Frequently Asked Questions

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1.  External innovations are hidden: competitors don’t advertise them and companies rarely perform the R&D to discover them on their own. Years of exposure to aggressive ‘sales experts’ has created a justified avoidance and skepticism of the industry. That keeps out the hype but also those rare, research-based insights that could substantially elevate sales performance.  

2. Internally field-level innovations tend to go unexplored and uncaptured. 

3. Knowledge transfer from sales reps tends to be weak.

• Reps are often too improvisational to recognize when a specific change meaningfully advances progress. They experience conversations as a whole and as “the same but different,” focusing on feel rather than isolating the structural elements that actually increased success.
• Even when a rep recognizes an innovation, its relevance to other accounts, other reps, or different pipeline stages is not always apparent.
• When significance is clear, voluntary sharing is uncommon. Sales performance is the primary driver for compensation, security, and status. Advantage is protected; mystique is currency.
• When innovations are shared, peer and management receptivity can be inconsistent or dismissive, or worse: seen as bragging or deviation.
• When receptivity is high, most organizations lack the operational discipline to convert field insight into a usable playbook and to propagate it to current and future reps.

Yes. You need people - good ones. The mistake is assuming the choice is between people and systems. 

There is no debate: poorly designed sales systems interfere with selling. But they don’t have to. Well-designed systems protect, codify, and propagate effective behavior so results are produced by design, not by individual capability.

They anticipate common interactions to reduce friction and cognitive load, freeing reps to be authentic, present, and connected. Good systems are structural and light, guiding conversations around value and utility without scripts or awkward procedures.

In short, they create the conditions under which relationships can form and thrive.

People facilliatate connection and build trust. Systems enable repeatability, efficiency, transferability across accounts and reps, simpler coaching, and continuity when individuals leave. Without a system, success remains personal, fragile and incapable of reliable scaling.

Organizations have leverage across three dimensions:

1. Economic performance
   Margins, close rate, sales cycle length, repeat business, referrals and advocacy, bad debt, and preventable misunderstandings.
2. System efficiency
   Recruiting and ramp-up speed, quality and usability of the playbook, training effectiveness, consistency of execution, and the systematic capture and reuse of field insight and innovation.
3. Refinement and durability
   Recruiting fit, retention, motivation and morale, pipeline predictability, refined metrics (measuring the wrong things, or the right things poorly, can actively obscure opportunity), client intelligence, strategic execution, and stronger, more durable customer relationships. 
4. Synergy and Harmonization:
   The degree to which the parts reinforce one another rather than compete.
   This shows up in how messaging, stages, metrics, incentives, management behavior, and field execution align or quietly undermine each other. In low-synergy systems, local optimization creates friction elsewhere. Reps work around process. Managers compensate for design gaps. Metrics reward behaviors the system implicitly discourages.
   High synergy reduces drag. Improvements compound because changes in one area make other areas easier, not harder. Performance becomes more predictable not because people try harder, but because the system stops working against itself.