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What An MBA Didn’t Teach You About Sales

The sales profession is challenging. You need to work hard at it to succeed. You need to learn from the best. You need to improve your skills continuously. If you think you can sell since you are a hit at parties and have a lot of friends, you may soon find that you are a failure as a salesperson. Blunt truth:

because the sales profession is so hard, you have to focus on doing everything in sales very well, or you will be considered a failure.

I call this blog, Skinned Knees because I try to relate all of the learning that I have done over the past 4+ decades (while skinning my knees in the learning process).

I hope that you learn from my mistakes so that your business will grow!

Stop Betting on Superstars: How Operating Standards Turn Sellers into Predictable Producers

Many teams grow, but few truly scale revenue beyond individual hero efforts. That difference changes everything for leaders today and in the future. Growth relies on hustle; scaling depends on repeatability across segments and individuals. Your strategy must reflect that hard truth in practice.

Are you relying on one standout to win deals month after month? That looks strong until risk turns visible and costly. One resignation can cripple momentum and expose brittle systems that you had previously ignored.

Scalable sales replaces heroics with defined, teachable operating rhythms that everyone follows. It turns chaos into predictable pipeline progress and results. It clarifies markets, messages, motions, and measurable expectations for every seller on a weekly basis. It builds leverage into onboarding and coaching for consistency. It protects margins while systematically accelerating win rates and velocity across territories.

The foundation begins with a clear picture of your ideal customer, including any disqualifying factors. Having an accurate Ideal Client Profile (ICP) helps minimize waste and reduce uncertainty in your efforts. Take time to define firmographics, pain points, triggers, and buying behaviors using consistent language based on shared evidence. Understand who cares about these issues and why it matters to them now. Also, identify negative personas to sharpen your focus and qualification processes in marketing and sales. A well-defined ICP can significantly boost your conversion rates and shorten the sales cycle.

Next, turn your ICP into straightforward messaging and discovery frameworks tailored for each stage. Consider what unique problems you solve for your customers. What outcomes are most important to them, and who are the key stakeholders by role and priority?

Build talk tracks that lead buyers, not chase buyers with purpose always. Anchor questions to the business metrics and risks they feel. Teach a qualification that tests mutual commitment and outlines next steps with attached dates. Avoid fluffy demos; design relevant proofs using their data. Process specificity turns B players into consistent producers without copying another personality.

I suggest you establish a practical, stage-based operating rhythm that everyone can easily understand and follow. By sharing clear definitions and expectations, managing the pipeline becomes a consistent and smooth process each week. Define each stage with specific exit criteria—avoiding vague intentions or subjective feelings. For example, discovery is considered complete when stakeholders confirm the consequences and impact, and solution fit is achieved when success criteria and ownership are clearly aligned. The commit stage should be backed by a shared plan with clear dates and assigned owners. During weekly reviews, focus on assessing quality rather than just quantity or activity counts. Ask yourself:

  • Does evidence from buyers’ backstage moves have a direct impact on their purchasing decisions?
  • Are the next steps specific, mutually agreed upon, and already scheduled on both calendars?
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From Leads to Clients: How Aligning Sales and Marketing Fuels Sustainable Growth

There’s a common sentiment among sales teams this time of year: a sense of urgency. The calendar flips, Q4 starts, and suddenly it feels like you’re already behind. Sound familiar? That mid-Q4 pressure is real. But before you sprint into outreach and activity, step back and assess what’s actually fueling your pipeline? More importantly, is it aligned with long-term growth?

Sales leaders and CEOs often default to lead generation as the focal point. It’s understandable. More leads, more conversations, more deals, right? But that mindset skips a critical first step. You can’t scale what isn’t aligned. If your marketing message doesn’t match your sales conversations, you’re wasting time and budget. If your sales team is chasing poorly qualified leads, you’re burning cycles. And if your customers can’t articulate why they bought from you, you’ve got a positioning problem.

The foundation starts with clarity. What value do you truly deliver? Why do customers choose you over alternatives? If you can’t answer that in a clear, 50-word statement, your team is likely improvising in the field, and that’s costing you revenue. This is where sales and marketing alignment becomes more than just a buzzword. It’s operationally necessary.

Sales enablement isn’t only about tools and training. It’s about empowering sales with the right message at the right time. That starts with defining three core customer states:

  1. leads,
  2. prospects,
  3. clients.

Each phase requires different messaging, timing, and expectations. Most organizations blur those lines. That’s where inefficiency creeps in.

Leads sit at the top of the funnel. They are either unaware or only lightly aware of your offering. At this stage, marketing owns the responsibility. However, marketing without sales feedback is akin to shooting in the dark. Sales needs to inform marketing what makes a lead qualified.

