A few weeks ago I was in a workshop with the executive team of a mid-market software company. They were a sharp group. The CEO had been an operator for thirty years. The CRO had run revenue at three different scaled companies. The CMO had built brands I’d recognize. The product leader had run engineering at one of the most respected platforms in the space. The room knew its business cold. Or thought it did.

I asked them a simple question. What problem do you solve.

The CEO went first. He gave me the elevator pitch. We help mid-market companies streamline their revenue operations through a unified platform. The CRO nodded. Right, we help companies get a single source of truth on pipeline, deal stage, and forecast. The CMO took her swing. We help revenue leaders make better decisions with real-time data. The product leader, who I’d had dinner with the night before and who I knew was sharper than this answer, said something about consolidating the GTM tech stack.

I waited. Nobody noticed they hadn’t actually answered my question.

I’d asked what problem they solve. They told me, four different ways, what they DO. The verb was “help” but the structure was a product description in every answer. Not one of them named a single business problem the buyer would recognize as theirs.

This is not a story about a bad executive team. This is a story about a normal one. We’ve run this exercise with hundreds of companies and the result is almost always the same. The opening answer is product-centric. We help companies do X. We provide Y. We enable Z. That answer is not a problem. It’s an output disguised as a problem because the verb sounds like one.

Then I push.

After the first round, I tell the room, that’s not a problem. That’s what your product does. Tell me what’s actually broken in the buyer’s business that your product fixes. The room rallies. The CEO comes back, OK, we help companies who lack visibility across their revenue stack. The CRO, we help companies stuck with manual reporting cycles. The CMO, we help leaders who are drowning in disparate data sources. The product leader, we help companies whose go-to-market tools don’t talk to each other.

Better answers, structurally. Worse answers, taxonomically.

Because none of those are problems either. Lack of visibility. Manual reporting. Disparate data. Tools that don’t integrate. Those are root causes. A root cause is always a broken process or a broken tool. Never a business problem. Never an impact. It is the mechanism that produces both.

Take a warehouse as the cleanest illustration. Sit with the business problem of high returns. What’s producing it? Could be a manual picking process. Could be untrained warehouse staff. Could be poor SKU labeling. Could be no quality check before the box leaves the dock. Could be an outdated WMS that doesn’t validate orders against the SKU master. Five different broken things, all capable of producing the same business problem. The impacts downstream are similar but distinct. Reduced margins because every return absorbs labor and return shipping. Customer churn because customers fed up with order errors take their volume elsewhere. Higher CAC because winning a customer back costs more than keeping them in the first place.

Now run it the other direction. Take one of those root causes, the manual picking process. What business problems can it produce? High returns, yes. Also customer churn from repeated order errors. Lost retail partner contracts because shipment errors trigger compliance breaches on delivery SLAs. Inventory shrinkage running above benchmark because pick mistakes cascade into inaccurate stock counts. Missed peak season revenue because the process can’t absorb volume spikes. One broken process, five distinct business problems. Each with its own impact line.

This is the part most people miss when they try to draw a PIC. The relationship between the three columns is many-to-many, not one-to-one. A single business problem typically has a half-dozen root causes feeding it. A single root cause can produce several business problems. The PIC is not a list. It is a map of the connections between layers. Building it requires the leadership team to actually trace every connection, not just guess at one row and move on.

Look at ASG’s own PIC for a moment. The four business problems we sell against are low close rates, declining sales, lacking pipeline coverage, and low average sale prices. Each one is a recognizable condition a revenue leader would name. Each one has a stack of root causes feeding it. Take low close rates. The root causes that produce it, in our experience across hundreds of revenue orgs, include weak sales team, lack of training, poor sales enablement, poor deal strategies, poor sales management, real product issues, lack of understanding of target customer, poor marketing, wrong target marketing. Nine root causes for one problem. Several of those same root causes also feed our other three business problems. Lack of training shows up under declining sales. Poor sales management shows up under declining sales. The connections cross-link. That cross-linking is why fixing one root cause can sometimes shift multiple problems at once, and why missing one can leave a problem untouched no matter how many other root causes you address.

Map this for your own business and the work gets clear. Three columns. Three definitions. Many-to-many connections between them. Most companies cannot articulate any of it. Until they do the work.

**The Problem Is** the company that cannot name the problems it solves cannot teach its sellers to find those problems in a buyer’s business. Because there is no shared definition to find against.

What ends up happening, instead, is what we see in every dysfunctional sales org. Reps go into discovery and they ask product questions. How are you doing this today? How many of these do you have? Who else is involved? They take the answers and pattern-match to features. The buyer mentions a manual reporting cycle, the rep says, our platform automates that. Done. Move to demo. Move to proposal. Three weeks later the buyer goes dark and nobody can figure out why.

The reason is simple. The rep solved a root cause. They never named the business problem the root cause was producing. They never quantified the impact. The buyer never got to the place where the cost of inaction exceeded the cost of action. Because that math gets done at the impact layer, not the root cause layer. And the rep never got there.

There are two findings from our buyer research that should land hard for any revenue leader reading this.

The first. 37% of B2B buyers told us the number one reason their last deal stalled was the rep didn’t understand the problem. Number one. Ahead of budget. Ahead of competition. Ahead of timing. Discovery quality, in the buyer’s own words, is the single biggest predictor of whether the deal lives or dies.

The second is harder. 48% of B2B buyers told us they had bought the wrong product at least once because nobody understood the problem they were trying to solve. Read that twice. Almost half of B2B buyers, in survey, say they have spent budget on a product that did not solve their business problem because the rep on the other side of the table did not diagnose what was actually broken. That is not a stalled deal. That is a closed deal that produced a churn customer, a damaged relationship, and a dollar of revenue that costs you more than it earned once you account for the renewal that’s not coming.

Bad problem identification kills you twice. Once at the top, where 37% of your deals never close because the rep can’t articulate the buyer’s problem. Again at the bottom, where almost half of the deals you do close turn out to be the wrong solution to the wrong problem and churn out within a cycle or two. Neither failure shows up as “we sell the wrong product.” Both are diagnostic failures upstream of the close.

If 37% of your deals stall on problem misunderstanding and 48% of the rest were sold to the wrong fit, the issue is not pipeline. It is not closing skills. It is not a discounting problem. It is that the document your rep was supposed to learn the problem from does not exist in your company.

This is the part that should sting if you’re reading this and your team runs Gap Selling.

We have clients who tell us they’re a Gap Selling shop. They’ve read the book. They run the workshops. They reference current state and future state. They have it on the wall. They have not built a PIC. Not even an attempted one. They believe Gap Selling is the philosophy of “find the gap between what is and what they want and sell to it” and that the methodology stops there. It does not stop there.

The Problem Identification Chart is the operating layer that makes Gap Selling work. Three columns. Problem, Impact, Root Cause. Defined precisely, distinguished rigorously, mapped many-to-many for the specific ICP your company sells to. Without that document, the philosophy floats. Reps run into discovery armed with vibes. They come back with vibes. The deal review is a vibe check. The methodology produces no compounding effect because there is no shared definition for the team to compound against.

You can read every book. You can attend every workshop. You can certify every rep. If you have not, as a leadership team, sat down for the weeks it actually takes to build the PIC, you are running the philosophy without the architecture. The architecture is what produces results.

People don’t buy to fix root causes. They buy to fix business problems. If your rep cannot articulate the business problem in the buyer’s own language, the buyer doesn’t recognize themselves in the conversation. The product becomes one of three quotes. Price becomes the differentiator. The deal goes to a cheaper option, or to no decision, or to a budget freeze.

All of that traces back to the PIC the company never built.

