I got into it a little with a manufacturer’s rep at a conference recently. He was frustrated, and his complaint was one I’ve heard a hundred times. His dealers’ salespeople send pricing when a customer asks for it before agreeing to a meeting, and in his view, that means they’ve “lost control of the sale.”

So I asked him a simple question. If the customer won’t take the meeting without a price, what exactly do you want the salesperson to do instead?

He didn’t have an answer. He paused, and then he went right back to talking about control, as if saying the word again would make “control” happen. That non-answer stuck with me, because it really summed up a big problem in sales in the year 2026. “Don’t lose control” sounds like advice. The problem is that there’s really no way to get there from here. “Controlling the sale” is almost a nostalgic concept these days.

Let me be clear that I’m not dunking on this guy. He learned “control the sale” in a market where it was closer to being real and it often worked. I say “often” because the truth is that salespeople never really “controlled” the sale – our buyers could always simply pitch us out the door – but it was much easier to establish heavy influence that looked like “control” if you were the seller. The idea wasn’t wrong. It just quit being true, and a lot of good people never got the memo.

What actually held that influence together

Here’s what’s worth understanding. That heavy influence that looked enough like control that we started calling it control came from one place. The seller had the information, and the buyer didn’t.

Pricing, specifications, comparisons, what other companies in a similar spot had done and how it worked out for them — none of that was easy to get anywhere else. If you wanted it, you generally went through a salesperson. Withholding the price until you’d secured a meeting wasn’t manipulation. It was leverage, and it worked because the buyer genuinely needed something he couldn’t easily get on his own. The buyer could always still throw you out — he held the real control the whole time — but as long as you had something he needed, he usually chose to sit and listen. That choice was the influence. We just mistook it for something more permanent than it was.

That information is now free. It’s instant, it’s more complete than what most reps carry in their heads, and it’s available to the buyer at eleven at night, on their couch, in their underwear, while they eat Cheetos, without anyone scheduling a thing. So nothing got taken away from salespeople. The buyer’s control didn’t grow. What changed is that the lever that used to earn his attention evaporated, and now he knows he never had to give that attention in the first place. He always held the cards. Today he knows it, and he plays them.

That’s why the rep at the conference had nothing to say when I asked what a salesperson should actually do. “Maintain control” describes a feeling sellers used to enjoy back when they had leverage. It doesn’t prescribe an action, because the action it’s reaching for depended on an information gap that’s closed.

The buyer isn’t being difficult or rude

It’s worth sitting in the buyer’s chair, because the “control” framing quietly casts him as an adversary, and he isn’t one.

A buyer who asks for pricing before a meeting isn’t being disrespectful or playing games. He’s doing exactly what sellers taught him to do over the last twenty years of qualifying calls. We spent two decades screening buyers out before we’d invest time in them, and he learned the lesson perfectly. Now he’s screening us out the same way, for the same reason: he has more suppliers who want his time than he has hours in the week, and price is the single fastest way to find out whether a conversation is even worth having.

There’s more to it than efficiency, though. In some original research I ran, I asked buyers why they decline meetings with salespeople they don’t already work with. The most common answer wasn’t about price at all. It was that the meeting usually turns out to be a pitch rather than something useful. When a buyer asks for your number before he’ll meet, he’s not withholding a meeting to gain the upper hand — he already has the upper hand, and he knows it. He’s protecting an hour he doesn’t expect to get any value from, because experience has taught him the hour is usually a sales presentation made up of facts he’s already learned. The pricing request is self-defense, and we’re the ones who trained him to need it.

So what does the rep actually do?

This is the part the man at the conference couldn’t answer, and any take that stops at “the world has changed” without answering it is just whining and complaining. Here’s the answer.

The refusal-to-quote play only works when you have something the buyer can’t get anywhere else. Almost nobody does anymore. So quit trying to run a play that depends on leverage you don’t have, and pick one of these instead.

Give the price and lose nothing. If the number disqualifies you, it was going to disqualify you after the meeting too. You’ve just saved yourself an hour and found out early. And if it doesn’t disqualify you, you’re now talking to a buyer who already knows you’re viable, which is a far better conversation than one where he spends the whole meeting quietly wondering whether he can even afford you.  Isn’t it more fun to start a meeting knowing that sticker shock isn’t on the bingo card?

Give the price and add what the price doesn’t contain. A number by itself invites exactly one response: a comparison to other numbers. But a number with context around it — what it includes, what drives it up or down, what companies in a similar position usually land on and why — isn’t a quote anymore. It’s a piece of analysis that happens to have a number in it, and it earns a follow-up conversation on its own strength. This is the option most reps skip, and it’s the best one, because it’s the one that rebuilds real influence instead of pretending at control.

Give a range and name what moves it. “For an operation your size it usually runs between here and here, and the thing that moves it most is X.” That’s honest, it’s genuinely useful, and it makes the next conversation about the buyer’s situation instead of about your price. You’ve turned a disqualifier into a reason to talk.

What doesn’t work is refusing, deflecting, or trying to trade the number for a meeting. That trade required leverage you no longer hold, and worse, attempting it tells the buyer exactly what kind of salesperson he’s dealing with — the kind who’s guarding information that isn’t valuable anymore, which only makes him wonder what else you’re being cagey about. Remember – today’s buyer values transparency.  You can either embrace that or have it forced upon you.