  • What signals intent?
  • What common objections surface early?

Without that feedback loop, marketing tends to optimize for volume rather than quality.

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Differentiating Through Value: Mastering the Art of Consumable Sales

Navigating the competitive landscape of consumable sales calls for a thoughtful and kind-hearted approach. Salespeople, sales managers, and CEOs of small companies should remember that their role is about more than just making transactions. In a market where products often seem very alike in quality and price, what truly sets you apart is your ability to consistently show value. So, how can you create lasting relationships with your customers, even when many options are available?

Consider the analogy of fast-food giants like Burger King and McDonald’s. Both offer similar products, yet they each have a dedicated customer base. The key lies in creating a unique selling proposition that resonates with your target audience. 

As a salesperson, your goal is to become indispensable to your customers. This means transforming from a mere vendor to a trusted advisor who is deeply integrated into the customer’s business operations.

Become Part of Their Team

A critical part of this integration is understanding what a “gatherer” is. A gatherer is more than just an account manager. They build a close, almost inseparable bond with the customer. They become a trusted part of the customer’s team, often turning to them for advice and solving problems together. Building this kind of trust requires a genuine understanding of the customer’s business, enabling you to offer insights and solutions that extend beyond the products you provide.

In the realm of consumable sales, where products are used and replaced regularly, the salesperson’s value lies in their ability to maintain and continually grow the relationship. This involves not just selling a product but also selling yourself and your company. Your expertise, reliability, and ability to anticipate and solve problems become the key differentiators. When customers face challenges, they should instinctively think of you as the go-to person for solutions, regardless of minor price differences or delivery times.

To attain this trusted advisor status, you must focus on three core elements: 

  1. the product, 
  2. the company, 
  3. yourself. 

While the product and the company are essential, the most significant value often comes from you as the salesperson. Your ability to understand the prospect’s needs, guide their purchasing decisions, and challenge them to think differently about their business can set you apart from the competition.

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The Evolution of Sales: Scaling from 10 to 100 Customers

The journey of a business unfolds as a story of growth, change, and ongoing adaptation. As salespeople, sales managers, and CEOs, we all share the ups and downs that come with this path. One of the most exciting moments in sales is the shift from landing your first ten customers to growing your family of clients to 50 or even 100. This milestone is truly a game-changer, shaping the future direction of your business.

When you’re starting, your focus is on acquiring those first ten customers. You’re trying to find your footing in the market, identify your target audience, and refine your product or service offering. You might be customizing your product or service for each customer to ensure it fits their specific needs. However, as you aim for the next level of growth, you need to start thinking about systemizing your sales process. 

To grow successfully, it’s helpful to have a standardized product or service. While customizing can be useful when you’re just starting out, it can become hard to manage and slow you down as your customer base expands. 

Focus on creating a product or service that you can sell over and over again with just small tweaks. This approach simplifies your sales process and makes it easier for others to sell your offerings, too.

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From 10 to 100 Customers: Scaling Your Sales Process for Growth

For founders of companies, the journey of a business is a narrative of evolution, growth, and constant adaptation. As salespeople, sales managers, and CEOs, we are all too familiar with the challenges and triumphs that punctuate this journey. In the world of sales, one of the most critical turning points is the transition from acquiring your first ten customers to expanding your customer base to 50 or even 100. This pivotal moment sets the trajectory of a business and is a key focus of our discussion.

When you’re starting, the founding team is focused on acquiring those first ten customers. They’re trying to find their footing in the market, identify their target audience, and refine their product or service offering. You might be customizing your product or service for each customer to ensure it fits their specific needs. However, as you aim for the next level of growth, it’s crucial to start thinking about systemizing your sales process. This will ensure efficiency and prepare you for the next level of growth. 

To scale effectively, company leaders need to standardize their product or service offering. While customization can be beneficial in the early stages, it becomes impractical and inefficient as your customer base grows. The key here is to create a product or service that can be sold repeatedly with minimal adjustments. This streamlines the sales process, making it easier for others to sell the product or service.

In the early stages of a business, the founders might be the ones doing all the selling. But as the company grows, this becomes less feasible. To reach a larger number of customers, you need to bring others on board to sell for you. This is where standardization comes into play. By standardizing your product or service, you make it easier for others to understand and sell it. 

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Transform Your Sales Team: Strategic Compensation Adjustments for Year-End Momentum

Autumn is the time of year for sales leaders, managers, and CEOs to begin laying the groundwork for next year’s success. Have you considered how your current sales compensation plans impact your team’s motivation and productivity? Now is the ideal moment to evaluate, adjust, and deliver these plans, preferably by December 1st. Doing so can significantly influence your team’s drive to close deals in December and build momentum heading into the next fiscal year.