**The Point** is there is no shortcut to the PIC. It is the most expensive document a company will ever produce in terms of time and executive attention. We have never had a company complete it in less than several weeks of actual work, with the right people in the room, willing to argue, willing to throw out the first draft, willing to admit that what they thought they sold is not actually the problem they solve.

Most companies refuse to do this work. They want the methodology certification. They want the workshop. They want the wall poster with “find the gap” on it. They do not want to sit in a room for three weeks and argue with their CMO about what counts as a business problem versus an impact versus a root cause, and how the connections between them actually run.

The companies that do it have a different sales motion six months later. The reps run discovery against a real definition. The deal reviews inspect against a real definition. The forecast is built on real definition. The competitor’s reps are still pattern-matching to features. Yours are diagnosing.

This is the work. There is no version of Gap Selling, or any other problem-centric methodology, that produces compounding results without it.

If your team cannot, today, name the business problems your buyer experiences when they do not have your product, separate from the broken processes that produce them, separate from the downstream impacts each problem creates, with the connections mapped between layers, you do not have a methodology.

You have a vocabulary you have not earned.

Build the PIC. Or stop calling yourself problem-centric.

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I was on a call with a CRO last month, mid-March, who was visibly trying not to panic. He runs revenue at a mid-market SaaS company, the kind that grew 40% last year and was supposed to grow 35% this year. The board call had been the day before. The board had asked him a question he wasn’t ready for.

“What part of your team can be replaced by Claude Cowork?”

He told me he sat there for a beat. He was prepared for questions about pipeline coverage. He’d built a deck on win rates. He had a story about the new SDR program. He had, as every good CRO does, a contingency plan for a softer Q2.

He did not have an answer for that question. Nobody on his leadership team did.

The question wasn’t rhetorical. The board had been reading the same headlines everyone had. Anthropic launched Claude Cowork in January. Open-source plugins for Sales, Legal, Finance, Marketing, Data Analysis. Two trillion dollars of SaaS market cap evaporated by April. Wait, scratch that word, two trillion dollars wiped off in four months. The board wasn’t asking him as a hypothetical. They were asking him because they had already started cutting their software budgets and wanted to know which of his people they could cut next.

He flew home that night thinking about the question. He’d been a CRO for eleven years. He’d never been asked it before in those terms. He told me, on our call, that the part that scared him wasn’t the headcount question. It was that he didn’t have a framework for answering it. He didn’t know which roles on his team did work that AI couldn’t do. He didn’t actually know what his reps did all day, in the deep sense. He knew the activity. He didn’t know the work.

I think a lot of CROs are about to have that same conversation. Most of them aren’t going to be ready either.

Think about what your average rep actually does in a week. Research accounts. Build target lists. Sequence outbound. Personalize messages. Take a discovery call. Take notes. Write a follow-up email. Build a one-pager. Update Salesforce. Pull a forecast number. Write a deal review. Prep for a manager 1:1. Run a demo. Send a recap. Loop in a stakeholder. Draft a proposal. Follow up after a meeting. Repeat.

Now look at that list and circle the parts that require a human in the loop. Be honest.

Maybe four items. Discovery. Demo. Stakeholder management. Proposal negotiation. The rest is information assembly, summarization, message drafting, data entry, and follow-through. Every single one of those activities can be handled by an agentic AI right now, today, with current tooling. Not in two years. Now. Claude Cowork is just the brand name.

The reason it took the market this long to price it in is that for the last decade, the SaaS industry sold the rep team a thousand tools to do those activities better. Outreach to sequence. Gong to record. Clari to forecast. Salesloft to coordinate. ZoomInfo to research. Apollo to enrich. Lavender to write. Crystal to personalize. Each tool extracted a layer of work from the rep and moved it onto a software seat. The rep was supposed to be left with the high-value parts.

That isn’t what happened. The rep, in most cases, became a curator of automated artifacts. They reviewed the AI-drafted email. They edited the AI-summarized call notes. They dragged the AI-scored deal up or down a stage. They ran demos that increasingly looked like a deck the marketing team built. The “high-value” work compressed because the easy work expanded to fill the calendar.

Then Claude Cowork showed up and said, fine, we’ll just do all of that for you, no per-seat license, plug into your tools, drop the artifacts in a folder. The CFO ran the math on the unit cost and the answer was a heart attack. A trillion-and-a-half dollars of SaaS valuation, in four months, was the market saying out loud what every CFO already knew. The intermediating layer between the rep and the actual selling work doesn’t need to be that expensive. It might not need to be there at all.

What the market hasn’t priced in yet is that the rep layer, in most companies, is also expensive in a way that doesn’t pencil once the tools collapse.

Walk through it. If the AI handles research, sequencing, summarization, follow-through, and CRM hygiene, what’s the rep doing? If the answer is “selling,” fine. Show me what selling looks like in practice when you strip the activity out. Most CROs can’t.

Because what they call selling is, in practice, mostly the activity layer. The rep’s day is built around tasks. Take away the tasks and a lot of reps don’t have anything left to do that the company can clearly point at. The discovery call is fifteen minutes. The demo is thirty. The stakeholder coffee is forty-five. That’s an hour and a half of actual selling on a good day, surrounded by hours of activity that, two years from now, no human is going to be assigned to.

This is the part nobody at SaaStr next week is going to want to talk about. The bifurcation isn’t between AI and humans. It’s between reps who can do the irreducibly human work, and reps who built a career on the activity layer.

The first group is going to be the most valuable employees these companies have ever had. The second group is going to be the layoff line in the Q4 board deck.

I had this conversation with a head of enablement two weeks ago. She said the quiet part out loud. “We’ve been training reps on tools for eight years. We trained them to be good at the activity. We never really trained them to be good at the conversation. Now the activity is going to be free, and the conversation is what we’re going to need them to do, and they’re not very good at it.”

That’s the gap. That’s the entire crisis sitting under the SaaS sell-off.

The AI isn’t replacing the seller. The AI is exposing what the seller was actually doing.

If your reps were running a real diagnostic conversation with buyers, asking precise questions about broken business processes, helping the buyer see a problem they hadn’t fully articulated, quantifying the cost of inaction in dollars per month, building consensus across stakeholders who started the conversation with different versions of the truth, holding the room long enough that the buyer chose action over the safety of doing nothing, then the AI tooling around them is just a productivity multiplier. They get to do more of that real work because the noise gets handled by Claude.

If your reps were curating templated outreach, summarizing notes, updating fields, and pushing deals through a stage gate they didn’t really earn, then the AI isn’t a multiplier. It’s a substitute. And the math the CFO is running right now will arrive at that conclusion well before the end of this year.

Most companies are in the second category. Not all. But most.

For twenty years, the SaaS economy and the sales economy reinforced each other. SaaS sold tools that automated rep activity. Reps learned to manage the tools. Quotas got hit, sometimes, mostly because there was enough macro tailwind to forgive the inefficiency. Methodologies got bought and shelved because the activity layer absorbed the energy that should have gone to building real selling skill. The org chart got bloated with layers of revenue ops, sales ops, enablement, and revenue intelligence to manage the tools the reps used to manage the activity. Every quarter, the headcount went up and so did the revenue, and the assumption was that those two things were causally related.

They weren’t, mostly. The macro was. Now the macro turned, the AI showed up, and the question on the table is whether the people you have on the floor can do the actual work, with the AI handling the rest.

The CRO I was talking to last month didn’t have an answer because he’d never been forced to ask. None of us had. The system was designed to obscure the question. Now the system is collapsing fast enough that the question is in front of every revenue leader at once.

Which of your reps can do the irreducibly human work? Have you ever, on purpose, watched them do it? Have you ever defined what good looks like in that work, in operational terms specific enough that you could grade a call against it?

