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.

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 […]

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.

26 August 2026

Q4 won’t tell you what your team can do. It’ll show you what they fall back on.

In 25 years of running and advising sales teams, I’ve spent a lot of time in the final quarter watching people I thought I knew well do things I didn’t expect. There were the steady ones who went quiet, and the confident ones who started discounting deals that didn’t need discounting. And then there were […]

A sales manager holding up a cut-out template against a colleague who does not fit its outline

19 August 2026

Before you decide someone is under performing, check they’re not just doing it differently to you.

For most of my early years running sales teams, I managed people the way I’d have wanted to be managed myself. Tell me the problem, tell me what you’re doing about it, then let me get on with it. No long preamble, no hand holding, and a fair amount of pressure when things slipped. It […]

12 August 2026

Sales careers are built on ordinary Tuesdays.

A sales year is mostly a run of events. The big deal, the competitive bid, the quarterly review, the two day course, the kick off, the appraisal. They’re the moments everyone remembers, and they’re where people get judged. They’re also where nobody improves. An event puts you under a light and shows what you can […]

29 June 2026

If your sales team is underperforming, one of these five things could be behind it.

Some of your reps are behind your numbers. You can see it on the dashboard every morning. So you do what most sales leaders do. You turn up the levels of activity, with more calls, a demand for more pipeline, maybe a team training session or two. But, reaching for the same fix you always […]

15 June 2026

Your best reps leave first. And, you never worked out what makes them great!

The email arrives on a Tuesday. Your best rep is leaving. Eight weeks’ notice, a competitor, nothing you can match without blowing up the whole pay structure. You read it twice. Then you do the sum every sales leader does in that moment, the one about how much of next year’s number just walked out […]

sales leaders are similar to football managers

8 June 2026

What the World Cup Teaches Us About Leading a Sales Team

The 2026 World Cup kicks off on 11 June. Forty-eight nations. Sixty-four days. One winner. Every team that walks out has roughly the same raw material: talented players, qualified coaches, and months of preparation. What separates the teams that go deep from the ones that go home early is almost never talent alone. It is […]