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.