If you can’t answer those questions, you’re not behind on AI. You’re behind on selling.

The two trillion dollars the market wiped off SaaS this spring is, in a strange way, the most useful thing that’s happened to the sales profession in a decade. It’s forcing a question we’d been avoiding. The CRO who answers it now is going to be running a much smaller, much sharper, much more valuable team in 2027. The CRO who doesn’t is going to be on a board call no one wants to be on.

What does your rep do that AI can’t? You should know the answer by Q3.

Because the board is going to ask.

Let’s be honest, just for a minute.

Let’s all of us pause for a moment, take a deep breathe and admit it.

Our forecasting process, if one even exits, is terrible.

I have worked with 100’s of companies and I have yet to see a clean, predictable, deliberate forecasting process.

Accurately predicting the number, without massive amounts of organization contortions is extremely uncommon.

When forecasts follow this path, chaos isn’t far behind.

We’ve all seen it, deals slip, losses come out of nowhere, and ironically so do wins. Requests for discounts mount. Exacerbating the problem, as the quarter or year approach, management applies the pressure, pushing reps to “find deals to bring into the quarter, year.” In essence, demanding the team trade next quarter or year for the present one.

We’ve all seen it. It’s become SOP for sales teams for decades.

The key underlying issue comes down to a few things, lack of real forecasting criteria, and . . . wait for it . . . lack of accountability for forecasting accuracy.

We’ve yet to run into an organization that has clear, identified forecasting criteria, that marks or highlights what constitutes a forecastable opportunity or any real accountability for it.

To address this common occurance, we recommend attacking things a little differently.

1. Identify a clear set of problem centric criteria that every deal must meet, in order to be forecasted. I’ve talked about these before, we call this information BID (Buyer Input Data). Bid is critical. Reps MUST capture BID and be able to articulate the cost of inaction vs the cost of action in every opportunity before it can be forecasted. There are no exceptions. It’s the reps job to do the work to uncover a complete diagnosis or description of the buyers world and why they must change. The case must be data backed and buyer provided.

2. Establish a higher level of accountability. — make management own the forecast number. This second layer of ownership is a game changer. Sales gets the BID, but frontline managers cull the opps and creates the forecast. This is done by enforcing frontline managers operate from a secondary filter for forecasting; The Buyer Confidence Model

   1. Clarity — Does the buyer fully understand their problem, its root cause, and the cost of inaction?

   2. Control – Does the buyer feel in control of the buying process, decision-making, and implementation path?

   3. Consensus – Has the buying group aligned on the problem, impact, and solution?

   4. Change Confidence – Do they believe they can successfully execute the change after purchase

   5. Competition — Does the buyer believe we can solve the problem better than the competition?

Add . . . and can the rep prove it, to the end of these and you have a winner.

It’s the reps job to get this information from the buyer. It’s their job to do the proper discovery and diagnosis to understand; is change mandatory and does the buyer want to change. It’s the reps job to properly define the gap; the current state problem, impact and root cause and to uncover the future state desired outcomes. It’s the reps job to quantify it all and create an air tight case on why the buyer is going to change and change to us now.

It’s the frontline manager’s job to validate what the rep has uncovered and push it through the Buyer Confidence Model framework. Only if and when management, not the rep, can confidently answer yes to all 5 questions in the confidence model do they forecast the deal.

Separating opportunity creation and advancement (the reps) from forecasting (frontline managers) is game changing.

This tiered system acts as a checks an balance system, that minimizes the chaos. Reps understand what a information deals need to be forecasted, and do the work to get it. It’s then the frontline managers job to pressure test the information and ensure that the 5 c’s are present and validated.

Improving forecasting starts with discovery, but finishes with accountability. Get that right and things become far more predictable.

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I’m driving my daughter to school today.

Ok, she’s driving me as she’s working on getting her driving license when she turns 16 in April.

As we’re rolling down the street, she turns to me and says:

“Chris gave me the best compliment today.”

Chris is Ava’s strength and conditioning coach.

For those of you who don’t know, Ava is an aspiring Olympian. (You can see her spectacular feats on her Instagram, @ava.keenan).

Ava told me that at her workout session yesterday, she apologized to Chris for not having made the team workouts the past few weeks, because her PT conflicted with team workouts, but promised him she had been doing them after school and that she wasn’t missing them. (Ava tore her MCL, a few weeks ago and has PT in the am).

His response was what Ava feel so good.

He said, “Ava, there is no one on this team who I trust more to get these workouts done.”

He continued, “If you don’t make it, I know it’s for a good reason and that I’m not worried.’

Chris went on to say that Ava has an absolutely impressive work ethic and that at no time does he ever questions her motives or commitment.

This, of all the compliments in the world a 15-year old could get that could make her feel good was one the said he “trusted her.” It wasn’t him saying she was an amazing skier. It wasn’t him praising her skills. It wasn’t him saying she was some gifted skier or an amazing leader. It was that he trusted her.

It was that simple compliment that lit up her day.

And, I get it.

Gaining someones trust is earned. There is no other way to describe it. You earn trust or you don’t and it’s not always easy.

Trust requires actions, not words, not placations, but simple, consistent repetitive actions, that match your words and commitments. It takes time.

But, that’s not how trust works.

Trust is the most intimate and important aspect of human interaction and interpersonal relationships and, in my opinion, we’re continually minimizing it’s value in the world, and the sales world is not exempt.

Trust requires a few things in business;

• Honesty and straight forward communication

• Transparency and openness with information

• Vulnerability to exposure or harm. (You can’t build trust if you’re in a defensive posture)

• Humility and sacrifice, you can’t build trust if you are unwilling to subjugate yourself if your wrong, or the truth does not serve your best interest.

These are hard for people to do because sometimes they undermine our motives. We want or need something and being “honest” can undermine that, so we trade trust for our own selfish needs.

This can be seen in the drive for revenue, profit, and the growth at all costs culture of today’s business and sales environments. It has blurred the lines of what we call truth. Half truths, lying through omission, and permission based lying (giving yourself permission to lie, by convincing your self the situation warrants it) have become far too acceptable at a huge cost.

We’ve convinced ourselves that a little lie, lack of transparency, or omitting information isn’t lying and if it is, it’s not that big of a deal and “if” it bites us, we can get our way out of it.

Being direct, truthful, transparent and honest doesn’t give people the dopamine hit any more, like it did my daughter, and that’s a problem.

Few people take “pride” in truly being transparent and honest. It’s almost as if, it’s not about being honest, but rather not getting caught.

I get it business is tough. Things are never black and white and as clear cut as we’d like. But that’s not an excuse to obfuscate, avoid, or omit the truth for your own personal or corporate gain.

Engaging in that manner is short sighted, and it never wins in the long run.

My daughter missed several trainings. She didn’t call and tell the coach. But when she finally did show up, she apologized and told him what happened.

But, he didn’t need any of that. He already knew Ava was doing what she need to do and that she wasn’t missing training. He trusted her. It never entered his mind that her actions were inconsistent with who she was or what she committed to. She had earned hit trust through years of consistently being the only girl to be at weight training, no excuses, no whining, not complaining. She just showed up and did the work.

This made her feel awesome and called it an amazing compliment.

Why?

Ava values her character and identity more than her skills as a skier. She’d rather be complimented on being a great person, than a great worker, skier or any other trait.

We need more of this in sales.

All the while, convinced we’re not doing anything wrong adn because business demands it, we keep doing it. And if it does come back and bite us, we can get out of it, as long as we don’t lose the account.

At ASG, we have a VERY strict policy on full transparency, even if it costs us a deal.