Sales compensation should be motivating and rewarding for employees. It directly shapes your sales team’s behaviors and priorities. An effective plan incentivizes the right actions and deters the wrong ones.

Consider a common pitfall: salespeople holding back deals to inflate their numbers for the following year. Does your current compensation structure inadvertently reward this practice? If so, you’re unintentionally harming your year-end results.

To counter this, strategically incorporate compensation escalators and cliffs into your plan. Escalators progressively reward increased sales performance throughout the year. Higher performance equals higher commission rates, driving your sales team to push forward continually. 

Commission cliffs reset commission rates at the beginning of each year, creating a sense of urgency to close deals before the end of December. Communicating these compensation details clearly by early December ensures your team understands what’s at stake.

Don’t hold your team back!

Another critical compensation consideration is eliminating commission caps. While some organizations cap commissions to control expenses, this practice can backfire dramatically. Caps tell your top-performing salespeople that their exceptional efforts are neither valued nor rewarded appropriately. This demotivates your top talent and encourages them to seek opportunities elsewhere that offer uncapped rewards. 

Removing commission caps signals that the organization fully supports and rewards outstanding performance. Have you considered how much growth your company might achieve if artificial constraints didn’t limit your sales team?

When evaluating compensation, look beyond simple cost containment. Consider the true profitability of incentivizing increased sales volume. Once salespeople reach their targets and enter accelerators, each additional dollar earned typically comes at a lower incremental cost to your organization. 

Sales transactions earlier in the year have already covered the salesperson’s base salary once they have met their annual quota. In fact, at 100% of quota, the salesperson should have covered all their costs and their share of the overall company’s revenue needs. Thus, every extra sale at escalated commission rates still contributes positively to your overall profitability. 

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The AI Sales Process Map: The Ten-Stage Sales Process Framework

Sales leaders today often fall into the trap of using artificial intelligence tools randomly rather than systematically. This sporadic usage is like owning a Swiss Army knife but only using the bottle opener; you miss out on ninety percent of the available value. AI’s real power comes not from isolated tools but from integrating capabilities across every stage of your sales processes. When mapped correctly, AI accelerates every interaction, shortens sales cycles, and makes revenue generation more predictable.

Random AI adoption leads to inconsistent results. Some reps use it effectively, while others revert to manual methods under pressure, resulting in uneven performance. Systematic AI integration, however, compounds improvements across the entire sales cycle. Data captured at one stage strengthens the next, creating a virtuous cycle of sales success that is scalable, measurable, and sustainable. The outcome is not just faster deals, but stronger business acumen and more consistent revenue management.

The ten-stage AI sales process framework provides a structured way to apply AI:

  1. Prospecting,
  2. Outreach,
  3. Qualification,
  4. Scoping,
  5. Presentation,
  6. Economic Buyer meetings,
  7. Validation Events,
  8. Proposals,
  9. Closing,
  10. Onboarding/expansion.
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Choosing the Right AI Stack for Your Sales Organization

A VP of Sales recently confided in me: “We have six different AI tools, but our reps are still doing manual work. What went wrong?”

This is the AI tool proliferation problem. Sales leaders often collect tools without a strategy, mistaking a pile of features for a cohesive system. It’s like buying a hammer, screwdriver, saw, and drill without realizing you’re actually trying to build a house. An effective AI stack means integration. When tools work together, they amplify each other’s value. When they don’t, they add complexity, confusion, and wasted money.

Why Strategy Beats Random Adoption

Random tool adoption is rampant across sales organizations. Teams chase shiny new software, often ending up with overlapping features, siloed data, and productivity lost to tool-switching. Instead of solving problems, the stack itself becomes the problem.

But when built strategically, the benefits are profound. Integrated systems reduce manual data entry, accelerate response times, and deliver actionable insights for reps. Three well-chosen, well-connected tools can outperform six isolated ones. Integrated stacks also improve adoption rates by providing consistent interfaces and reducing training overhead.

The Five-Layer AI Stack Framework

To avoid the chaos of random adoption, I use a five-layer framework for structuring sales AI tools:

  1. Data Foundation – Your CRM and data management system, enriched and maintained for accuracy.
  2. Intelligence & Analytics – AI-driven insights, lead scoring, forecasting, and market intelligence.
  3. Automation & Workflow – Sequences, task automation, and cross-platform orchestration.
  4. Content & Communication – AI writing, proposal generation, and customer-facing tools.
  5. Optimization & Learning – Conversation analysis, performance tracking, and continuous improvement.
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Mastering Sales Channels: How to Align Your Strategy for Maximum Impact

Understanding the dynamics of sales channels can transform how businesses approach their markets. Many sales professionals, whether they are salespeople, managers, or CEOs, often miss a critical distinction: the difference between the product they are selling and the value it provides. 

