Performance

Last week I was running a workshop. A team was presenting their new commercial dashboard. Clean. Well built. Months of work, visibly. Left side: activity metrics. Visits, client types, opportunities created. Right side: results. Bookings, revenue. I asked a first question. “Two salespeople. Identical territories. Same numbers on the left. Big gap on the right. […]

Arcane Technologies’ leadership meeting lasted three hours. Impeccable slides. Clear ambition. New premium positioning: exit the small, time-consuming accounts, focus on high-value enterprise clients. Margins would improve. Growth would accelerate. Everyone nodded. The meeting notes were sent. The new strategy was officially launched. Three months later, nothing had changed in the field. Leadership talked about […]

Sofia sent a perfect proposal. Technically flawless. Well presented. Within budget. Addressed exactly to the needs expressed in the last meeting. Three weeks later: silence. She followed up. A polite acknowledgment. “We’re looking at it, we’ll get back to you.” Two more weeks. Nothing. She followed up again. This time, no reply at all. Sofia […]

Your experts aren’t resistant to selling. They’re resistant to becoming something they don’t respect. That’s a very different problem. And confusing the two is why most sales transformation efforts in expert-led organizations fail before they’ve really started. Here’s what I hear regularly from commercial leaders: “Our team is full of experts. Brilliant people. But they’re […]

Thomas isn’t the kind of manager who wings it. When a mutual contact introduced us, he’d already done his homework: reviewed the numbers, redrawn the territories, analyzed his conversion rates. He was looking in the right place. Just not at the right depth. He has everything he needs to succeed. An experienced team. A real […]

You’ve been in that meeting. The one where someone presents a training program, a new methodology, a coaching approach — and before the slide is even finished, someone in the room says it. “This is all well and good. But where are the numbers?” Maybe you said it. Maybe it was said to you. Either […]

You trained them to be transactional. Every Monday morning. For years. You’re frustrated. You call them old school. You say they use outdated sales techniques. You say they don’t care about their customers. Maybe you’re right. But here’s the question you’re not asking: who built the system they work inside? That system — the one […]

Two meetings. Two companies. Two different industries. Same opening line: “We need to transform our sales team.” Same problem underneath: they had no idea what their salespeople were actually doing. I always ask the same question when I hear “transformation.” “What’s happening that makes you want to do that?” Meeting one. The CEO told me […]

Last week, a Sales Director showed me one of his team’s meeting recordings. The salesperson was polite. Structured. Professional. They asked the right questions. They showed the right slides. They followed the right steps from the playbook. About twenty minutes into the conversation, the customer mentioned something almost in passing. “We would need to check […]