managing a "supply chain."

The Enablement Supply Chain Audit

Enablement's strategy must be a mirror image of the Sales Leader’s inspection strategy. To ensure this alignment, organizations should utilize the Sales Enablement Supply Chain Audit.

The core philosophy is simple: The Manager's Inspection Guide creates the "Demand," and Enablement must provide the "Supply."

• If the Manager is inspecting for quantified pain (Demand), Enablement must supply the ROI Calculator and training on how to use it (Supply).
• If the Manager is inspecting the Influence Map (Demand), Enablement must provide the templates and the "skill drills" on how to identify an Economic Buyer (Supply).
• If the Manager requires a Business Value Hypothesis (Demand), Enablement must provide industry-specific hypothesis templates (Supply).

If Enablement is building assets that do not map directly to a red flag on the Manager's Inspection Guide, they are wasting resources.

The Path Forward: Rigor as a Competitive Advantage

In a tight market, the organization that learns the fastest and executes with the most precision wins. By aligning Leadership inspection, Rep behavior, and Enablement infrastructure around a single source of truth, you replace hope with validation.

The tools—the Inspection Guide, the Audit, the Hypothesis, the Influence Map—are just mechanisms. The real change happens when Leadership and Enablement lock arms to demand and support a higher standard of professional selling. That rigor is your sustainable competitive advantage.