Adam’s Sales Philosophy

The opening: no single method

Learn every method you can, then build your own.

I don't believe in one sales methodology. I'm certified in three: the Sandler Selling System, The Entourage's sales training and David Priemer's Cerebral Selling. I take something from all of them, because no single method fits every sale.

How you sell depends on your product or service, your target audience, who you're speaking to, how many people are in the room, and everything in between. Selling a box of pies to a consumer is quick, emotional and often impulse-driven. Selling a corporate catering contract to an office manager involves a budget, an approval and a process. Same product, completely different method. The same goes for D2C versus B2B, or a founder-led start-up versus an enterprise with a procurement team.

So learn as many methods as your brain will hold, and combine them into a style that's yours. That's the Adam method: adaptable, and built around the buyer in front of you.

Mindset and the buyer

11. Sales is, and always will be, a numbers game

Selling without knowing your numbers is like heading somewhere unfamiliar without a map. Every revenue goal breaks down into a chain you can measure:

• How many calls or messages it takes to book a discovery session
• How many discovery sessions it takes to get to a pitch
• How many pitches it takes to send a proposal
• How many proposals it takes to close a sale
• How many sales it takes to hit your revenue goal

Working backwards: an example month

1. 120Conversations1 in 5 book a call
2. 24Discovery calls1 in 2 move to a pitch
3. 12Pitches2 in 3 get a proposal
4. 8Proposals1 in 2 close
5. 4New clientsThe goal

Marketing works the same way: how many leads become MQLs, how many MQLs become SQLs, and how many SQLs end up in a meeting with you. So does email: open rates, click-through rates, replies, and how many follow-ups it takes to get a response.

Track these daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly on a simple scorecard, and the numbers start telling you what to do. If you're two sales short with 75% of the month gone, work backwards: you might need ten more discovery calls to give yourself a chance. They also show you whether you're improving. If ten pitches turned into two sales last month and four this month, something's working, so you can experiment, scale and refine.

It's also why rejection is part of the job. You'll never have a 100% hit rate, so measure how many no's it takes to get a yes, and stop taking each one personally. Your accountant and your investors will thank you too.

22. Know your shit

Buyers want to leave a conversation with you feeling they've been told the truth. Authenticity comes from honesty, and it's far easier to tell the truth when you actually know what you're talking about. So know your product, your market, your competitors and your buyer's business better than they expect, and aim to become a genuine thought leader in your space.

Getting there takes repetition and rest. Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman talks a lot about how the brain learns: it rewires through repeated practice, with rest between deep learning sessions. You won't master anything in a day of reading. You'll master it over months of studying, pitching, practising and repeating.

And when you don't know something, say so. Then bring in the right person, or go and find the answer fast.

Study, pitch, practise, repeat.

33. Know your buyer

Knowing your buyer matters from your very first message: it shapes your prospecting, your lead generation and your messaging. You'll talk differently to someone who deals with technology all day than to someone building marketing collateral all day. Founders, CEOs and business owners wear multiple hats at once, so they need you to get to the point and connect it to the whole business.

• The CTO: how it works, how it integrates and what the risk is
• The CMO: pipeline, brand and results they can report upward
• The founder: time, money and whether it moves the whole business forward

It matters in qualifying too. Find out early who the real buyers are: who signs, who influences and who can block it. That gives you the best chance of getting the deal over the line in a reasonable time.

And map your market before you message it. Start with your total addressable market: every company that fits your ideal customer profile. Tools like DiscoLike map it from web data, and AI Ark maps the companies and stakeholders behind them on LinkedIn, so you can see who signs, who influences and who can block before you send a single message. Then get the contact details right. Findymail finds and validates emails, waterfall enrichment tools like BetterContact check several data providers in turn until one finds a valid phone number, and Clay pulls it all together, orchestrating many data providers in one place.

44. Understand personality types

Two people with the same job title can need completely different conversations. The DISC profile is a simple way to read who you're talking to:

• High D (Dominance): direct and time-poor. Skip the long rapport-building. Be punctual and get to the point, and they'll respect you for it.
• High I (Influence): the life of the party, high energy. They expect the first five to ten minutes to be free-flowing and fun. Skip it and they'll feel you're only there to sell.
• High S (Steadiness): usually more introverted, patient, steady and humble. Match them with calm energy: not too high, not too low.
• High C (Conscientiousness): data-driven, analytical and reserved. They want numbers, logic and detail.

Don't assume the type from the role. You might expect a CMO to be a high I, but they could just as easily be a high D. Recognise the type as early as you can and adapt the flow of the conversation to the person. Over time, reading personality types, demographics and psychographics becomes second nature.

The four DISC types, and how to sell to each

Outgoing and fast-paced

Task-focused

People-focused

Reserved and steady-paced

DDominance

Direct, decisive, time-poor.

Be punctual, get to the point and lead with results.

IInfluence

Energetic, social, big picture.

Enjoy the first ten minutes, tell stories and keep it lively.

CConscientiousness

Analytical, careful, reserved.

Bring the numbers, the logic and the detail, and don’t rush them.

SSteadiness

Patient, calm, humble.

Match their calm energy and build trust without pressure.

55. People buy from people, so disarm them first

That much has always been true. Most buyers come in guarded, expecting to be sold to, so the first job is to lower their guard.

For me, disarming comes down to honesty and authenticity. I'll be upfront about why we're talking, without ever using the word "qualify": "By the end of this call, I'd love to know whether we're a good fit. If we are, great. If we're not, no problem, we'll go our separate ways." Buyers hear that as honest and respectful, not as someone who just wants a sale.

It's also rapport, and showing you understand their position. Let them see you've done your homework and you're not about to pull the wool over their eyes or pretend to be something you're not. Trust comes first; the sale follows.