That’s the heart of it. The salesperson who won’t send a price isn’t protecting the sale. He’s protecting a process that stopped working, and the buyer knows it – and he’ll simply do another 2-minute Google search to find someone who will work with him the way he wants to be worked with.

Why the advice hangs around anyway

If “control” is so hollow, why does it persist as coaching? Because it’s easy to say and it costs the person saying it nothing.

Telling a rep to maintain control of the sale requires zero preparation from the manager. It sounds like wisdom, it fits on a coffee mug, and it puts the entire burden on the salesperson to somehow produce a result the advice never explains how to produce. Giving that rep something genuinely worth trading for a meeting — real insight into the buyer’s business, a useful point of view, analysis the buyer can’t generate himself — takes actual work, and the compensation plan probably doesn’t pay for it.

So the word survives. Not because it’s true, but because it’s convenient. It lets everyone feel like a strategy is in place while the meetings keep not happening.

And notice what the better path actually is. It isn’t a way to get control back, because we never really had it. It’s a way to earn influence again — the honest kind, the kind that comes from being worth the buyer’s hour instead of holding something hostage. Influence was always the real asset. We just got to take it for granted for a few decades, back when information was scarce enough to do the work for us. Now we have to earn it on purpose. If your salespeople are losing deals at the pricing request, that’s the fix. Not holding the line harder on control you never had, but giving them something to offer that’s worth more than a number the buyer could’ve found on his own.

Watch a salesperson who calls himself “consultative” run a discovery call. He’s got his questions. What are your goals this year. What’s your current setup. What’s your budget range. What’s your timeline for a decision. He asks them in order, nods at the answers, maybe writes a few things on a legal pad. Then he gets to the bottom of the list, thanks the customer for his time, and launches into the presentation he was always going to give.

The questions didn’t change anything. He’d have delivered the same pitch no matter what the customer said. The discovery was a formality he performed on the way to the close, and both people in the room could feel it.

I’ve been banging this drum for 20 years – “Consultative” is the most claimed and least earned label in B2B sales. Nearly everyone says it about themselves. Almost nobody qualifies, and the salespeople who don’t qualify aren’t frauds. They were taught that asking questions is consulting. Somebody handed them a needs-analysis worksheet in a training class a decade ago and told them that was the job. They’ve been measured on calls, demos, and closed deals their entire careers. They’re doing exactly what the system asked of them, and calling it exactly what they were told to call it. The word lost its meaning, and the people using it never got told.

Asking questions isn’t consulting

A five-question framework memorized from a seminar is not consulting, and neither is a discovery worksheet. Those are scripts with question marks on the end. The tell is that the answers don’t change the outcome. You run the list, you reach the end, you present. If the customer’s answers could have been anything and the pitch would have been the same, no consulting happened.

So what does the real thing look like? Here are a few specific tests, and they’re stricter than you probably think.

A genuine consultative salesperson asks questions because she actually wants to know the answers, not because a form needs filling. She walks in curious. She’s trying to understand how this business really works, where it’s under pressure, and what the customer is wrestling with, and she follows the conversation wherever the answers take it. Her next question comes from the last answer, not from a list. She isn’t steering the customer toward a conclusion she brought with her. She’s letting what she learns change what she thinks.

She analyzes what she hears the way a consultant would. She takes the information, combines it with what she’s seen across other customers in that industry, and comes back with something the customer didn’t already know about his own business. That’s the part that requires having seen enough operations to recognize a pattern, which is why product knowledge alone never gets you there.

She applies her own judgment to the customer’s problem, including when there’s no straight line from that work to an order this quarter. This is the hardest one, and it’s the one that separates real from fake. A consultant will tell a client the problem is somewhere else, or that the timing is wrong, or that they don’t actually need the thing being sold, or need a smaller version of it than they were about to buy. A salesperson running a script cannot say those things, because the script only points one direction.

And she does work between meetings that isn’t building the proposal. That’s a clean practical test you can apply to your own team tomorrow. Between the discovery conversation and the proposal, did the salesperson do any actual thinking about the customer’s situation, or did she just write it up? Writing it up is not thinking. One produces a document. The other produces an insight.

Here’s the line all of this comes down to. Consultants get paid for judgment. Salespeople get paid for closing. Everything else follows from that one difference.

“Selling systems” are built for closing, not judgment

Once you understand that difference in roles, the reason genuine consultative selling is so rare gets obvious. It isn’t a talent problem or a character problem. Almost every system a company runs pays for closing and has no way to pay for judgment.

Compensation runs on closed business, usually on a monthly or quarterly clock. Judgment work has a longer payback than the pay period. The rep who spends real time understanding a customer’s business is working on a timeline the commission statement doesn’t recognize, and the rep knows it. The return is long-term and substantial, but it’s seldom immediate gratification.

Activity metrics count calls, demos, proposals, and appointments. Those still matter, but none of them count understanding a customer’s business. You can be the sharpest thinker on the team and show up short on a scorecard that has no row for the thing you’re good at. That’s where managerial judgment and coaching come into play.

CRM stages are transaction stages, built to track a deal’s march toward signature. There’s rarely a stage for “we now actually understand what’s going on here,” so the one piece of progress that matters most is the one the system can’t see.

Pipeline reviews ask when it’s going to close, not what we’ve learned about the account. And what gets asked in the meeting is what gets done in the field. If the only question a rep ever fields is about the close date, the close date is the only thing that rep will prepare to discuss.