We’d rather lose a bunch of deals on the back of transparency, rather than win just one on the back of lie.

Being trusted is the greatest feeling. I love it. It’s freeing. It’s the ultimate in interpersonal relationships. There is no better feeling than knowing, without a shadow of a doubt, the people, person, or company you’re dealing with has your best interest at heart and you theirs.

My daughter was right. It was the best compliment ever and the fact that she recognized it, is what really matters.

If being told that your trusted isn’t the greatest compliment in the world, that’s probably a sign you can’t be trusted.

It’s time we get back to valuing trust, giving and earning it.

What do you think?

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Most sales enablement organizations are being run by people who think like teachers, not performance engineers. And it’s killing your revenue.

They came from education — academia, L&D, HR. They were trained to think in learning objectives, Bloom’s Taxonomy, Kirkpatrick’s Levels, and knowledge transfer. They know how to build courses, structure curricula, and assess comprehension. They know how to make sure everyone feels like they learned something. They’re world-class at helping people understand.

But sales isn’t a classroom. Sales is a performance business.

That’s the lie. We built an entire function around learning when what we needed was performing.

You’ve seen it. You’ve probably lived it. Your enablement org looks sophisticated. You’ve got dashboards. Reinforcement modules. Coaching programs. You’re tracking completion rates, satisfaction scores, and confidence levels. And on paper, it looks good.

But look closer.

Win rates haven’t moved. Pipeline velocity hasn’t changed. Half the team still isn’t hitting quota. You’re proud of your LMS report: 90% of the sales force certified. Then you scroll one line down: Only 50% of the team hitting quota.

What the hell are we doing?

You can’t Bloom’s Taxonomy your way to revenue. Learning hierarchies don’t close deals. Confidence doesn’t equal competence. And knowledge doesn’t automatically translate to execution. But L&D taught them it does. That’s how they were trained — design the course, deliver the module, measure satisfaction, move on.

It’s the logic of education, not execution. The classroom is built to inform. The field is built to transform. That’s the gap. Training stops at understanding. Performance begins at execution.

You can feel it in how most enablement teams operate. Motion everywhere, but no movement. Meetings about “learning outcomes.” Workshops on “soft skills.” Reinforcement plans that sound brilliant and do nothing. Reps who can explain your methodology better than they can execute it. Managers who can deliver the training deck but can’t coach the behavior.

They’ve mistaken activity for advancement, complexity for capability, curriculum for performance.

This isn’t about blaming L&D. It’s not that they’re wrong. It’s that they were trained in the wrong domain. Their entire professional identity was built around the idea that knowing is progress. But in sales, doing is progress.

Sales doesn’t reward knowledge. It rewards execution under pressure. You don’t pay your reps to remember what to do. You pay them to do it — consistently, when it counts.

So, if you want to fix your sales performance problem, stop thinking like an educator and start thinking like a coach. Stop teaching salespeople. Start building performers.

In sports, athletes don’t get paid to memorize the playbook. They get paid to execute it under real conditions. They drill, they simulate, they analyze film, they correct mistakes in the moment. Every rep, every exercise, every ounce of feedback ties directly to the field of play.

That’s performance development.

Sales needs the same thing. We don’t need more lessons. We need mechanisms that take what people know and what we teach them and convert it into what they consistently do. We need feedback loops, real-world repetition, and accountability tied to outcomes, not attendance.

Because here’s the punchline: if your enablement org can’t prove that what was taught shows up in deals, it’s not performance enablement, it’s training theatre. And training theatre is costing you millions.

So take a hard look at your dashboards. Ask the uncomfortable question: Are we measuring learning, or are we measuring performance?

Because you don’t grow revenue in the classroom. You grow it where pressure lives, in the field, in the call, in the close.

The Great Enablement Lie isn’t that people don’t care about performance. It’s that we let the wrong discipline define it.

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They found us through search. They were looking for sales training. They had experience with other sales training firms, and wanted to know more about us, based on the book (Gap Selling).

Celeste, one of our salespeople did an amazing, I mean amazing discovery. She got to the problem, why they were looking, what prompted them to reach out. She uncovered why the problem existed and how its existence impacted them.

She went even further was able to uncover the long term implications of not addressing the problem and it was substantial. She got them to define in numbers the costs, losses, impacts etc. Everything was measurable. She found the “gap.” Not changing was not an option. Whether they went with us or not, was secondary. They had to change.

Based on her comprehensive discovery Celeste understood exactly what the problem was, the impact it was having on them, the root causes for the problem and what happened if they didn’t change. This allowed her to make a very powerful and custom recommendation.

To their credit, they were not shy, and told us so.

They were a bit shocked and caught of guard and said we were 3x the competition.

After the recommendation call, they asked for a few days to take it all in and process. They said they would get back with us.

Before they got off the phone we asked what the competition was offering. It was training, one or two days, I can’t remember. But, they mainly offering training. No pre-work, no organizational assessment, no reinforcement, no prospecting training, just sales training. That was it.

Understanding the problems they were struggling with. The current impact of those problems and the root causes of those problems, we were perplexed at how the competition felt comfortable they could help this company address the issues AND achieve their stated outcomes or desired future state, based on what they recommended.

It made no sense to us.

So, that’s where we came up with the idea. We can offer that same service, for the same price — easy!

We didn’t think it could work for them, we didn’t think it was the right choice, but we could provide it.

So, to make it easier for our prospect and allow them to compare apples to apples, we revised the proposal in a choice format.

We outlined a training only option that competed well with the competition at their price point, but offered more value from a product perspective AND we retained our original recommendation that addressed all the issues we uncovered in our discovery.

Giving them two options, one that mirrored the competition as well as our original recommendation based on the discovery and the business problems we uncovered allowed them to expand their evaluation perspective.

The approach allowed the buyer to properly assess their options, not from a product to product perspective or a price perspective but from a product to problem perspective. Not from a which product was cheaper, had better features, (training curriculum, trainers, experience, methodology, etc.) but rather which offer was best suited to holistically solve their problems and therefore provide the greatest probability of achieving their desired outcomes for the business.

This proved to be the perfect strategy and exactly what the buyer needed.

We won the deal.

Why?

In the clients words,

“We were originally very concerned with your price point and the robustness of the offer, but when you gave us the option for the smaller scale, offer that matched the other proposals, you gave us permission to step back and evaluate it from the perspective of our business not the product.

Once we did that, it was a no brainer.

By giving us the two options, you moved us from which vendor (because we could have any of them for roughly the same price), to which solution/recommendation was best. Once our head was there, the analysis became more clear and what you were recommending was a far more relevant and effective approach. Even though it was quite a bit more expensive, it seemed silly to go the other direction. We didn’t think it would work.”

If you’re in sales, THIS is why discovery is important. This is why problem-centric selling matters. When you properly diagnose the challenges and issues your prospects are having, you’re in a MUCH better position to provide the most effective recommendation, that leverages the most confidence.

Sales is a confidence game. Understanding how to build confidence via discovery is the holy grail. Product pitching, focusing on price, etc. does little to nothing to build confidence, it’s just order taking.

Sales is not about price, it’s about value, and if you can’t establish value, you can’t sell.

Value comes from understanding how to solve the problem, not the product.

POST, POST TAKEAWAY:

We sell sales training and consulting services, our competition is Challenger, SPIN, Sandler, ForceManagement, Value Selling and in many cases we are told they don’t sell using their own method or approach. The buyer in this engagement explicitly said the other suppliers did little to no discovery and never really understood or uncovered their current environment.

How does this happen?

No matter what you sell, eat your own dog food!!!!