66. Listen more than you talk

The 80/20 conversation

Listening 80%Talking 20%

Aim to do about 80% of the listening and 20% of the talking. You could write a thesis on why, but these are the big reasons:

• People like talking about themselves and their business, so let them.
• If you're talking, you're not learning.
• If you're not listening, you won't know what to ask next.
• The real problem is rarely the first one they mention. You only find it by digging; Sandler calls it the pain.
• Buyers believe what they say out loud far more than what you tell them. Let them describe the problem and what it's costing them, and they'll sell themselves.
• You hear objections early, while there's still time to handle them.
• You pick up their exact words, which you can use in your proposal.
• People trust people who make them feel heard.

Ask open questions, then stay quiet longer than feels comfortable. The best sales conversations feel like a diagnosis, not a pitch.

77. Qualify hard, and disqualify quickly

A bad customer can cost you more time and money than you'd ever imagine. Close the wrong client because you need the revenue, and you can spend the next two or three months going out of scope, going back and forth, and spending more fixing their problems than you made from the deal.

The same goes for bad prospects. If someone's only moderately interested and you know deep down they're not a great fit, stop investing in them. Send the pitch, send the proposal, put them into a follow-up sequence, and move on. Don't think twice.

That's why you learn to disqualify quickly, and to say no quickly. Qualify early on the real problem, the budget, the timing and who makes the decision. A fast no beats a slow maybe, and it keeps your time, money and effort on the deals that deserve it.

Qualify against a framework, not a feeling. Gut feel is how bad deals slip through. Every qualification framework asks the same core questions in slightly different words, so pick one, train everyone on it, and make it the language of your CRM:

For most growing businesses, Sandler's pain, budget and decision covers it. Layer on MEDDICC's champion and economic buyer once your deals involve a buying committee.

Score every deal, every call. After each conversation, mark each check green, amber or red. Two or more reds after discovery is your cue to slow down, or walk away.

An example deal, scored after discovery

• PainLosing about ten hours a week to manual reporting
• BudgetA range discussed, not yet approved
• Decision-makersThe ops manager is your champion. The CFO signs, and you haven’t met them yet
• TimingWants it live before 1 July
• FitMatches your ideal customer profile
• CompetitionTalking to other providers, but won’t say who
• Next stepDemo with the CFO booked for Tuesday

ConfirmedPartly confirmedUnknown or a risk

One red and two ambers: still qualified, but find out who you’re up against and get in front of the CFO before you send a proposal.

Time is the real cost. Salesforce's State of Sales report (2024), a survey of 5,500 sales professionals, found reps spend 70% of their time on non-selling tasks. Every hour you pour into a deal that was never going to close comes out of the 30% that's left.

The sale itself

88. Run discovery like a diagnosis

Discovery is where most deals are won or lost, long before anyone sees a proposal. A good doctor doesn't prescribe before they've asked questions, run tests and understood the symptoms. Selling works the same way: diagnose first, prescribe second.

Buyers notice when you skip it. In Adience's December 2025 survey of 350 business buyers, 30% said vendors asked poor or repetitive discovery questions, 29% said vendors didn't understand their industry or use case, and 27% said vendors focused on features rather than business impact. Meanwhile, Gartner's 2025 research found 61% of B2B buyers would prefer to buy without a sales rep at all. So when a buyer does give you their time, the call has to be worth more than a visit to your website. Gartner's advice is for sellers to act as "a sounding board for buyers". That's exactly what good discovery is.

Before the call: do your homework. Never ask a question Google, LinkedIn or their website could answer. Ten minutes of research, or two minutes with an AI call brief (principle 18), lets you skip the basics and go straight to what matters. "I saw you've just opened a second location. How has that changed things for the team?" beats "So, tell me about your business."

The shape of a great discovery call. Every call is different, but the bones stay the same. This is how I'd split a 45-minute call:

A 45-minute discovery call

1. Rapport and up-front contract0–5 min
2. Situation5–12 min
3. Pain12–24 min
4. Impact24–32 min
5. Decision32–40 min
6. Next step40–45 min

0153045

1. Rapport and the up-front contract (about 5 minutes). Agree the time, the agenda and the outcome, including that "no" is a perfectly good answer (principle 5).
2. Situation (about 7 minutes). How things work today: the team, the process and the tools.
3. Pain (about 12 minutes). The real problem, and the problem behind it. Keep digging: "Tell me more about that." "How long has that been going on?" "What have you already tried?"
4. Impact (about 8 minutes). What the problem costs in money, time, people and stress, and what happens if nothing changes.
5. Decision (about 8 minutes). Who else is involved, how they decide, what the budget looks like, and when it needs solving.
6. Next step (about 5 minutes). Summarise what you heard, in their words, and book the next meeting before you hang up (principle 13).

Questions worth stealing

• "What made you take this call today?"
• "Walk me through how this works today."
• "What's that costing you, in time or money?"
• "What happens if you don't fix this in the next six months?"
• "What have you already tried, and why didn't it work?"
• "Who else will have a view on this?"
• "How have you made decisions like this before?"
• "If we were working together a year from now, what would have to be true for you to call it a success?"

Don't pitch in discovery. The moment you start presenting, you stop learning. Hold your solution until you understand the pain and its impact, then play it back: "So if I've got this right, the real issue is..." If they say "exactly", you've earned the right to pitch. If they correct you, even better, because now you know.

Record it, then review it. Fathom or Gong captures every call, and AI can score your discovery afterwards: how much you talked, which questions you asked, and which qualification checks are still red. It's the fastest coaching you'll ever get.

99. Red brain, green brain

I learned this model from The Entourage, and it changed how I sell. The red brain is the logical side: facts, features, numbers, price and analysis. The green brain is the emotional side: how will this make me feel, and will it make my work or my life better?

Too much red-brain selling overwhelms people, especially less analytical buyers. Pile on features, data and pricing tables and the brain stalls and procrastinates. People decide in green and justify in red, so you need to engage both: lead with the feeling and the outcome, and keep the logic ready to back it up.