On top of all that, most sales managers were promoted because they were good closers. Closing is what they know, so closing is what they coach. Very few were ever taught to coach comprehension, and you can’t teach what you were never shown. The ones who do teach comprehension tend to have sales teams that are very successful in relationship building, customer maximization, and customer retention.

None of these mechanisms is stupid. Each exists for a good reason, and a company that abandoned them would fall apart. That’s exactly why this is hard. The system isn’t broken. It’s built for something, and the something is closing.

What it takes to adapt and go forward

For the salesperson, it means covering fewer accounts more deeply. Real preparation time, not five minutes in the parking lot. Learning an industry instead of just a product line, so she has a pattern to match against. It means being willing to say something the customer might disagree with, and being wrong out loud sometimes, which is the price of having a real opinion. Most of all it means giving up the comfort of the script, because the script is a security blanket and you cannot consult from inside it.

For the sales leader, it starts with changing the questions he asks in pipeline reviews. Ask what we’ve learned about the account, not just when it closes, and watch how fast the field starts doing that work. Coach comprehension, not only next steps. Protect a good rep’s thinking time from the activity quota instead of treating every unscheduled hour as slack. And learn to tell the difference between a rep who’s doing the deep work and a rep who’s just hiding from the phone, because those two look similar for a while and are not the same.

For the owner, understand that this is a comp plan and scorecard problem before it’s a training problem. You can send everyone to the best consultative-selling course in the country, and the moment they get back to a system that pays only for closes and counts only activity, they’ll do what the system pays for. It also takes patience, because the payback on judgment is longer than the payback on a spiff.

I know what you’re thinking, so I want to head it off. I am not telling you to throw out activity metrics or stop caring about closing. A sales organization still has to produce, and discipline around activity and results is not the enemy. The argument is that your scorecard has to find room for judgment and customer understanding without letting go of activity and results. Both, not either. Any version of this that turns into “we stopped measuring things and started having deep conversations” ends with a company that understands its customers beautifully and misses its number. Keep the discipline. Add the dimension the discipline is missing.

What the modern buyer actually wants from you

Think like your buyers and this makes a lot more sense. Buyers do most of their research before they ever contact a salesperson. By the time they’ll talk to you, they don’t need more information. They’re drowning in it. What they need is interpretation, and interpretation is judgment. The often-cited CEB and Google research found that the average B2B buyer is 57% of the way through the purchase decision before ever engaging a sales rep, and more recent studies put the figure higher still.

A seller who brings judgment gets treated differently. She gets access to more senior people, because judgment is what senior people are short of. She gets told things the other vendors never hear, because she’s earned it. She lands on shorter shortlists. The scored results follow from there: fewer and larger opportunities, higher win rates on the deals she actually chooses to chase, less price pressure because her offering stops being directly comparable to the vendor down the street, and customers who stay longer.

Judgment is the only thing a salesperson brings that a buyer can’t get faster and cheaper somewhere else. Everything else has been commoditized by a search box. A rep whose entire value is transmitting information is now competing directly with the internet, and loses that fight on both speed and price every single time. The consultative rep isn’t in that fight at all, because you can’t Google an informed outside opinion about your own business.

This is the time for a paradigm shift in your selling. Consultative selling used to be the premium version of the job, the thing the best reps did to stand out. It’s becoming the only version with a future, because it’s the only part of the job a machine can’t do. The good news, and I mean this, is that it makes the work more interesting than it’s ever been. The people who get there get to think for a living instead of recite for one.

I’m spending this year studying how much B2B buyers have actually changed and whether sales organizations have kept up, with the first findings coming this fall. This is one of the questions I most want the data to answer.

Think of LinkedIn as a high school lunchroom.

Under the old model, you picked your table. You invited people to sit with you, and those invitations were your connection requests. Others said, in effect, “I want to sit way down at the end. I won’t say anything, I just want to hear what you say.” Those were your followers. Together they were your table, and you could build it strategically. If you only wanted accountants at Fortune 500 companies, that’s who you invited.

When you posted, LinkedIn test-marketed it to a slice of your table, something on the order of 10%, weighted toward whoever had engaged with you most recently. Nobody outside LinkedIn knows the exact figure, but 10% is a fair characterization and roughly what my own results showed. If those people reacted, LinkedIn showed the post to more of your table. And those people had tables of their own, so their engagement carried your content outward, table to table. A post that started a real discussion could travel a long way. My best one did 376,000 impressions, before the change. That wasn’t luck. It was a system you could understand and work inside of.

Then LinkedIn burned the lunchroom down and replaced it with detention.

Now, You’re Assigned a Table

Here’s how it works now, as best I can tell, because LinkedIn hasn’t published the mechanics. The system reads your profile and your last thousand or so interactions, decides who you are as you walk in the door, and assigns you a table. Think The Breakfast Club: the jock, the nerd, the princess, the criminal. Or without the movie: the engineers, the sales guys, the marketing people, the HR crowd. Your content gets shown around the table you were assigned, whether or not a single person at it is a connection of yours.

Sit in Your Assigned Seats, Please

This is the part almost everyone gets wrong, and it’s the most important thing here.

