The founder of a small startup gets the email she has been waiting for in the second week of December. Her champion at a mid-sized logistics company writes that the operations team wants to keep the product after the pilot. Then comes the bad news: the CFO wrapped up budget season last week, and the […]

In the second week of October, a VP of Customer Success starts planning next year's customer advisory board. The CEO suggests inviting the ten largest accounts by contract value, since their logos will look good online. Eight executives accept, and three of them later send a director in their place. The January session produces polite […]

In the second week of January, an account executive emails every contact in the book she picked up through the year's account transfers. An operations director at one customer replies within the hour with a question the new rep cannot answer. Last fall, she spent three calls walking the previous rep through a vendor consolidation […]

The fall release goes live on a Tuesday in October, and the launch checklist is full of green checkmarks. Product marketing shipped the deck last week, and every rep passed the quiz at the end of enablement's two live sessions. By the usual measures, launch readiness looks complete, so the VP of Sales tells the […]

The operations director joins the first call with an AI assistant's comparison of four vendors open on her second screen. Before the account executive can share his agenda, she reads him what it says about his product. The AI gets two points right, but it quotes a pricing model his company dropped last year and […]

Open any opportunity record in a CRM that has run for more than three years and count the fields. You will find one that someone added for a 2022 campaign that no longer exists, plus "Competitor (Secondary)," which no rep has ever filled. Meanwhile, a picklist with fourteen options for "Buying Motivation" holds whatever a […]

The account plan template arrives in the first week of October, as it does every year. Reps open the CRM, copy last year's plan, and update the revenue number. Then they list the stakeholders they remember and write objectives that sound strategic. Managers review the plans in a single meeting and file them in a […]

The manager pulls up the dashboard, sorts the team by talk ratio, and finds her answer. Her rep at the bottom of the leaderboard also talks the most on calls. She considers the case closed and, in their next one-on-one, tells him to talk less and listen more. He follows the advice, and as his […]

Every quarter, a well-meaning sales leader announces a new call review session, and what follows is familiar. A manager plays a recording while the team watches a colleague fumble an objection. Everyone tries not to look at the rep, and someone offers feedback that is really a critique. As many teams run it, the sales […]

On the first morning of October, the Q4 pipeline looks healthy, partly because a third of it was Q3's pipeline until yesterday. Fourteen slipped deals that were supposed to close by September 30 now carry close dates in October and November. Over the last two weeks, a rep moved each one with a "pushed, still […]