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The corrosion effect is when a sales organization is quietly and continuously being attacked from the inside out. No matter how much effort, how many tools, or people are used, the team never reaches true effectiveness and efficiency. What’s truly frustrating is, the corrosion effect almost always goes unseen or ignored and yet few if anyone is impervious to it. The corrosion effect, affects almost every sales team out there and it’s a unique phenomenon to sales.

Quota attainment is a blinder. It allows the corrosion effect to fester and eat away at revenue, making salespeople and sales orgs work harder.

When talking with CRO’s two things are always present

• The corrosion effect is present to some degree

• They don’t see it.

Sales is far more complex and sophisticated than most CRO’s, CEO’s and boards recognize and it’s this dismissiveness of the complexity of sales that allows the corrosion factor to exist.

In addition, the culture of sales now, make the number at all costs, trade a dollar today for a dollar tomorrow only amplifies the corrosion effect, because it doesn’t allow GTM leaders to see it and fix it.

The corrosion effect is like a tax on the sales team and the longer it exists the greater the tax.

The corrosion effect or tax on sales:

1. The team is at quota (or even exceeded quota) and everyone is happy, yet only 80% or less of the team achieved 90% or more of quota, 20% or more missed substantially. This miss is massive, costing teams millions. Just because the team collectively hit quota doesn’t mean the team is operating effectively. This “tax” can easily contribute a 5-10% hit or more.

2. Lack of a standard sales methodology. This is a contentious topic, as far too many sales organizations don’t believe in a method or lack the skills to implement and operate a sales organization around a standard method. The evidence is clear when a sales organization embeds a sales methodology it sees a 23% improvement on quota attainment. The tax: 20-25%

3. Training isn’t on going, it’s one and done, and god forbid, new every year or two. Sales is a performance profession, like sports or a musical instrument, and when organizations don’t emphasized continuous learning, skills soften, erode and the numbers suffer. The tax 3-5%.

4. Product-Centric Selling, when sellers push products, features and benefits, they subject themselves to higher price pressures, losing to the status quo and lower win rates. BANT and MEDDICC type orgs that tend to demo quickly, push products, and focus on the sale as a transaction, leave a lot on the table. The tax, easily 20% or more

5. Frontline sales managers are glorified salespeople. When sales managers spend more time “helping” salespeople sell, the corrosion effect accelerates as deal support, coaching, deal review, opportunity management, rep development, all suffer. Frontline sales managers in this environment constantly proclaim they are “too busy” to coach, do deal review, check the CRM, etc., because they are still selling. The tax: 10-15%

6. Lack of CRM hygiene; the CRM is a ghost town, filled with dead deals, old close dates, little to no BID data, and used only for reporting. When CRM hygiene is poor, the cost is astronomical. (Side note, any CRO or head of sales that does not have strong CRM hygiene should be fired — period. There is no excuse.) The CRM is a sales teams vault of selling info, and allowing it to devolve into an empty shell of useless information and an executive reporting tool is malpractice. The tax 10%

7. There is no existing or documented BID information. Bid information is the data a buyer provides that tells you their cost of inaction is greater than their cost of action. When organizations lack this, reps are all over the place and the data required to increase win rates is lacking. You can’t close deals when you don’t know why the buyer must change. The tax 5%

8. Lack of forecasting criteria; this is an extension of lack of a methodology and BID information. When deals are allowed to be forecasted on rep gut or opinion, or buyer verbal expressions, forecasting is a mess. Documented forecasting criteria provides reliable insight to all deals being forecasted and has historical reliability. Without it, the tax, 5%

9. Sales enablement is a learning and development organization, not a performance enhancement organization. When sales enablement is structured and measured on courses taken, team participation, certifications achieved, and not win rate improvement, average contract value increase percentage, quota/revenue increase percentage, you’re not getting growth, you’re getting participation. The tax 10-20%

Yes, I’m very aware that when you add up the taxes, they equal between 93% and 115% of the status quo or of quota. And that’s why it’s called the corrosion effect. It’s insidious, quietly and maliciously eating away at revenue.

There is a real and credible argument that every sales organization is leaving anywhere from fifty to one hundred percent of quota on the table, simple because of the corrosion effect.

To make things worse, these are the largest and most prevalent elements of the corrosion effect. There are a plethora of additional, smaller issues that when combined, collective work at taxing your org costing additional revenue losses.

Ferret out the corrosion effect, look at the system, look at the structure of the org and stop paying unnecessary taxes. It’s not an outside tax, you’re taxing yourself, stop thinking quota is the end all be all and ask, could we have done more?

That’s how you get on the right track.

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I wish I had uncovered this concept while writing Gap Selling. It would have been game changing for the hundreds of thousands of people who have read the book or been implementing the methodology.

But, I’ve uncovered it now, so it’s going to be in Gap Prospecting, coming out in January (fingers crossed).

The idea is simple, but powerful.

During discovery (or during any of our client interactions) our job is to get the buyer to reflect on their current environment, their desired outcomes and their perceptions regarding the problems, impacts and root causes they experiencing.

I’m gonna say that again, because you may have missed it. Our job is to get them to reflect!

re•flect - /re’flk(t)/ to think deepy or carefully care about

Getting someone to reflect does something very powerful, it causes them to open up, self distance and become vulnerable.

According to the paper: Autonomy and Vulnerability: Elements of a Phenomenology of Reflection, it argues that reflection causes a kind of self-distancing (ie stepping back from the lived experience) which opens up the possibility of taking a stance on reason. The author also argues reflection creates or is associated with improved vulnerability.

Getting buyers to be vulnerable in their exploration of their problems is critical in discovery.

Think about that, what is traditionally the most difficult part of sales, getting people to open up, could simply be accomplished by getting the buyer to stop and “reflect” on their environment ?

Reflection just may be the secret weapon, ie; asking questions and engaging in a discovery that is truly discovery and causes the buyer to stop and reflect on their environment, perspective and issues.

Take a look at your or your team’s discovery calls. Look at the information required for deal review and opportunity qualification, is it information that requires deep, introspection, or is it superficial low hanging fruit?

It needs to cause reflection.

Selling is about helping. It’s about being a true consultant committed to assisting buyers solving their most pressing problems. Success here requires a vulnerable and open buyer, who is not resistant to reason and can be vulnerable enough to acknowledge their issues and work with you to fix them.

Sales enablement orgs will benefit greatly by building into their training at the skills layer, methods that will equip the team in this effort. Think business acumen training, industry knowledge education, buyer KPI insight, and more.

Create sellers that ask insightful questions, that encourage buyers to reflect on their unique situation, it will be worth the effort.

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It’s no secret that the average tenure of a CRO is just 18 months. To be honest, I’ve always struggled with that. It makes no sense.

Any org that has a true CRO position is north of 10 million, but looks more like a 50 million dollar company and larger.

Understanding this, I never understood what any CEO or board expected in 18 months that would drive them fire someone so quickly. Your typical NFL and NBA coaches are given more twice that time. Their average tenure with a team is 3.7 years and they’re not known for their patience.

So how did we get to a place where CRO’s are given less time to turn around, grow, or deliver in sales than a professional head football or basketball coach?

The reason’s are many, and I can see myself sharing them here over time, but there is one main one that is 100% the CRO’s fault and it’s there’s alone to fix.

Here’s the deal, when it comes to fixing, growing and/or running a large sales organization there are two critical levers you can pull, the people lever or the systems lever and if you pull the wrong one, you’re done.

The biggest opportunity for success with a new CRO is knowing how to diagnose what the problem is in the organization. It’s the responsibility of the CRO to quickly and effectively understand what problem they have to fix.

Why?

Depending on the diagnosis, the approach to addressing it changes.