The seat belongs to you, not to any individual post. LinkedIn decides who you are from your profile and history, and one post doesn’t change that. So when you put up something that doesn’t fit that identity, you don’t get moved to the table where it would belong. You get a shrug and a token audience. If I, for instance, posted about an HR topic tomorrow, it would not go to the HR table. LinkedIn would essentially ask why a sales guy is talking about HR. It’s the quarterback of the football team trying out for the lead in the school’s production of Hamlet. Nobody’s buying it, and the part goes to a theater kid.

The table is where distribution starts, not where it ends. If your table reacts strongly enough, the room widens and more people at your assigned LinkedIn table get shown the post. That’s how something occasionally still reaches tens of thousands of strangers. But it starts at one end of your assigned table every time, and if the post doesn’t fit that table, it never gets going at all.

The irony resembles the movie. The whole story is those kids crossing the lines between the cliques and finding they had more in common than the labels said. This system is the opposite. Nobody at your table ever learns a thing about anybody at another one. The film was about breaking down the walls. This new system exists to make sure that never happens.

What that means is that the network you built, over years, is no longer your distribution. Your connections still count as a signal, and LinkedIn says suppressed content still reaches direct connections, so those relationships didn’t evaporate. But the machine that decides who sees your work is no longer running on the table you assembled. You built the guest list. LinkedIn stopped using it. And your clients and prospects may not be sitting at your table anymore. If the system reads you as a “sales trainer” and seats you with other sales trainers, the owners and managers you’re trying to reach are in a different room, and your post never gets carried to them.

The part people are getting wrong

There’s a common explanation going around, and it’s half right. The story is that LinkedIn started rewarding quality, so if you just make genuinely good content, you’ll get found.

The people saying this aren’t foolish. Follower count genuinely did stop being distribution. If you built a big following and watched your reach collapse, you weren’t imagining it.

But the conclusion isn’t correct. The system isn’t measuring quality. It’s measuring two things: whether your post fits who it’s decided you are, and whether it predicts your assigned table will react. Neither is the same as “good.” You can write the most useful thing you’ve ever produced and watch it go nowhere. If that’s happened to you, you’re not losing your touch. You’re running into what the system actually rewards, which was never the same as what’s worth reading.

What my own numbers show

I’ve tracked 73 of my own posts across this change. It’s a controlled sample from inside one account, and it lets me see the machine work.

Since the shift, I’ve had posts land as low as 57 impressions. And 110. And 147. Roughly 2% of my following. Under the old model’s rough 10% floor, those numbers were structurally impossible. Meanwhile, in the same stretch, other posts of mine cleared 52,000. Same account, same writer, same week. That kind of spread with the author held constant tells you the author was never the variable. The system was.

Two things have to happen for a post to travel. First, it has to fit who LinkedIn has decided I am. The posts that cratered weren’t weaker than the ones that flew. Some of the lowest reach posts were better written than things that cleared five figures. The common thread in the ones that died was that the subject sat outside my lane, and there’s no reassignment when that happens.

Second, the system has to predict my table will react. This should settle the “quality wins” question. My teaching content, the frameworks and the method, fits my lane every time. And it consistently underperforms the stuff that picks a fight, because it informs instead of inflaming, and the system has no use for a post that doesn’t generate a reaction. The machine is optimizing for emotional reactions, not intellectual help.

There’s a clean natural experiment in this. Writing about how LinkedIn works travels well for people filed as LinkedIn experts and marketers. The same subject, from someone filed as a sales guy, goes quiet. That’s not a comment on anyone’s writing. It’s the mechanic doing what it’s built to do: seat the author, then distribute by whether the subject fits the seat.

Why it works this way, without the conspiracy theory

None of this is LinkedIn being evil. It’s ordinary business logic, and understanding it tells you what to expect.

LinkedIn sells advertising, and advertising inventory is impressions, which come from people scrolling. An interest-based feed is scroll architecture: instead of your feed being what your own network posted, it draws from everything and slots in what you’re most likely to react to. That turns a finite feed into an effectively infinite one, and an infinite feed is a lot more ad inventory. For the quarter ending September 30, 2025, LinkedIn reported $4.71 billion in revenue, up 9% in constant currency, with Microsoft crediting its advertising solutions for the increase. The ad machine is carrying the quarter, and it runs on scroll time.

A company that monetizes attention builds systems that maximize attention. That means the platform’s interest and yours stopped pointing the same direction, and it’s on you to notice. For a long time, what was good for you on LinkedIn was also good for LinkedIn. That alignment is over, and nobody’s going to send you a memo about it.

What this means if you’re a salesperson

Comments are now better distribution than your own posts, and the lunchroom shows why. A comment is you getting up from your assigned table and walking to another one. Leave a substantive comment on a post that’s already traveling, and the people at that table see you whether or not LinkedIn would ever have seated you there. The visit isn’t permanent. The minute you’re done, LinkedIn walks you back to your own table. But while you’re there, you’re there, and that’s reach you could never have gotten from posting. One thoughtful comment on a prospect’s post beats three of your own into an empty room.

The trick is which table you visit. Go where your buyers are sitting, not where the other salespeople are. It’s comfortable to trade nods at the sales-and-selling table with people who do what you do. None of them are going to buy from you.

Your profile and history decide which table you’re seated at. If you’re filed somewhere your buyers don’t sit, that’s a profile problem before it’s a content problem, and no amount of better writing fixes it. And post about your subject, not whatever interested you this week. Straying doesn’t win you a new audience. It wins you no audience; ask me how I know!