Red brain, green brain

Red brain: logic

• Facts
• Features
• Numbers
• Price
• Analysis

Justifies the decision

Green brain: emotion

• How will this make me feel?
• Will it make my work better?
• Outcomes

Makes the decision

Lead with green. Back it up with red.

The Entourage pairs this with what it calls the Four Forces to Attraction: speak to your buyer's frustrations, wants, fears and desires, in that order. Do that well, and people want to work with you.

It lines up with the science, too. In Descartes' Error (1994), neuroscientist Antonio Damasio described patients whose brain damage had cut them off from their emotions while leaving their intelligence, memory and logic intact. You'd expect perfectly rational decision-makers. Instead, they struggled to decide anything. One spent the best part of half an hour weighing the pros and cons of two possible dates for his next appointment, and still couldn't choose. Without feelings to tip the scales, pure logic never reached a conclusion.

That's the case for the green brain in one example: logic informs a decision, but emotion makes it. Pitch to the red brain alone and you're asking your buyer to decide the way Damasio's patients did: slowly, or not at all.

1010. Timing is everything

Timing can make or break a deal, and some of it is out of your control. A deal you think is about to sign suddenly stalls because something happens in their business, then they come back six months later ready to go. Other times you'll walk out of a meeting sure you got the timing wrong, then hear back within 24 hours: we're ready, let's move fast.

But you can also take control of timing. You won't always know when a company sets its budget, but with experience you learn the patterns. Pitch three months before budget discussions. Put prospects into a nurture sequence three months out. Turn the timing in your favour: create the opportunity, and create your own luck.

Start by learning your buyer's calendar. Most Australian businesses run on a July-to-June financial year, so budgets are usually set in the months before 1 July. Pitch in late June and you're often asking for money that's already been allocated. Watch for trigger events, too: a new executive, a funding round, a restructure, an acquisition, a product launch or a disappointing quarter. Each one opens a window, and the seller who's already in the conversation gets there first.

Better still, let buying signals tell you when the timing is right. RB2B shows which people are visiting your website (it works best on US traffic; for Australian visitors, company-level tools like Leadfeeder (formerly Dealfront) are more reliable). Fibbler shows which companies are engaging with your LinkedIn ads, Jungler flags prospects engaging with relevant posts and creators on LinkedIn, and Apify can scrape almost any custom signal you care about, from job ads to pricing-page changes. A buyer who's just been on your pricing page is telling you something. Reach out while they're still thinking about it.

Then qualify for timing as hard as you qualify for budget. Ask, "What's happening in the business that makes now the right time?" and "If this goes well, when would you want it up and running?" If the honest answer is "not this year", don't force it. Log the reason and a revisit date in your CRM, keep them in a nurture sequence, and check back when the window opens. A deal that isn't ready now isn't lost. It's just early.

1111. Use offers to create excitement and urgency

I believe a good product should sell itself. When I worked at Virgin Active, we never discounted: the thinking was that if people value something enough, they shouldn't need a discount to sign up.

That said, plenty of my deals have come from creative offers. People love an offer. They love saving money, and if they feel they can take advantage of something, they usually will. One that’s worked well for me: with a few days left in the month, I'd go back to a prospect and say, "We're really keen to get started with you. I've got approval for a one-time offer: 30% off the first three months if you sign by the end of the month." A lot of the time it closed the deal, and when it didn't, it usually got a reply. That makes offers a great way to re-engage a deal that's gone quiet.

Don't lead with an offer. Keep it up your sleeve, start with your smallest one and scale up only if you need to. And keep the urgency honest: a real deadline builds excitement, fake scarcity burns trust.

1212. Master the art of negotiation

Negotiation starts long before anyone talks price. Everything before it, knowing your numbers, knowing your buyer and listening, is what gives you leverage at the end.

• Know your walk-away point before you start. Negotiators call it your BATNA, your best alternative to a negotiated agreement, from Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury. If you know what you'll do if the deal falls through, you won't cave under pressure.
• Start high. Open at the top of your range: the highest price you can genuinely justify. Then negotiate down from there. Start in the middle or near the bottom and you've left yourself no room to move. Psychologists call this anchoring: the first number on the table shapes everything that follows (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974). Just keep it credible. Back your number with the value behind it, so it comes across as confident, not overbearing or unreasonable.
• Plan your concessions in advance. Decide what you can give, in what order, and start small. It's the same rule as offers: smallest first, and scale up only if you need to.
• Trade, never give. Every concession should get something back: a longer term, a faster signature, a case study or a referral. "If I can do that, can we sign this week?"
• Negotiate on value, not price. Bring it back to the problem they're solving and what it costs them to leave it unsolved.
• Use silence. After you name a price or make an offer, stop talking.
• Ask calibrated questions. Former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss, in Never Split the Difference, recommends questions like "How am I supposed to do that?" They keep the other side solving the problem with you.
• Aim for a deal both sides feel good about. You'll be working with this client long after it's signed.

1313. Always a next step, always a follow-up

Never end a sales call without a next step in the diary. Next steps keep the momentum going and give both sides a common goal to work towards.

For you, they make the deal trackable: you can see where it sits on the timeline and how close it is to a decision. For your prospect, they bring a sense of control. They can follow the process on their side, and they keep the power to say yes or no without feeling oversold.

Then follow up, because a lot of deals end up in the follow-up graveyard. Most aren't lost to a competitor; they're lost to silence, because nobody followed up. The flip side is just as true: plenty of deals are won by a great follow-up process.