If a CRO assumes or thinks the problem is the system and they begin to address playbooks, the sales process, the deal qualification criteria, the marketing spend, ad dollars, reporting, sales operations, metric requirements, etc and they have a people problem, they will be gone in 18 months.

Why?

They would have been working system issues for a year and a half when they had a people problem and that would have barely moved the needle.

The logic goes the other way as well.

If the CRO thinks it’s a people problem, and invests in training, methodology implementation, skills development, role play tools, manager training, sales rep evaluation and assessment processes etc. and it’s a systems process. Yup! They will be out of a job in 18 months, because in spite of how strong the salespeople are the underlying system is broken.

I’ve found the most sophisticated CROs understand this. They don’t rush to make changes or prove their worth in the first quarter. They spend the first 90 days digging in, really digging in to figure out if they’re dealing with a people problem, a system problem, or both (and which one needs to be addressed first).

They treat those first 90 days like a forensic investigation. They’re not asking, “how’s everyone feeling?” They’re asking, “what’s actually happening?”

Here’s what they are doing:

They start with the process.
Not the one written on paper, but the one that actually happens. They look at the stages, the exit criteria, the opportunity data. They’re asking, do these stages align with how our buyers buy, or just how we think we sell? Most organizations have a process problem that’s really a process illusion. The process exists, but nobody’s following it.

Then they dig into the data and the forecast.
They don’t just look at accuracy; they look at truth. Can I trust this data? Is it predictive or just historical? When the forecast’s off, they don’t blame rep optimism, they ask; what in the system allows bad data to live this long?

Next, they test the playbooks.
They don’t care if playbooks exist, they care if they’re being used, and why or why not. They’ll listen to calls, watch demos, sit in on deal reviews. If reps aren’t using the playbook, it’s easy to call it a “people” problem. But often it’s a design problem. The playbook was built around how leadership wants to sell, not how buyers actually make decisions. That’s a system miss, not a rep miss.

They pressure test ICP and buyer alignment.
Most CROs assume it’s dialed in, but the good ones validate it. They look at where the leads actually come from, what closes, and whether Marketing’s targeting the same ICP Sales is chasing. If the definitions don’t match, you’re wasting time and dollars. They see that’s not a marketing problem that’s a system alignment problem.

They look at the handoffs.
Marketing, Sales, RevOps; how do they interact? Not “do they meet weekly,” but are they aligned on metrics, data, and accountability? You can’t have Marketing optimizing for MQLs and Sales optimizing for velocity. That’s two systems pulling in opposite directions, again a systems problem.

They study the enablement and management layers.
They don’t just ask, is training happening? They ask, is it working? Is enablement measuring attendance or outcomes? Are managers coaching or just chasing deals? Too many CROs inherit managers who think their job is to sell more, not make the team better. That’s not a people issue; that’s a system definition issue.

They audit the tech stack.
They don’t just check if tools exist, they look at how they’re being used, what data they capture, and whether it leads to better decisions. Tools can create visibility or they can create noise. Most orgs don’t know which one they have.

They assess the method — if one even exists.
Most CROs assume the company has a sales methodology, but when you dig in, what you usually find is a few slides in enablement or some dusty training materials from three years ago.
The best CROs want to know: Is there a method that defines how we diagnose problems, run discovery, and advance deals?
Who owns it? Is it managed to? Is it coached? Does it show up in how we qualify, forecast, and review deals?
If it’s not embedded in the daily rhythm of the org, it’s not a method, it’s a memory.
And that gap between having a “method” and actually managing to one is where most revenue systems quietly fall apart.

Hint: To the converse far too many new CRO’s come in and just drop their favorite method into the org. before assessing the above and that can create more damage than good. Don’t be that person.

And finally, they test the GTM message.
They look at the story the company is telling. Is it connecting with the market? Is it creating demand or just describing a product? Weak messaging doesn’t live in marketing decks. It lives in stalled pipeline, long sales cycles, and confused prospects. That’s not fluff. That’s a system failure.

The answers to these questions begin to provide insight into what is going on in an organization and what it’s going to take to reach or exceed the goals.

Whether it’s a turn around situation or and accelerated growth goal remit, knowing what the problem actually is, will make or break every CRO’s tenure.

Eighteen months is barely long enough to get anything done and see any meaningful, foundational change. But, if the problem is properly diagnosed, the right plan can be created. A plan that targets the right initiatives and tactics that can start to deliver around the 18-month time frame.

Here’s the bonus.

When you go to the board/CEO/Executive team with the proper diagnosis after 60-90 days and are able to confidently say: “We have a ““people”” problem or we have ““systems”” problem, here’s why, and here’s what it’s going to take to fix it.” Your’e properly setting expectations beyond 18 months.

If you got it right and you execute properly, you’ll blow by 18 months, build a sales team that exceeds expectations, and you’ll be sitting pretty knowing your one of the few pulling up the average.

CRO’s last just 18 months not because they’re experience has failed them, but because they focused that experience on the wrong problem.

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I’m sure this title isn’t sitting well with many of you. And on the surface, I don’t blame you. It does have a rather creepy feel. But stay with me.

Here’s the deal, until or if AI becomes sentinel, it simply does what we tell it to do. And this is why we need to treat it like a human, in many ways, I’d argue we need to treat it like a child or a brand new employee.

For the rest of this post, I’m going to be referring to sales and AI in the sales space, because that’s what I know, however, I feel strongly, what I’m sharing here transfers nicely into all other functions and industries.

It’s undeniable, we’re seeing AI everywhere in the sales space, we’re seeing it in coaching, role play, deal review, prospecting, task management, research, etc. It’s everywhere, but what I’m not seeing is good practices.

What do I mean?

We’re training AI to do a task, but we’re not training to be GREAT at that task. I see sales role plays and sales coaching AI with no best of breed selling method underneath it. I’m seeing prospecting AI without a best of breed criteria on how to get a buyer to engage or what “great” prospecting looks like. I’m seeing forecasting tools that lack a clear understanding of buyer confidence, how to calculate it, and why it matters.

What I see a lot of is, AI doing a lot of tasks without deep, sophisticated methods or frameworks guiding it. I see lots of “action” but no best of breed guidance.

In other words, we’re so focused on what we want the AI to do, we’re forgetting to training on HOW to do it well.

Imagine creating an AI pitching machine robot and you taught it to throw a curve ball, a sinker, a slider, a fast ball and change up. Now on the surface this sounds like an amazing tool, but it’s really not much better than having the coach or another pitcher for batting practice. It’s doing the same thing the humans were doing, just at scale, an maybe a bit more predictable.

But, what if you taught the machine how to understand all the scenarios a batter would face; are there men on base, what’s the pitch count, how many outs, what’s the score, what inning is it, and more. Now imagine you taught it the most successful pitching strategies and methodologies, and approaches, including how to mix pitches, attack the strike zone, reverse pitching, pitch to contact and more. Imagine how that would change the hitting success of a team if AI was more than just a machine that could throw all the different pitches.

It would be transformational, as a team could continually practice real game scenarios. Not just practice hitting.

I could go even further and imagine training the AI on all the tendencies of the pitchers in the league, and be able to replicate those. So now the team can “practice” against the next pitcher they’re going to face.

Can you imagine?

Unfortunately, in most cases we’re building fancy pitching machines in sales, they can throw a great curve ball or sinker, but that’s it.

If you’re developing an AI for role play and it’s not based on an identifiable and proven sales methodology, you’re just building or using a better pitching machine.

If you’re leveraging AI for deal reviews and forecasting and you haven’t trained it on industry leading BID information and opportunity qualification criteria, you’ve again created just another pitching machine.