What this means if you run a sales team

If you’re scoring rep social activity by post volume or follower growth, stop. Neither is a leading indicator of anything. A rep with 12,000 followers and a rep with 1,200 are, for distribution purposes, closer to even than they’ve ever been.

Be skeptical of any social selling program priced on audience building. If the pitch is “we’ll help your team build a following,” it’s describing a lunchroom that got demolished.

Coach table-visiting as a prospecting behavior, with a time budget and a target list, the same way you coach call blocks. It’s the highest-leverage social activity left, and almost nobody is managing it deliberately. And check what your reps’ profiles say they are. If a rep is filed as something other than what they sell, their content is going to the wrong table no matter how good it is.

Finally, audit how much of your pipeline depends on a channel you don’t own. If a big share of your lead flow rides on organic LinkedIn reach, you have a single point of failure controlled by another company’s revenue model, and you just watched that model change the rules with no notice. Reinvest in the channels you own. Your email list can’t be reassigned to a different table.

Going forward

Your LinkedIn distribution was always rented. It felt like yours because it worked for so long and because you built it with real work. But it sat on someone else’s land the whole time, under terms they could rewrite whenever it suited them. This year it suited them.

If you built a following and now watch it produce nothing, you didn’t do anything wrong. You followed advice that was correct when you got it, and the ground moved. But here’s the lesson under the lesson: a rented audience can be taken back, and an owned one can’t. Your email list, your real relationships, your reputation — nobody at LinkedIn can reassign those to a different table. Everything else is a seat you can be moved out of.

So use LinkedIn for what it’s still good for: finding the right rooms and being useful in them. Then go build the part nobody can take away.

I’m spending this year studying how much buyers have actually changed and whether sales organizations have kept up, with early findings this fall. This is one piece of it, and I suspect a lot of us are going to see ourselves in the full picture.

Here’s something I want to credit to Robin Wesolowski at Covisian, who gave me a genius insight and named a pattern I’ve been circling for years. When any other department in a company struggles, upper management’s first instinct is to look at the department’s tools, systems, and processes. When sales struggles, the first place they look is activity and effort.

Think about how differently we treat the two situations. If your production numbers fall, you examine the equipment, the workflow, the materials, the maintenance schedule. If your fulfillment times slip, you audit the process. If accounting is making errors, you look at the software and the procedures before you look at the accountant. In every one of these cases, the reflex is to interrogate the system first and the person second.

Sales gets the opposite treatment. When the numbers come in soft, the first questions are about the rep. Are they making enough calls? Are they working hard enough? Do they want it badly enough? And if effort isn’t obviously the issue, the next question is about ability — do they simply have what it takes? Either way, we reach for a character diagnosis before we ever reach for a systems diagnosis, and that single reflex costs companies more money and more good people than almost anything else I see in this business. Everything I teach in the Navigator’s Chart is built on the opposite instinct — that a sales organization is a system to be designed, not a collection of personalities to be motivated.

Why Sales Gets Singled Out

There’s a reason sales draws this treatment, and we need to understand it before we talk about what it costs.

Sales is the only function in the company where individual variation is visible and constant. Put two reps in the same territory, with the same product, the same pricing, and the same tools, and they’ll produce different numbers. One will close more than the other. That difference is real, and everyone can see it, month after month, right there on the board.

That visibility is exactly what fools us. Because the variance is real, effort looks like the thing causing it. When one rep outproduces another on identical resources, the obvious conclusion is that the difference must be the person — the hustle, the drive, the character. And sometimes it partly is. But visible does not mean causal. Effort may simply be the most visible variable, not the one actually driving the result. The salesperson is working the same Waters as everyone else on the team — the same buyers, the same market conditions — which strips away the easy external explanation and leaves only the person standing there to blame.

Nobody watches two machinists produce different output on the same line and concludes the tooling must be fine. We’d examine the setup, the training, the machine each one was running. But in sales, the individual is so prominent that we skip straight past the system and land on the person.

Or, Plan B: Ability

Effort is the first thing we question, but it isn’t the only one. When a rep is clearly working hard and the numbers still don’t come, the diagnosis usually shifts to ability — maybe they just don’t have what it takes.

That conclusion runs in two directions, and I want to be fair about both. Sometimes it leads to an investment in training, and I’m not going to stand here and complain about that — developing salespeople is real work that produces real results, and frankly it’s part of how I make my living. Training a rep who’s fighting a broken structure won’t save them, but training a capable rep inside a sound structure is one of the highest-return things a company can do.

The other direction is where it goes wrong. Management concludes the salesperson simply lacks the ability, and they let them go — and I want you to remember this: in almost every case, that judgment was made on gut instinct. No psychometric profile was ever run. No structured assessment of the traits the role actually requires. Somebody watched the numbers, formed an impression, and rendered a verdict on a human being’s capabilities without a shred of actual data behind it. We would never evaluate a piece of equipment that way. We’d measure it. But we’ll decide a person “isn’t cut out for sales” on a feeling.

That’s the thread running under this entire problem. Gut instinct is standing in for data, and it’s making expensive decisions while it does it.

The Chain That Follows

Once you start with a character diagnosis — whether the charge is effort or ability — a predictable chain unfolds, and every link looks reasonable from the inside.