So set one up properly, even if it's manual, even if it's a spreadsheet because that's the easiest view for you. Better still, use the tools at your disposal, such as HubSpot, Brevo or Pipedrive, and automate your follow-ups based on signals and engagement. Just don't make them aggressive. This is the rhythm I use for the first two weeks after a proposal goes out:

The two weeks after a proposal goes out

1. Day 0Proposal sentWith a next step already in the diary
2. 2 days laterA short check-inOne or two lines, automated
3. 3–4 business days laterSomething usefulA resource or case study, plus an offer to answer questions
4. 5 business days laterClose the loopHonest, friendly, with a touch of humour

1. Two days later: a short, automated check-in. One or two lines: "Hi [name], just checking whether you had any questions. Really looking forward to the prospect of working together."
2. Three to four business days after that: something useful. Automate it if you can; if not, send something universal, like a relevant resource or case study: "Thought you might like to see this. Once again, if you have any questions on the proposal, just let me know."
3. Five business days after that: close the loop, with a touch of humour. "I feel like you might be getting cold feet. If this isn't for you, I'd rather close the loop. Just keen to find a resolution one way or another."

And don't be shy about picking up the phone, sending a text or reaching out on LinkedIn. The right tools make multichannel easy: HeyReach automates LinkedIn outreach alongside your email sequences, and an AI parallel dialler like Nooks calls several prospects at once and only connects you when someone picks up. The channel matters less than the habit. Whatever you do, follow up.

1414. Don't be afraid to ask for the sale

You've done the work. They have the problem, and you have the answer. So ask for the business.

It sounds obvious, but plenty of salespeople talk themselves out of deals because they never actually ask. Part of it comes with experience; part of it is the fear of seeming pushy. Either way, the result is the same: a great conversation that ends with "let me know what you think" and drifts into the follow-up graveyard.

The data backs this up. Outreach's Sales 2025 report (September 2025) found that deals closed within 50 days were won 47% of the time. After 50 days, the win rate fell to 20% or lower. Deals don't get better with age: if you don't ask, the deal stalls, and the longer it stalls, the less likely it is to close.

Win rates by how long a deal stays open

Closed within 50 days

47%

Open longer than 50 days

≤20%

So be bold and direct. Confidence isn't the same as pressure, and most buyers respect a straight question:

• "Can we have your business?"
• "What's stopping you from signing on today?"
• "What do we need to do to win this deal?"

If the answer is yes, great. If it's no, you've just surfaced the real objection, and now you can handle it. Do whatever it takes to win the deal, and that starts with having the confidence to ask for it.

Process and growth

1515. See the whole funnel: marketing, sales and post-sale

When I think of the funnel, I think of a word HubSpot made famous in its early days: Smarketing. Sales and Marketing, run as one. That's how every business should see the two departments: as a "harmonious" marriage. (The quotation marks are deliberate. No marriage is harmonious all the time, but neither side can work without the other.)

Sales needs marketing. Marketing owns persona development, collateral, research, data, messaging and communication. Without it, sales doesn't know which leads to go after, how to talk to them, what the market is saying or what competitors are doing. Marketing is what gives reps the power to sell well.

Marketing needs sales. Marketing needs to know what prospects are saying on discovery calls, in pitches, at networking events and at trade shows. When sales feeds that back, marketing can refine its targeting, messaging, competitor analysis and product matrix.

That's why the funnel matters so much. People argue about whether there's one funnel or separate marketing and sales funnels. They're not right and they're not wrong: it depends how you set it up. You can run one big funnel, or several that hand over to each other. What matters is that there are no gaps, and that every stage is defined, measured and owned:

• Pre-awareness, the new layer. AI search has added a stage at the very top, where brands get discovered before a buyer even knows they exist. Someone asks ChatGPT, "What are the top 10 CRM automation tools?", and up pops a tool they'd never heard of. If your content isn't structured for AI search and LLM visibility, you're missing buyers at their very first question. Semrush and Ahrefs show what buyers are asking and where you rank, in search and in AI answers. AirOps and Searchable help you create content for AI search and track whether you're being cited. And don't ignore Bing Webmaster Tools: several AI assistants draw on Bing's index.
• Awareness. What content are you creating, and which channels are you distributing it through to build the brand? Use AnswerThePublic to find the questions your buyers ask. Record with Riverside, edit short-form video in CapCut, design in Canva or Figma, and publish on LinkedIn and YouTube. YouTube does double duty: it builds trust with people and earns citations from AI. A newsletter on beehiiv builds an audience you own, rather than one you rent from an algorithm.
• Interest. Once people know you exist, how do you keep them interested? Social media, PR, influencer marketing, events and email nurture. Schedule and report on social with Sprout Social, run events through Luma, and nurture by email with HubSpot Marketing Hub, Brevo or Customer.io, triggered by what each lead actually does. This is also where buying signals start to show up (see principle 10).
• Consideration. Personalised to the persona. An ecommerce customer may never speak to a salesperson, so the funnel has to nurture a consumer on its own. A B2B buyer might need a case study, a testimonial, social proof or a salesperson walking them through use cases. Record client interviews and testimonials in Riverside, send short Loom walkthroughs, and make booking a call effortless with Calendly or Cal.com. For your highest-value accounts, Mutiny can build personalised one-to-one pages and sales plays, so each buyer sees their own use case.
• Purchase. Again, built for the persona. Are you creating urgency? Is your pricing right? Do you have a comparison matrix? Are you sending the right offers? Send proposals people can sign on the spot with Qwilr, and take payment with Stripe.
• Post-sale. Whether this belongs in the funnel depends on how a business views sales, marketing and operations. I'd always include it, because what a business needs is repeat, predictable revenue. Keep nurturing clients once they sign, through smart marketing, a strong customer success team and efficient project management: new features, new services, offers and options that benefit them. HubSpot keeps the client record and upsell triggers in one place, and Customer.io or HubSpot can automate onboarding and lifecycle emails. Get it right and clients become advocates and evangelists.

AI has changed the funnel, but not its fundamentals. Each stage will look different for a B2B, direct-to-consumer, partner-led or enterprise business, but the job is the same: no leaky gaps, and everyone who enters your funnel nurtured as well as possible. It flows into, and influences, almost every other part of the business.

A funnel with no gaps also needs a stack with no gaps. If data has to be copied from one tool to another by hand, it will leak. Polytomic syncs data between your tools, OutboundSync logs every email and LinkedIn touch from your sequencer into the CRM, and n8n runs the recurring workflows in between. And put UTM tags on every link you share, so HubSpot can tell you which content and channels actually produce revenue.

