Blog

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

10 May 2026

The Self-Sufficiency Trap: Why Experienced Professionals Plateau

Early in my sales career, I was working harder than I had ever worked. The hours were there. The preparation was there. I showed up to every conversation as ready as I knew how to be. The results were still not coming. My manager kept pushing. More challenge. More questions about how I was approaching […]

5 May 2026

The Cost of Inaction: Why No Decision Is the Most Expensive Outcome in Consultative Sales

The deal had everything going for it. Strong relationship. Genuine need. The right solution. Six months of careful work by a Business Developer who had done almost everything right. And then, at the point where a decision should have been made, the customer said they needed more time. Three months later: still more time. Six […]

27 April 2026

The investment nobody is going to make for you is discretionary, but not optional.

The thing that separates people who improve from people who plateau is not a team session or scheduled training course…

12 April 2026

You Don’t Have to Be in Enterprise Sales to Sell Consultatively

Most B2B sellers have written off consultative selling before they’ve tried it. Not because they’ve tested it and found it wanting. Because they’ve decided it doesn’t apply to them. The assumption is understandable. The label conjures a particular image: a complex, multi-stakeholder deal with a 12-month sales cycle, a buying committee, and a procurement process […]

6 April 2026

Being liked is not the same as being valued

Early in my sales career, I thought I was doing everything right. I was working a major account at a global oil company. I met lots of people. Took clients to lunch and dinner. Played golf, attended events, kept the conversation easy. They genuinely seemed to enjoy my company. I focused on being fun to […]

30 March 2026

The question most consultative sellers never prepare

I was reviewing a discovery call with James a few years ago. He was a solid Business Developer. Prepared questions, good rapport, comfortable with silence. The customer had engaged genuinely throughout. By any standard measure, it had gone well. But when I asked him what he thought the customer would do differently after that meeting, […]

15 March 2026

AI Didn’t Start This. The 1990’s Did

In the mid-1990s, I was part of a focused leadership team in BT Corporate. We were tasked with setting up a team to solve a specific problem in the corporate mid-market. The numbers told a clear story: the revenue-per-head ratio in field sales was difficult to sustain at this level of the market. Cars, expense […]

7 March 2026

How I became a consultative seller

I became a consultative seller by accident In 2007 I left corporate life to start my own consulting business. I thought I knew how to sell. I’d spent years in B2B commercial roles, working my way up through increasingly complex environments. I understood products. I could hold a conversation. I was reasonably good at handling […]