Results disappoint. Management responds the way a character diagnosis tells them to — push harder on activity, tighten accountability, demand more calls and more visits. Results still disappoint, because the actual cause was structural and no amount of pushing changes a structure. So management draws the only conclusion the character frame allows: the rep was the problem. They’re replaced.

The new rep arrives and steps into the same compensation plan that rewarded the wrong things, the same sales process that was never documented, the same hiring profile that nobody ever wrote down, and all of it perhaps created for a set of buying habits that doesn’t exist anymore. They underperform too — of course they do, because nothing that produced the last failure has changed. And they get replaced in turn.

That’s the machine. And it produces two conclusions that feel like hard-won wisdom but are actually just artifacts of the machine itself.

The first is that high sales turnover reflects a bad labor pool. It doesn’t. The turnover is what a character diagnosis manufactures mechanically. When you keep swapping the person while holding the system constant, you generate a stream of failures that has nothing to do with the quality of the people passing through.

The second is the belief that finally settles in after the fourth or fifth failed hire: “We just can’t hire good salespeople.” That belief is durable because from the inside, it’s genuinely indistinguishable from a real supply problem. After four people have failed in the same seat, the pattern really does look like the labor market let you down. The one thing that visibly changed each time was the person, so the person is where the eye lands. The comp plan didn’t change. The undocumented process didn’t change. The hiring profile didn’t change. The only variable anyone could see was the human being, and the human being kept failing, so the humans must be the problem.

They weren’t. The seat was. Every rep who failed was a Crew problem in name, but a Vessel problem in fact — the boat was built to sink, and we kept blaming the people who went down with it.

If your sales problem were a manufacturing problem, you’d have looked at the system a year ago.

I Made This Exact Mistake

I’m not describing this from a distance. I did it myself, and I did it with total confidence.

In 1998 I took over the worst-performing sales branch in the country. Dead last. And I did what I knew how to do — I pushed. Prospecting quotas, activity metrics, accountability, all of it. For five months I coached hard and held people to standards, and it worked, sort of. The branch climbed from worst in the country to the bottom half. Real movement, and I was proud of it.

Then on January 1, 1999, we changed the compensation plan. My General Manager and I tripled the multiplier on the product line that the company actually wanted us selling. That was it — one structural change to what the comp plan paid for.

By April, my branch led the entire company. And it stayed there for two years.

Now, it would be easy to conclude that the coaching didn’t matter and the comp plan did all the work. That’s the wrong lesson, and I want to be clear about it. The coaching didn’t fail. It was loaded and waiting. Five months of building activity, discipline, and skill had put a capable, hard-working branch in place — and that branch had nowhere to express itself because the structure didn’t pay for the thing the company wanted done. The moment the structure changed, all that coached-up capability had somewhere to go, and it went there fast.

Structure doesn’t replace coaching. Structure determines whether coaching sticks. I could have pushed activity for another year and stayed in the bottom half forever, because I was coaching people to swim against a current the comp plan was generating. Change the current, and the same people I’d been developing became the best in the company in ninety days. I’d spent five months working on the Crew when the problem was in the Vessel the whole time.

What This Should Change

The point isn’t that effort and ability don’t matter. They do. A lazy rep is a real problem, a genuine skills gap is a real problem, and coaching and training are real work that produce real results. The point is the order of operations.

When sales disappoints, resist the reflex to diagnose the person first. Ask the questions you’d ask about any other department. Is the compensation plan actually paying for the behavior we want? Is there a documented sales process, or is every rep improvising? Was the hiring profile ever written down, or do we hire on gut and hope? Does the structure make success possible for a capable person working hard — or are we asking good people to overcome a system we built wrong and never examined? Those are Vessel questions, and they come before any question about the Crew.

Diagnose the system first, the way you already do everywhere else in your company. Then coach and train — because development aimed at a sound structure sticks, and development aimed at overcoming a broken one just wears out good people until they quit or get fired and become one more data point in your case that nobody good is available. And when you do reach a judgment about a person’s ability, base it on an actual assessment, not a gut feeling formed while staring at a scoreboard.

That last point is one I take seriously enough to apply to myself. What I’ve laid out here is a hypothesis. It matches what I’ve seen across a lot of companies and a lot of years — but I’ve just spent a whole article warning you about the cost of letting gut instinct stand in for data, and I’m not going to exempt my own convictions from that standard. So I have a multi-industry study underway right now measuring exactly this: whether sales really does get diagnosed as a character problem where other departments get diagnosed as systems problems, and what that difference costs. The numbers land in January. When they do, this stops being my instinct and starts being data — and I’ll share it either way.

I commented last week on a post by Brian Wells, a building materials sales leader, and it’s been rattling around in my head ever since. Brian asked a pointed question: does anyone in sales leadership actually want reps to build trust anymore? He laid out the math a lot of companies run — a rep who takes eighteen months to build the kind of trust where a customer calls you first, before checking price, costs money every one of those months. A rep who hits quota fast by being aggressive looks cheaper on paper, right now. So the real question isn’t whether trust matters. Everybody agrees it does. The question is whether you’re willing to accept the cost of building it.

My response to Brian was that this isn’t a building-materials problem. It’s everywhere. And I want to expand on why, because there’s a bigger shift underneath it.