The key to building and leveraging AI isn’t to teach it to do what we do, but think of AI as a human and teach it to be better, to be the best at what it does.

Until AI is thinking for itself, just like employees, some will be better at doing a job than others. Some AI’s will be smarter, more sophisticated and leverage the best and most effective best practices, while others will just do what the average employee was doing, just doing it at scale.

I guess what I’m saying is teaching is a natural element to life, animals teach their offspring. Humans teach their children, their workers, the peers. Teaching is fundamental to life, as its how things move forward, so treating AI like a human only makes sense.

And like anything else, if we’re going to teach people or AI to do something, we better teach them right the first time.

We need to stop thinking small and creating pitching machines that can throw great pitches, and start creating pitching machines that do things better than we can at scale. Isn’t that what it’s all about?

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If you haven’t noticed, sales stages are on their way out. I’m not gonna make some bold prognostication, but I’m pretty comfortable, sooner than later, we won’t be managing deals based on sales stages, but rather by data (BID) readiness or completeness.

Ok, stay with me.

Why do we have sales stages today?

We have them to help us track and assess our pipeline. They provide a simple view into all the opportunities a rep is working on, or within the entire organization in order to gain insight and predictability of the pipeline. Pipeline and pipeline stages are arguable the greatest leading indicator in sales. Stages made them manageable.

The typical sales “stage” is a representation of where and opportunity lives, based on a few primary criteria, the activities the rep has taken, the statements from the buyer, and the data collected in the process (think MEDDIC or Gap Selling, how much of the acronym or current state and future state has been collected).

The challenge or issue with stages is leadership arbitrarily assigns the values and the entrance and exit criteria for each stage, and then manage reps to the criteria.

Adding to the challenge, sales stages tend to be seller centric, designed to provide clarity around the selling process, rather than the buyer process. Because of this emphasis, the stages tend to be further from the buyers motives, drivers and issues AND subtleties that influenced a win or a loss are missed. Thereby, making forecasting far from predictable or accurate.

Sales stages have been a crude, but necessary foundation to selling for the past 65 years. We had to know, they weren’t going to be with us forever, right?

So, where are they going?

AI is going to punch them in the nose.

Here me out.

We’re not far off from AI being fully embedded inside the CRM or connected to all your selling, and customer engagement tools like: Gong, Email, Social, Noted Analytics, Aligned, Drift, Outreach, Lavender and more, and being able to aggregate all those communications and engagement channels to accurately predict closure based on a historical analysis.

When AI can see every conversation you’ve had, when it can see all the information (BID Information) collected, who was part of the decision, who the competition was, when there wasn’t competition, when budget existed and didn’t exist, who all the buyers were, what recommendations were made, what the decision criteria were, etc. and then can bangs all that data that up against win/loss results, you don’t need sales stages anymore.

In this integrated AI environment, deal stages become irrelevant, everything is now managed based on percentage of close, (derived from historical information), and deals are simply managed to increasing their probability of close.

In this environment, reps and management start managing opportunities based on percentage of close and the gap between the BID information. The AI spits out a deal score, or percentage of close based on the data in the opportunity, and then gives the rep real time insight and direction on what needs to be done to get the deal closer to close. There is no need for “stages.” Every deal is now managed individually, based on the completeness and integrity of the data collected and activity performed by the rep.

The sales world is changing fast and one of its victims will be sales stages, you can count on it.

I for one, will be thrilled.

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I feel dumb and a bit remedial listing the same horrid sales numbers that seem to be posted every year, highlighting how bad the state of sales is. But here they are:

1. Quota Attainment just 43.2%

2. Win rates down 10%

3. 75% of buyers want a rep free experience

4. CAC up +14%

5. Average Sales Cycle is flat across all deal sizes, with 100k plus deals taking slightly longer and <100 deals slight shorter

Adding to the puzzle, according to RepVu’s latest Cloud Sales Index, spending on sales tools is up 7.8%. Yet, quota is up just 1% since Q4 2023

To sum it all up, sales enablement spend has gone from 1.7b in 2020, to 5.23b in 2025 that’s a 207% increase yet we have NOT seen a 207% increase in productivity. Making matters worse, we have seen an actual decline in the key metrics.

1. Win rates are down 2% decrease since 2020

2. Average sales cycle length has increased by approximately 20 days.

3. CAC has increased 60% or $364 per customer.

We’re spending all this money on tools and software and it’s not working.

Why?

We’ve lost sight of the people.

In the same time period from 2020 to 2025 the spend on sales training has decreased by 600 million dollars, declining from 4.8B to 4.2 billion. We’re spending less on making our sales people better and more on the tools to scale their declining sales skills.

At the end of the day, it’s the people behind the tools. It’s salespeople talking to the customer and doing discovery. It’s salespeople and sales managers managing the deals. It’s the people making the decisions, creating the strategy, assessing the customer, planning the calls, executing on the strategy and doing the work.

Tools are NOT creators of productivity and efficiency, they are enhancers of it. The first chair violinist will be better with a Stradivarius not the average violinist. The bad ass bump skier will be better with bump skis, not the average skier. The scratch golfer will be better with the best clubs, not the 95 handicap. Great tools enhance great skills, they don’t create them.

Expecting tools to raise the skills of the average to below average person to great or professional is a fools errand. In many cases it can make things worse, as it magnifies the weaknesses and or exacerbates the negative outcomes. Giving an average violinist a Stradivarius and then putting them into first chair, not only harms the violinist, but now the entire orchestra is in jeopardy. The orchestra is now not as sharp, the conductor is exposed, the audience and critics are unhappy, ticket sales drop, and now the symphony is in trouble.

We’ve been making this mistake in sales for the past 5 plus years and it’s getting worse. According to Grandview research the sales enablement tool space is supposed to grow by 144% from approximately 5.23B to 12.78 by 2030.

Do you we really believe we’re going to see an 7 billion dollar in crease in productivity or revenue increases in the next 5 years?

I wouldn’t bet on it.

It’s time the sales organizations begin to build sales performance enablement engines.

CROs and sales organizations spent 24.5% more on tools than on training in the last 5 years only to see almost zero productivity gains or improvement.

The numbers are clear.

Organizations that want to see true productivity gains, the organizations that want to experience measurable, quantifiable, predictable growth across all key metrics (win rates, acv, CAC, sales velocity) will be those that shift tool spend and tool mindshare more evenly across the organization and towards salesperson performance. It will be those that put the salespeople, and salespeople development at the center of their sales org investments and build the sales tools around the skills and capabilities of the salespeople themselves.

F1 starts with the driver, then the car. Build the greatest car in the world, put a crappy driver in the seat, and you’ve wasted 100’s of millions of dollars.

Put the best driver in the seat, and build the best car in the world around that driver and winners circles will become the norm.

We are going to be severely tempted to continue to spend and implement new tools in the coming years. Especially with the lure and promise of AI.

The lure of the easy button will be as intense as ever. But, resist we must.

The most sophisticated CRO’s and sales organizations will avoid this temptation and will start with building and developing robust salesperson performance engines and performance enhancement programs. They will build a strong skills development programs that last, they will leverage tools to DEVELOP sales people as much as. they will use tools to scale salespeople. Sales enablement programs will be people centered with tool enhancing capability models. They will have clear understanding of key skills to success, they will have programs designed to identify, build and grow the key competencies to success. They will be heavy coaching and leadership centered programs.

They won’t be tool driven. They will be people driven.

If sales growth, reduced CAC, increased win rates, and improved sales velocity is the goal, avoiding the easy button, by avoiding the lure of growth via tools, is the strat.

Building a high performance engine, that focuses on salespeople SKILLS and skills development is where the win will be.