This gap in understanding can lead to suboptimal sales performance, particularly in environments where products are sold through intermediaries, such as distributors, referral partners, or dealer networks. The challenge is not just about knowing your product, but also about understanding how to position it in a way that resonates with every player in the sales chain.

Sales success starts with recognizing who your true customer is. In sales management or channel sales, the end customer is often not the person you interact with directly. Instead, your “customer” might be the intermediary, your distributor, reseller, or even your own sales team. These intermediaries are the ones who ultimately connect your product to its final user. If you don’t understand their challenges, motivations, and context, you risk failing to equip them with the necessary tools to succeed. Are you selling a product’s features, or are you helping them understand how to sell it effectively? This distinction is vital.

When selling through intermediaries, the emphasis should shift from “what the product does” to “how the product can be sold.” Your distributors or referral partners don’t need every technical detail of your product. They need clarity on how it solves problems for their customers, how it fits into their existing offerings, and how they can position it to drive sales. 

The goal is not to overwhelm your partners with information but to provide actionable insights that align with their specific needs. If you’re focusing solely on product features, you’re likely missing the mark.

Salespeople and sales managers must also recognize the game they are playing. Are you selling a commodity, a widely available product, or an exclusive offering? Each scenario demands a different strategy. 

Commodities often compete on price, necessitating bulk sales or value-added services to differentiate themselves. Widely available products often rely on relationships, service quality, or unique add-ons to differentiate themselves. Exclusive products, on the other hand, can often avoid price wars by emphasizing their uniqueness and superior quality. Knowing which game you’re in allows you to tailor your approach and avoid misaligned strategies.

For small businesses and solopreneurs, the challenge lies in effectively managing referral partners. Referral partnerships are a powerful way to generate leads, but they require careful management and oversight. 

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AI Isn’t Replacing Salespeople, It’s Giving Them a Competitive Edge

AI isn’t replacing salespeople, it’s making them more effective. The real risk isn’t losing your job to AI; it’s losing to a competitor who uses AI better than you do. Sales professionals who integrate AI into their workflow will outperform those who don’t. 

It’s not about technology taking over but about using technology to gain an edge. The market is becoming increasingly competitive, and the most efficient salespeople will emerge victorious.

Time is a salesperson’s most valuable asset. 

Every minute spent on administrative tasks is a minute not spent selling. AI helps reclaim those lost hours. Tools that automate writing, scheduling, and research allow salespeople to focus on what matters: building relationships and closing deals. If you’re not leveraging AI to increase productivity, you’re leaving opportunities on the table.

Sales emails need to be clear and professional. AI-powered writing assistants ensure your messages are polished and effective. A poorly written email can cost you a deal. AI tools catch grammatical mistakes, improve clarity, and even suggest more effective phrasing. This isn’t just about looking professional; it’s about being understood. 

If your message isn’t clear, it won’t convert.

Presentations are another time-consuming task. AI can generate professional decks in minutes. Instead of spending hours designing slides, salespeople can focus on developing effective strategies. AI-powered tools create branded, structured presentations based on simple inputs. This ensures consistency while saving time. Sales professionals who utilize AI for presentations can focus on delivering insights rather than formatting slides.

CRM systems are the backbone of sales operations. AI enhances CRM by automating data entry, tracking customer interactions, and suggesting next steps. Salespeople often struggle with keeping CRM data updated. AI reduces this friction by automatically capturing and organizing information. A well-maintained CRM leads to better forecasting and stronger customer relationships. 

If your CRM doesn’t have AI capabilities, it’s time to upgrade.

AI-driven insights enable sales managers to make more informed decisions, rather than relying on instinct. Managers can use AI to analyze performance trends, identify coaching opportunities, and predict revenue outcomes. AI doesn’t replace leadership; it enhances it. 

Sales managers who adopt AI can build stronger teams and achieve better results. Ignoring AI in sales management is a strategic mistake.

Lead generation is another area where AI adds value. AI-powered tools can analyze vast amounts of data to identify high-potential prospects. Instead of spending hours researching leads, salespeople can receive AI-generated recommendations. This allows for more targeted outreach and higher conversion rates. AI doesn’t just find leads, it finds the right leads.

Sales follow-up is often inconsistent. AI ensures follow-ups happen at the right time with the right message. Automated reminders and AI-generated responses keep deals moving forward. 

A well-timed follow-up can be the difference between closing a deal and losing it. AI helps salespeople stay on top of their pipeline without relying on memory.

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