The Bottle Rocket Rep

Plenty of companies are constantly shooting for what I call the bottle rocket rep — someone who can “hit the ground running” and post some quick hits. Words cannot describe how much I hate that phrase, and I’ll tell you why in a minute.

The bottle rocket rep gets some early wins without ever really learning the business, the customers, or the dynamics of how the buyers actually make decisions. They go up fast and bright, and they tend to be short-term in both performance and attitude. If they succeed at posting quick numbers, those numbers seldom last, because they were built on activity and aggression rather than on any real foundation. And if they don’t succeed, they’re gone within the year. Either way, you’re back to hiring.

I tell my clients something that makes a lot of them uncomfortable: if you do it right, you probably won’t turn a profit on a new rep for the first twelve to eighteen months. The B2B industry stats back this up. But the companies that accept that reality make a lot of money on those reps over the long haul, because they’ve built something that lasts. The good companies get this. The ones that don’t get it usually stop being my clients, one way or another.

Why This Is Harder Now Than It Used to Be

Here’s the part that connects to something I’ve been writing about for a while, and it’s the reason this whole conversation is more urgent than it was ten years ago.

Selling used to come with a built-in dose of immediate gratification. When I started, you could pick up the phone and reliably set six to ten cold appointments a week. That meant a new rep — even one who didn’t fully understand the business yet — could generate visible activity fast. They could see progress. They could feel the wheels turning. The phone gave you a quick, repeatable hit of forward motion, and that immediate reward made the slower work of actually building relationships tolerable, because you had something to show while you did it.

That immediate gratification is fading. Not gone, but fading. The phone’s contact ratios have collapsed — where you once got a live conversation every three or four dials, you might now dial fifteen times to reach one human being. The phone as a stand-alone appointment-setting machine doesn’t deliver the quick hits it used to.

Let me be clear here, because I always am on this point: I am not telling you to abandon the phone. The phone still works. But it’s one instrument in the band now, not a solo act. It plays alongside LinkedIn, referrals, email, content, and everything else that goes into modern prospecting.

There is a real consequence to all of this, but it’s not one we can change. When the phone’s immediate gratification has been taken away and replaced with a slower, multi-channel approach that pays off over weeks and months instead of days, selling has been turned into a delayed-gratification profession. I didn’t do this. You didn’t do this. Your peers didn’t do this. Your customers did — because buyer preferences and habits have changed. That makes this a Waters issue in the Navigator’s Chart, and we can’t change the Waters. We can only build our Vessel to sail them.

The reward for doing the work right now shows up later — sometimes much later. The dopamine hit of six appointments booked on a Tuesday morning has been replaced by the slow accumulation of relationships, credibility, and trust that eventually produces a customer who calls you first.

Most People Are Wired for the Bottle Rocket

The trouble is that most people, and most companies, are wired for immediate gratification, not delayed. It’s human nature. We want the win now, not in eighteen months.

This is exactly why the bottle rocket rep is so seductive. They promise the immediate hit that our brains crave, and in a market where the phone no longer supplies that hit as reliably, the temptation to chase reps who seem to generate instant results gets even stronger. Companies feel the immediate gratification disappearing from the actual work, so they try to hire it back in the form of aggressive reps who promise quick numbers.

It doesn’t work, because you can’t shortcut a delayed-gratification game by hiring impatient people to play it. You just get the revolving door — the quick flameout, the soft quarters nobody can explain, and the constant wondering why nothing sticks.

Building a Vessel That Can Wait

We can’t change the Waters, but we can build a Vessel to sail them. If selling is becoming a delayed-gratification profession, then the companies that win are the ones built to absorb the wait. That’s a structural question, not a willpower question.

It means a compensation plan that doesn’t starve a good rep to death during the twelve to eighteen months before they’re profitable. It means performance reviews that measure the leading indicators of trust-building — the right activity, the right relationships, the right accounts being worked the right way — and not just this month’s closed business. It means hiring for patience, curiosity, and staying power rather than for the candidate who talks the best game about hitting the ground running. And it means leadership that has genuinely decided, on purpose, to accept the cost of building trust rather than letting short-term math win by default.

That last part is the whole thing. Most companies never actually decide. They don’t sit down and choose the bottle rocket over the long-term builder. They just have comp plans, review cycles, and quarterly pressure that all reward the quick hit, and the short-term math wins because nobody built the system to choose otherwise.

The Payoff for Patience

The companies that build a Vessel to absorb the cost of trust end up with reps nobody can poach, because those reps have relationships and credibility that don’t transfer and don’t evaporate. The companies that don’t end up with a revolving door and can’t figure out why nothing sticks.

The phone gave us a long run of immediate gratification, and it made a certain kind of impatient selling viable for decades. That era is closing — not because anyone in sales decided it should, but because our buyers changed the Waters underneath us. What replaces it rewards patience: the rep’s patience, and the company’s patience in building a system that lets good reps do the slow work that actually lasts.

The bottle rocket goes up fast and burns out fast. If that’s still the rep you’re chasing, it’s worth asking whether you’re chasing them because they’re what the business actually needs, or just because you miss the immediate gratification the phone used to provide.

That’s a much harder question. But in a delayed-gratification profession, it’s the only one that matters.

Want to learn more about how to hire and retain the Crew that can sail this Vessel through the Waters?  Make sure to attend my free webinar on August 20:  “It’s Not Your Comp Plan:  How to Hire, Develop, and Retain Salespeople Who Actually Perform.”  Register here!