One funnel

Three linked funnels

1616. Design your sales process around how your buyer buys

The funnel (principle 15) shows the whole journey. The sales process is the part you control: the steps from first conversation, or first click, to a signed deal or a paid order. And it looks completely different depending on who you sell to.

Two sales processes, side by side

B2B: a series of conversations

Selling to a buying group, over weeks or months

1. Prospect or inbound lead
2. Qualify: a short fit call or form
3. Discovery
4. Tailored demo or solution
5. ProposalDeals open longer than 50 days win 20% or less (Outreach, 2025)
6. Negotiation and sign-off, including procurement
7. Close and hand over to onboarding

D2C: the website is the salesperson

Selling to one person, in minutes or days

1. Discover: social, search, AI answers, ads
2. Browse and compare: pages, reviews, quizzes
3. Add to cart
4. CheckoutAbout 70% of carts are abandoned before payment (Baymard, 2025)
5. Recover abandoned carts by email and SMS
6. Deliver, and make the first experience memorable
7. Review, reorder and refer

B2B: a series of conversations. In B2B, you're usually selling to a group, not a person. Deals move through a sequence of meetings, from qualifying and discovery (principles 7 and 8) through to a tailored demo, a proposal and sign-off, which often includes procurement and legal. Every stage needs a clear exit: what has to be true before the deal moves on. Speed matters too. Remember Outreach's Sales 2025 data from principle 14: deals closed within 50 days were won 47% of the time, against 20% or lower after that. A clear process with a booked next step at every stage is how you keep deals inside that window.

D2C: the website is the salesperson. In direct-to-consumer, most buyers never speak to anyone. Your product pages, reviews, checkout and emails do the selling, so the process has to work without you in the room. The biggest leak sits between adding to cart and paying. Baymard Institute's research, last updated in September 2025, puts the average documented cart abandonment rate at 70.22%. Among US shoppers who abandoned a purchase, the top reasons were extra costs like shipping and fees (40%), slow delivery (20%), not trusting the site with their card details (19%) and being forced to create an account (18%). That's the D2C version of a deal going quiet, so fix the checkout before you spend another dollar on ads. Shopify runs the store, Klaviyo runs the abandoned cart and post-purchase flows, and Stripe takes the payment.

Most businesses run both. A D2C brand might sell online to households and run corporate catering on the side: same pies, two processes. Plenty of software companies let small customers sign up online while a sales team looks after bigger accounts. Run a process for each motion, and set clear rules for when an online customer gets a human: an order above a certain size, a company email address, or a request for a quote.

Whichever model you run, map the process on one page, give every stage an owner and an exit criterion, and mirror it in your CRM or store reporting. Then the next principle takes over: run it the same way, every time.

1717. Build a repeatable process, then be relentlessly consistent

Learn many methods, but run one process. What that process looks like will always depend on your industry and your buyer, so be willing to adapt and stay flexible. But once you find your groove, keep it. Refine it, repeat it, practise it and master it.

Consistency is what turns selling from an art into a system: the same discovery questions, the same deal stages and the same follow-up rhythm, done every time and improved a little each month. Define what has to be true for a deal to move forward. For example, a deal only moves from discovery to proposal once you've confirmed the pain, the budget, who decides and the timing. Then mirror those stages in your CRM, so your HubSpot or Pipedrive pipeline shows exactly where every deal sits and why.

Then write it down. A process that lives in one person's head isn't a process. Keep your playbook, discovery questions and objection handling in a shared space like Notion, and record short walkthroughs of your stages and tools with Zight or Loom, so new reps can learn on their own time. That's how a sales team grows beyond its best performer.

Consistency also makes your numbers mean something. If every rep runs a different process, your conversion rates are just noise. Run one process and principle 1 kicks in: you can see exactly which stage is leaking, change one thing at a time, and measure whether it worked.

1818. Put AI to work across the whole sales process

I've used AI in my own sales role every day for the last few years, and the biggest lesson is this: AI won't sell for you, but it will give you back the hours you used to lose to research, admin and first drafts, so you can spend them with buyers. Used well, it touches every stage of the funnel.

1. Research and prospecting. Connect your AI assistant to your data sources through an integration or an MCP connector where one exists, then let it do the legwork. My favourite is Origami: you describe your ideal customer in plain English, and its AI agents research the live web to build and enrich the list. Apollo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator fill in the contacts and account intelligence, Clay handles more complex enrichment, and NeverBounce verifies every email before it goes anywhere near a sequence. Ask AI to flag the signals that suggest the timing is right, such as a new hire, a funding round or a product launch.

2. Call prep in minutes, not hours. Before every meeting, ask Claude or ChatGPT for a one-page brief: what the company does, recent news, the person's background and likely priorities, their probable pain points, and three sharp questions to open with. What used to take an hour of tab-hopping now takes two minutes, and you walk in knowing your shit.

3. Build a pitch prompt, then turn it into a skill. Write one strong prompt that produces a tailored pitch: your offer, your best case studies, your pricing rules, your tone of voice and the structure you always follow. Test it until the output is something you'd actually send, then save it as a reusable skill (more on skills below). I used Claude to create every pitch deck, AI audit and prospect analysis, and Claude Design to turn them into polished, client-ready visuals. Now every pitch, proposal or follow-up starts from your best version instead of a blank page, and anyone on your team gets the same quality.

4. Personalised outreach at scale, with a human check. Let AI draft first lines and emails from each prospect's research, then review before anything is sent. Instantly runs the sequences across warmed-up mailboxes, and its AI reply agent tags interested replies so they flow straight into HubSpot. Personalisation that used to take ten minutes per prospect takes seconds, without turning into spam.

