Blog

Weekly thinking on consultative selling, sales leadership and building a team that sells on value.

A cut-out salesperson celebrates on the top step of a podium that is propped up by dice, with a golden horseshoe behind him

26 October 2026

If you manage your team from the sales leaderboard, you’ll know who’s ahead but not why

A sales leaderboard ranks results, and results mix skill with territory and luck. What that does to coaching and promotion, and what to use alongside it.

Collage of scissors cutting a bullseye out of a proposal to fit a price tag, with the line: Never sacrifice the outcome to hit a price.

19 October 2026

Why we didn’t charge what the market charges

What it costs to assess a salesperson through personality, skills, motivation and 360, why the market price got so high, and how we priced MyAcumen.

Collage of a smiling salesperson holding a gold-starred certificate beside a flat results chart, with the words They loved the course. Nothing changed.

12 October 2026

If your last sales training didn’t lift results, your team may never have had a training problem.

If your sales training didn’t lift results, the problem may not have been skill. What goes wrong when you skip the diagnosis, and what to check first.

Collage of a falling line chart crashing down while a sales leader studies his team through a magnifying glass

4 October 2026

Business confidence has dropped. Here’s what that could mean for your sales team

UK business confidence fell 12 points in a month and US hiring stalled. What it means for owners and the strategy choices facing sales leaders.

30 September 2026

What we’re building next

The gap between knowing your development gap and closing it is where nearly every assessment product gives up and hands you a reading list. Post 6 in a weekly series focused on building MyAcumen from the ground up using AI-First principles. The decisions we made, why we made them, and how we went about it. […]

23 September 2026

Same question, same answer

The most useful decision in an AI-First build is deciding where the AI does not go. Post 5 in a weekly series focused on building MyAcumen from the ground up using AI-First principles. The decisions we made, why we made them, and how we went about it. Aimed wider than my usual sales audience. Ask […]

16 September 2026

Where your data actually goes

Handing over capability data on fifty people is a far bigger act of trust than most vendors bother to acknowledge. Post 4 in a weekly series focused on building MyAcumen from the ground up using AI-First principles. The decisions we made, why we made them, and how we went about it. Aimed wider than my […]

9 September 2026

What the human eye can’t do

Five hundred data points on one person produce 124,750 possible pairs. Nobody is eyeballing that, which is exactly why most assessment reports stop at the bar chart. Post 3 in a weekly series focused on building MyAcumen from the ground up using AI-First principles. The decisions we made, why we made them, and how we […]

9 September 2026

Ask someone how good they are and you’ll get an honest answer. It just won’t be a reliable one.

Ask somebody on your team what they’re best at and you’ll get an answer in a couple of seconds. Two or three things, named with confidence, and they’ll believe every word of it. Then ask who told them. That second question is the one I’ve watched stop people, and it has stopped a lot of […]

2 September 2026

One chatbot is the wrong answer

An individual asking why they keep stalling on price, and a sales director asking which of their fifty people to coach first, are not the same question. So we stopped trying to answer them with the same build. Welcome to post 2 in the weekly series focused on building MyAcumen from the ground up using […]

A sales leader at a dusk office desk, turned away from a lit training workbook and certificate

31 August 2026

You can teach someone to build a value case. You can’t teach them to want to be better.

Every commercial role has its own skill set, and all of them depend on the same ten capabilities. Here is what each one is holding up, and what happens when it is missing.

AI first makes the assessments more useful than pdf reports

27 August 2026

Why AI-First was not just a preference

Most assessment products are a scoring engine with a PDF on the end. Which works fine, right up until the moment someone wants to know why. This is the first post in a weekly series focused on building MyAcumen from the ground up using AI-First principles. The decisions we made, why we made them, and […]