Imagine if we had spend just 50% of that 5.23b we spent on tools on salespeople performance development?

I’ll let that just sink in!

Avoid the easy button, avoid the shiny object and get back to basics, the people!

We’re coming up on SKO season and sales organizations around the world are gearing up for 2026.

As predictable as the return of swallows of Capistrano, organizations are preparing to kick off 2026 with their perennial Sales Kick Off (SKO) event.

These big events traditionally bring the entire sales team together under one roof to train, create energy and rush into the next year with vigor an excitement.

Calls are starting to come in here at ASG asking if I or someone on the team is available to speak or train or do a workshop and what our pricing is.

In everyone of these interactions, our first question is always the same. We ask what is it you are looking to do?

It’s at that moment it becomes clear, they don’t know. As the answer is almost always, we’re looking for:

1. A speaker to talk about . . .

2. A workshop on . . .

3. A sales training focusing on . . .

On the surface this seems rather innocuous. They’re trying to fill an agenda and create a fantastic SKO. It makes sense.

However, it’s this next question that stumps them.

What are your goals of this SKO? Are you trying to create a high-energy event that gets the team motivated to rush into the year OR are you trying establish lasting behaviors that will impact the KPI’s and outcomes for the coming year?

What comes next is almost a flurry of conflicting thoughts, I don’t know, that’s a good question. And this where the problem lies and why millions is lost every year on failed SKOs.

SKO’s are expensive, according to showpad. The average cost for an SKO can be $1500 - $2000 per rep. That’s $150,000 - $200,000 for a 100 rep SKO. That’s real money.

Without a real understanding of what your organization is looking to accomplish, you can expect to lose the majority of the expense.

That then begs the question, If it can’t deliver an ROI, then why do it?

Red Bull or Protein?

The main question any organization should ask is, do we want a Red Bull or a Protein SKO.

Red Bull SKO

A Red Bull SKO is designed and built to create energy, emotion and get the team rejuvenated and excited for the upcoming year. It’s designed to build on existing sales methods, and reinforce their success and provide reminders of why it works and why you need to keep using it. They launch new products that address last years product deficiencies, that cause reps to lose deals, but not this year! They bring in motivational speakers who tell powerful stories of success, and perseverance, with energy and vigor, riling up the crowd .

Redbull SKO’s are energetic, exciting, motivating and are best used when things are going well. The existing sales method is embedded, there is a common language and the sales method has been adopted and your looking to build on current successes and get more out of what you have that’s working. Red Bull SKO’s are great force multipliers of existing behaviors, processes and approaches.

Just don’t ask for behavior change from a Red Bull SKO.

Protein SKO

A Protein SKO is designed to create behavioral change. It’s designed to instill new methods, approaches, processes, market direction, etc. Protein SKOs introduce new sales methodologies, they do sales training, they introduce new sales processes, new go to market plans, and more. They are meant to create measurable future outcomes and are the catalyst to change beyond the immediate SKO bump.

Protein SKO’s are about building new muscle, changing behaviors, direction and doing things different. Protein SKOs are for when an organization wants lasting predictable change. They are for when organizations want people doing things differently, consistently over time.

Protein SKOs are great for orgs going though aggressive growth goals and need to elevate the sales team, understanding what’s being done now won’t work tomorrow. They are great for orgs who have started to stagnate and need to revitalize the team via restructuring, new skills, improve capabilities, as well as frameworks and processes.

Protein SKOs are anchored in long-term metrics like improved win rates, shorter sales cycles, improve quota attainment, or average contract value. Protein SKO’s are meant to move the numbers. They are meant to drive a measurable and specific metrics. They require post SKO training, and support. They require on going passive and active reinforcement after the event. They aren’t set and forget.

Protein SKO’s are perfect for organizations who are looking to move the needle. They aren’t build for rah, rah.

Doing a Red Bull SKO, when you’re looking to see behavioral changes that drive the number is a fools errand. It’s the best and fastest way to loose money. You’re better off not doing anything.

If you’re building a Protein SKO for a Red Bull outcome, don’t! You’re better off cutting the budget in half and get some really exciting people, put on some amazing team building and have a party. Don’t wast the additional money, when you don’t need to.

SKO’s are great, just make sure you’re doing the right one, for the right reason, Red Bull or Protein. No one has money to burn, I don’t think!

Bonus: To help make this decision, we have created the “How to Create the Best SKO Ever” It breaks down everything you need to know to decide between a Red Bull SKO or a Protein SKO and then how to build them. Enjoy!

Unfortunately, we’ve burned them out.

In our never ending pursuit of more, we all to often default to seller centric, quota driving, manipulating, overbearing, annoying, incessant approaches and buyer’s have had it.

When done right however, buyers are grateful when reps listen, don’t try and “push” the sale, offer insights that are helpful and are perceived as a partner.

When that happens, everything changes.

Wouldn’t you want buyers who treated you like this?

Ok, maybe not cut my food, but yeah, I’ll take a coffee.

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It’s a different world!

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s a different world out there today. The tried and true selling approaches, go to market motions and marketing are no longer working. From prospecting to customer success, from sales enablement to marketing, getting in front of customers, driving pipeline, closing deals, managing churn, training sales people, penetrating new markets, growing market share, are all under assault from Ai, savvy buyers, shifting economics, newer generations, buyer fatigue, and unfortunately poor selling motions and behaviors.

It’s crazy!

We (GTM, marketing, individual contributors, SDR’s, all of us) have beat the hell out of the sales GTM in the past 15 years and we’re seeing the results today.

To top it all off, buyers are fed up.

1. What it’s gonna take

Navigating this new world is going to take leadership, creativity, insight, awareness and lots of hard work.

We’re in a shift, and winning as GTM, CRO, Head of Sales, Sales Enablement and Marketing leaders (as well as individual contributors) will require rewiring of the brain, a commitment to change and a willingness to take risk.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think laggards will do well this time. Creating and maintaining an effective GTM/Sales organization is going to require agility, flexibility and a great deal of vision.

Wait and see . . ?

Not feeling good about that.

2. This Substack: The Growth Gap — The Problem is the Point

The Growth Gap — The Problem is the Point is going to address today’s challenges and issues. If I do it right, you’ll learn something with every post.

The objective, give you something you can use every time:

1. Insight: Point you in a direction, uncover something unique, or challenge a widely held or not so widely help POV.

2. Processes: Offer executable processes or frameworks that will enhance your GTM strategy at both the strategic and tactical layer

3. Conversation: A way for you to ask questions, engage and expand your perspective

4. Prognostication: Every once in a while I’ll look into my 8-Ball and share where I think things are going and why it matters.

5. Case Studies: I’ll break down unique environments, where things are working and why or where things aren’t working and why. The point: Give you real case studies you can learn from.

6. Tools/Ai: I’ll share my thoughts, insights and highlight new tools, as well as Ai use cases to keep you in the loop on what’s out there that’s having the biggest impact on GTM (Sales and Marketing).

3. Who’s this for?

This Substack is for GTM Leaders, CRO’s Heads of Sales Enablement, Marketing and even individual contributors.

If driving predictable, reliable revenue over a long period of time, is your goal, The Growth Gap is your Substack.

4. What’s in a name?

I chose The Growth Gap - The Problem is the Point for the title because being successful at anything requires a robust understanding of the problem your solving. Change comes from the acknowledgement of a problem and the ability to view that problem as clearly as possible.

Everything starts with problems. Growth comes from understanding why you’re not growing or what’s preventing you from growing.

Pushing EVERYTHING through a problem lens drives the greatest outcomes.

This Substack will do just that. Everything will be viewed from the lens of the problem and why and matters.

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