5. Intelligence from every conversation. Fathom sits on every one of my calls; larger teams often use Gong. Ask AI to pull out the pain points, objections, budget, decision-makers, timing and agreed next steps. Over a quarter, ask it what your best deals had in common, and which objections keep coming up.

6. Let AI keep your CRM up to date. Connect your notetaker to your CRM so call summaries, next steps and field updates are logged automatically; Fathom syncs straight into HubSpot. Then set up the automations: HubSpot workflows for follow-up reminders, deal-stage changes, alerts when a deal goes quiet, and sequences triggered by what a lead actually does. An agent like OpenClaw can take care of the rest of the CRM hygiene. A clean CRM stops being a chore and becomes a by-product.

7. Practise and sharpen. Use AI as a sparring partner. Have Claude or ChatGPT play a sceptical CFO, a time-poor high-D founder or a procurement manager (voice mode works well for this), and practise your discovery questions, objection handling and negotiation before the real thing.

8. Review the pipeline. Ask AI to read your pipeline each week: which deals are stalled, which have no next step, where the numbers say you'll land this month, and what to do about it.

AI across the sales process: where I’d start

1. 01Research and prospectingOrigami, Apollo, Clay
2. 02Call prepClaude or ChatGPT
3. 03Pitch prompts and skillsClaude, Claude Design
4. 04Personalised outreachInstantly, HeyReach
5. 05Call intelligenceFathom, Gong
6. 06CRM updatesHubSpot, OpenClaw
7. 07Practice and role playClaude or ChatGPT voice mode
8. 08Pipeline reviewClaude with your CRM connected

How AI gets to know your business: skills, memory and training

The difference between AI that's generic and AI that sells like you comes down to four things:

• Skills: your best work, made reusable. A prompt is a one-off. A skill is a saved set of instructions, and sometimes files and scripts, that the AI loads whenever a task calls for it: your pitch structure, your pricing rules, your brand voice, your proposal template. Claude calls them skills; in ChatGPT, the closest equivalent is a custom GPT or a project. Build one skill for every task you repeat.
• Memory: context that sticks. Instead of re-explaining your business every time, give the AI a memory. Claude and ChatGPT both offer memory and projects. Agents like OpenClaw keep theirs in plain-text files: MEMORY.md for long-term memory, SOUL.md for personality and AGENTS.md for how it should behave. Your ideal customer, offers, objections, case studies and tone of voice belong there.
• Training: a loop, not a one-off. Most AI tools don't retrain themselves on your data. They get better because you feed them better context. Every time the AI gets something wrong, correct it and update the skill or memory file. Feed it call transcripts from Fathom and won and lost reasons from HubSpot. Some agents, OpenClaw included, can write to their own memory files as they work, which is as close to self-learning as most teams will get today. Run that loop for a quarter and the difference is obvious.
• Agents: AI that acts, not just answers. OpenClaw is a free, open-source AI agent that runs on your own machine and takes instructions through apps like WhatsApp, Slack or Telegram. It can send emails, create and edit documents, update your CRM and check in on a schedule. In my last role, I used it to automate a lot: emailing, document creation and editing, CRM hygiene and more. It's powerful, so treat it with care. It has real access to your accounts, and early 2026 saw exposed installations and malicious skills uploaded to its public skill library. Run it on a dedicated machine with separate accounts, and only install skills you've vetted.

Connect AI to the whole stack. The real step change comes when AI can reach every tool you use. Claude Code, for example, can connect to your CRM, data, sequencing and analytics tools through MCP connectors and command-line tools, then research, enrich, write and update records in one run. Pair it with Clay for data and n8n for recurring workflows, and a lot of what used to need a RevOps hire can run in the background.

Start small, and let use cases build the stack. As Fivos Aresti, co-founder of Workflows.io, puts it, Clay plus Claude Code is a great starting point, but scaling unlocks more use cases, and more use cases add more tools. That's the right order. Don't buy a 25-tool stack on day one. Start with a CRM, a data source and an AI assistant, then add a tool only when a real use case, and your numbers, justify it. Every tool you add is another subscription, another login and another place for data to leak.

The guardrails. Keep a person in charge of anything a buyer sees, especially pricing and commitments. Check facts, because AI can sound confident and still be wrong. Use business plans that don't train on your data, and know what you're allowed to share. And never let speed become spam: AI should make you more relevant, not just louder.

1919. If you're fighting the product, fix the product

People love to say a great salesperson could sell ice in the Arctic. Maybe. But nobody buys ice that's cracked, or that will melt the day after they buy it, however good the pitch. If the product is poor, it doesn't matter how good your sales process or your offer is.

Customers buy because, in that moment, they're confident their problem has a good chance of being solved and that the solution is worth paying for. They only stay if that turns out to be true. That's why some products, services and software lose customers far faster than others. Lighter Capital's 2025 B2B SaaS Startup Benchmarks, drawn from 155 startups, put median annual customer churn at 16.25%, and the weakest quarter of companies lose more than 27% of their customers every year. No sales team can outsell a leak like that for long.

For B2B teams, this reaches well beyond the sale. Customer success, customer service and operations decide whether the promise made in the pitch is actually kept. So if every deal feels like a fight, the problem may not be the sales team. It may be the product, the price, the fit or the experience after the sale. Great sellers don't just push harder. They feed what they hear back into the business: the objections, the missing features, the reasons deals are lost and the reasons clients leave.

2020. Always ask for referrals, once you've earned the right

Your happiest clients know people just like them, and a referred lead arrives already trusting you. That trust is worth more than ever. TrustRadius's 2026 B2B Buying Disconnect report, a survey of nearly 2,500 technology buyers and vendors, found buyers still rank prior experience and user reviews among the most influential inputs when they choose a vendor. Even the AI tools buyers now research with lean heavily on peer experiences and reviews. A referral is the most personal version of all of that.

The caveat is timing. It's hard to ask for a referral before you've proven any results, and asking a brand-new client too early can cost you, or even tarnish the relationship. Delivery comes first. Ask once the result is real, and while it's still fresh.

If you're in the early stages and still building proof, there are other ways in:

• Ask for an introduction, not an endorsement. "We're so excited to be working with you. If you know anyone in your network who might want to speak with us, we'd love the introduction."
• Run a referral offer. "Refer five people and get 20% off your first three months."
• Reward every referral. "For every referral that becomes a client, we'll send you $100."

Then make it easy: give them a two-line blurb they can forward, and say thank you properly every time. There are plenty of clever ways to ask for referrals. It's one of the smartest ways to generate leads, and one of the most underused by sales teams.

2121. Optimise for channel sales: partners are an extension of your sales team

One salesperson sells one to one. A partner channel sells one to many. The right partners sell for you when you're not in the room, and the relationship compounds: referrals turn into evangelism and advocacy, contra deals, introductions and networking you could never buy.

The numbers back it up. Canalys forecast that partners would deliver around 70% of the total addressable IT market in 2025, out of roughly US$5.4 trillion in global IT spending. Crossbeam's 2024 network data found that involving partners in a deal lifted win rates by 11.7% on average, rising to 37.1% for companies connected to 50 or more partners.

What I learned building the ActiveCampaign partner channel

I ran a partner channel at ActiveCampaign that hit 152% of target. Looking back, these are the reasons it worked:

• A product partners wanted to sell. ActiveCampaign was fast-growing, affordable and powerful, and widely seen as a strong alternative to HubSpot for small and medium businesses. Email marketing, marketing automation, sales automation, a CRM, landing pages and advanced segmentation: everything a growing business needed for one source of truth across sales and marketing. Once the market knew about it, agencies leaned in. HubSpot partners added it, and SEO agencies added email marketing to what they offered. (It's principle 19 again: a great product makes a channel far easier to build.)
• Tools that let partners sell. Partners got sandbox accounts for testing and demos, and could build a sandbox as a template, then roll it out to clients through the partner portal. They could scale from one account to hundreds, which worked brilliantly for multi-location franchises and resellers with large client bases, from marketing agencies to mortgage brokers.
• More than one way to partner. Some partners resold. Some only wanted to refer for commission, and our direct sales team or agency account executives closed those deals. Every model fed the pipeline.
• Small numbers that compound. The average partner sold five to ten accounts, and some sold 200. Multiply that across hundreds of partners and the channel grows at a rate of knots.
• Education and community. There were education days, resources and a steady run of webinars. When I moved into the role, and later got promoted, I set up a Slack community for partners, with ActiveCampaign's blessing. It grew to hundreds of members, and I used it for partner, product and webinar announcements, and to check in with partners one-on-one and reply to them fast. For a long stretch I was the partner success team, and the community meant even the smallest partners were looked after.

Expect 80/20, and be honest about it. Roughly 20% of your partners will bring in 80% of your revenue. That held true for me: most of my week went to the top 20%. I treated every partner equally, but I was open about where my time had to go, and that's exactly why the community mattered. Nobody felt they weren't getting the service they deserved.

The 80/20 of a partner channel

Partners

Top 20%Everyone else

Revenue

80% from the top 20%20%

So recruit widely, then find the few who perform and invest most of your time in them: co-marketing, joint pitches and a first look at new offers. Find businesses that already serve your buyer, make it easy and worthwhile for them to refer or resell you, and look after them like your best clients.

2222. Build with design partners before you build for everyone

Partners help you sell what you already have. Design partners help you build what the market will actually buy.

A design partner is a target customer who agrees to help shape your product or service from the very start, in exchange for early access and a big discount. They're not beta testers. As Bessemer Venture Partners put it in 2026, beta users test a finished product, while design partners help decide what gets built, for whom and at what price.

This is how many early-stage businesses go to market, especially funded ones. Funding buys runway, not product-market fit, and the gap between the two is where design partners earn their keep. It's a big pool in Australia: the Cut Through Venture and Folklore State of Australian Startup Funding report counted $5.1 billion raised across 390 deals in 2025, with a median Series A of $11 million. Every one of those businesses needs its first real customers and proof that what it's building works.

How to run a design partner program

• Keep it small. Bessemer says most practitioners suggest five to 12 partners; SaaStr suggests three to five, so each one gets real attention.
• Choose for fit, not friendship. Pick businesses that match your ideal customer profile and feel the problem sharply. Bessemer found cold outreach gives a more honest signal than warm introductions. Strella recruited all 12 of its design partners through cold LinkedIn messages.
• Trade a real discount for a real commitment. SaaStr's 2025 guidance puts typical design partner discounts at 30 to 50% off list price for one to two years, or a longer price lock (for example, 40% off for three years) in return for feedback and a case study. In exchange, ask for a set feedback rhythm (fortnightly or monthly), roadmap input, and the right to use their name and results.
• Put it in writing. Common Paper's free Design Partner Agreement covers feedback sessions, references, discounts and, importantly, who owns the intellectual property. A handshake or a letter of intent leaves too much to chance.
• Agree on the finish line upfront. Set a milestone, such as public launch, when partners become paying customers at an agreed price. Bessemer recommends a hard deadline and a simple yes-or-no ask: go paid or don't. In its words: "Enthusiasm is noise. Conversion is clarity."
• Don't over-discount or over-customise. Build what many of your design partners need, not one partner's wish list, and keep the discount time-limited so the price still reflects the value.

A design partner program, start to finish

1. Recruit3 to 12 partnersMatched to your ICP, and cold outreach is fine
2. AgreeTerms in writingDiscount, feedback rhythm, references and IP
3. BuildShape it togetherFeedback fortnightly or monthly
4. DecideGo paid, or don’tA hard milestone with a yes-or-no ask
5. GrowProof and referralsCase studies, referrals and early channel partners

Done well, it works. Bessemer's 2026 case study on Strella reported that all 12 of its design partners converted to paying customers, it reached US$1.6 million in annual recurring revenue in its first year of selling, and its first renewal cohort hit 150% net dollar retention.

And it closes the loop on everything before it. Design partners make the product worth buying (principle 19). Once they get results, they become your first case studies and your warmest referrals (principle 20). And some of them may even become your first channel partners (principle 21).

Leading the team

Everything above works for one salesperson. This part is about building and leading a team that sells that way. I've led SDRs, BDRs, account executives and customer success reps, and I've coached a CEO on how to sell. The lesson that runs through all of it: the people you hire set the ceiling, and the rhythm you run sets how close they get to it.

2323. Hire to the bar, not to fill a seat

A great process with the wrong person in the seat still leaks. So I recruit slowly and deliberately, and I borrow a lot from EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System.

It starts with your best people. Think of the person on your team you'd clone if you could. For me, that's someone who's always on time, is a great culture fit and is great at their job. EOS uses exactly this exercise to find a company's core values: name the people you wish you could clone, list what makes them great, and look for the patterns.

Those values become the bar. In EOS, the bar is the minimum standard every person has to meet to stay with the company, and it covers two things. The right person: they live your core values. The right seat: they get the role, want the role and have the capacity to do it, three clear yeses. Nobody is hired who doesn't clear the bar, however good their CV looks, and anyone who drops below it gets coached for a set period (EOS suggests 30 to 90 days) before a decision is made.

Hiring to the bar, the EOS way

1. 1Find your best peopleThe ones you’d clone if you could
2. 2Set the barTheir traits become your core values, plus get it, want it, capacity to do it
3. 3Hire to itValues first, skills second, and make every candidate sell
4. 4Hold itReview every quarter; coach anyone below it for 30 to 90 days

How I recruit

• Write the role as outcomes, not tasks. Three to five results you expect in the first year, and the numbers that prove them.
• Screen for values first, skills second. Skills can be taught. Punctuality, work ethic and attitude mostly can't. Ask for real examples, not opinions.
• Get them to sell. A role-played discovery call and a written follow-up email tell you more than an hour of interview questions.
• Check references properly. Ask about the things on your bar: reliability, coachability and how they handled a bad month.
• Run every candidate through the same steps, and score them the same way. Decide as a team, against the bar, not on gut feel.

2424. Onboard like it matters, because it does

When a new salesperson struggles early, it's rarely because they can't sell. It's usually because nobody showed them how to sell here. A sophisticated onboarding program pays for itself many times over.

• A 30-60-90 day plan. Clear milestones for each month: learn, then shadow, then sell with support, then sell on their own.
• Shadow before solo. New reps listen to live and recorded calls, then run their first calls with a manager alongside.
• Certify before going live. Each rep pitches, runs discovery and handles objections in a role play before they speak to real buyers.
• Meet the rest of the business. A week one session with customer success, marketing and product, so they understand the whole funnel, not just their piece of it.

And give every new hire one playbook they can always go back to. It can be a spreadsheet, a shared drive or a simple portal, as long as it holds everything in one place:

• Recorded calls: the best ones, and a few that went wrong and why
• Pitch decks, one-pagers and case studies
• The ideal customer profile and personas
• Discovery questions, objection handling and competitor notes
• Pricing, offers and proposal templates
• Every tool, what it's for and how to get access
• A CRM key: what each stage, field and status means, and the exit criteria for each stage
• Who to ask for what

New hires shouldn't have to interrupt someone to find a deck. If the answer isn't in the playbook, add it.

2525. Run the team on a rhythm and a few clear numbers

A sales team needs a heartbeat. Mine is simple, and it doesn't move:

• A Monday kick-off. The week's priorities, the pipeline and who needs help.
• A Friday wrap-up. Wins, losses, what we learned and what's next.
• A weekly sales meeting with the executive team. Same day, same time, same agenda: the numbers, the deals that matter and the issues to solve. EOS's weekly Level 10 Meeting is a good model.
• A weekly customer success meeting. Every key account, its health, renewals, risks and upsell or referral opportunities, so no customer slips through the cracks.

A sales team’s weekly rhythm

1. MonTeam kick-offPriorities, pipeline and who needs help
2. WeeklyExec sales meetingThe scorecard, key deals and issues to solve
3. WeeklyCustomer success meetingAccount health, renewals, risks and referrals
4. FriTeam wrap-upWins, losses, lessons and next week

Simple, clear numbers. EOS calls it a scorecard: a handful of weekly numbers, each with an owner and a target, that tell you at a glance whether you're on track. Mix leading numbers (conversations, meetings booked, pipeline created) with lagging ones (deals won, revenue, retention). If a number is red two weeks running, it goes on the agenda.

Strict CRM hygiene. If it isn't in the CRM, it didn't happen. Every deal has a stage with clear exit criteria, an amount, a close date and a next step with a date. Reps update it the same day, and we review it every week. Clean data is what makes forecasting, coaching and every number above trustworthy.

2626. Coach every week, until the training wheels come off

Coaching is where good reps become great ones, and it's the first thing to slip when a manager gets busy. So I put it in the diary and protect it.

• Weekly for new reps. Call reviews from recordings, role plays and deal reviews, one skill at a time.
• Monthly once they're performing. The training wheels come off, but the support doesn't.
• Quarterly for the most experienced reps. Strategy, career goals and the deals that stretch them.
• Coach the skill, not the number. The number tells you where to look. The call recording tells you what to fix.
• Ask before you tell. Let reps find the answer themselves first. It sticks far better.

How coaching changes as a rep grows

1. WeeklyNew repsCall reviews, role plays and deal reviews
2. MonthlyPerforming repsThe training wheels are off, the support isn’t
3. QuarterlyExperienced repsStrategy, career goals and stretch deals

Coaching goes up the chain, too. Some of the most valuable coaching I've done was with a CEO learning how to sell their own business, which is often the first step before a founder can hand sales over to a team.

Who I learn from

No single method, so plenty of teachers. These are the people and programs whose ideas show up most in how I sell.