Every salesperson has a favor bank with every customer and every prospect. You don’t see it, it never shows up on a report, it’s impossible to log in CRM, there aren’t any KPI’s around it, and nobody ever taught you it exists — but it’s real, and how you manage it largely determines whether you build a career or just churn through relationships.  Yes, I said “Build a career,” and not “build a territory or a book.”

Here’s the concept. Every time you deliver something of value to another person — a genuinely useful insight, an introduction, a solved problem, a heads-up that saved them money or embarrassment — you make a deposit. And every time you ask them for something — a meeting, a referral, an intro to their boss, a signature, thirty minutes of their time — you make a withdrawal. Like any account, the balance matters. You can only withdraw against what you’ve put in, and the people who overdraw find out the hard way that a bounced favor is expensive.

Most salespeople are running their accounts overdrawn and don’t even know it.

How Salespeople Overdraw Their Accounts

Watch how a typical salesperson operates and you’ll see withdrawals stacked on top of withdrawals with almost no deposits in between. The first interaction is a request for a meeting. The second is a request for information. The third is a pitch. The fourth is a request for a decision. Then, before the ink is even dry — or worse, before there’s any ink at all — comes the request for referrals and testimonials.  To be clear – I love asking for referrals and testimonials, but there’s a time, and most salespeople jump the gun.

Every one of those is a withdrawal, and the salesperson made them all before depositing anything the customer would actually value. They’re spending goodwill they never earned, and they’re surprised when the account comes up empty. The prospect stops returning calls, the referrals never materialize, the relationship goes cold, and the salesperson chalks it up to a bad lead instead of recognizing that they simply overdrew an account that had almost nothing in it to begin with.

The referral ask is the clearest example, because it’s where I see good salespeople overdraw fast. There is nothing wrong with asking for referrals — I’ve told you before that too few salespeople do it. But timing is everything. Asking for a referral is a significant withdrawal, because your customer is putting their own reputation on the line when they send you to someone they know. If you ask before you’ve made real deposits — before you’ve delivered enough value that they’re genuinely glad they bought from you — you’re asking them to spend their reputation to cover your empty account. Most people, sensibly, decline.  In fact, most of those people don’t verbally decline – they just don’t refer.

How You Make a Deposit

The trick is understanding what your customers and prospects actually value, because a deposit only counts if the other person considers it valuable — not if you do.

A lot of what salespeople think of as adding value doesn’t register at all. “Checking in” is not a deposit. “Just wanted to touch base” is not a deposit. Dropping off a branded coffee mug is not a deposit. Those things cost the customer time and attention without giving them anything back, which means some of them are actually small withdrawals disguised as goodwill.

Real deposits are things the other person genuinely benefits from. An insight about their business or their market they didn’t have. A relevant introduction to someone useful to them, with nothing in it for you. A warning about a problem coming down the road. A resource, an article, a piece of information that’s actually relevant to something they told you they’re dealing with. A solved problem — even one that has nothing to do with what you sell. The common thread is that a real deposit helps them, on their terms, whether or not it ever leads to a sale.

This is where genuine Investigation pays off twice. When you actually understand a customer’s situation — what they’re trying to accomplish, what’s in their way, what keeps them up at night — you know exactly what a valuable deposit would look like for that specific person. The salesperson who never investigated has no idea what the customer would value, so they fall back on coffee mugs and check-in calls and wonder why the account never grows.  Or worse, they do the “donut call:”  “Hey, I brought donuts, can I have this week’s order?”

Build the Balance Before You Need It

The salespeople who never seem to struggle for referrals, introductions, or return calls are the ones who’ve been making deposits consistently, long before they needed to withdraw anything. This is the same idea Harvey Mackay was getting at with “dig your well before you’re thirsty,” and it applies directly to the favor bank. By the time you’re thirsty — by the time you need the referral, the introduction, the decision — it’s too late to start making deposits. The balance is either there or it isn’t.

This reframes how you should think about the early stages of any relationship. Your job at the start isn’t to withdraw as efficiently as possible. It’s to build a balance large enough that the withdrawals, when they come, don’t overdraw the account. That means leading with deposits — genuinely useful, no-strings-attached value — and being patient enough to let the balance grow before you start drawing against it.

It also means being deliberate about your withdrawals. Every ask spends something. Before you make one, it’s worth asking yourself whether the account can cover it — whether you’ve deposited enough that this request feels reasonable to the other person rather than presumptuous. A small ask against a healthy balance is easy. A large ask against an empty one gets declined, and worse, it can overdraw the account into negative territory, where the person now actively avoids you.

The Long Game

The favor bank rewards patience and punishes desperation, which is exactly why so many salespeople get it wrong. The pressure to hit a number this month pushes people to withdraw early and often, and that short-term grab is precisely what empties the account and kills the long-term relationship.  Too many salespeople are just lousy about thinking long-term, which is why they are thinking about hitting the current month’s quota on the 20^th of the month, rather than the 20^th of the month two months before.

The salespeople who win over time understand that goodwill is an asset to be built and protected, not a resource to be strip-mined. They make deposits generously, they withdraw thoughtfully, and they never let the pressure of a quota push them into overdrawing an account they spent months building. They know that a customer with a healthy favor-bank balance is worth more than almost anything on their prospect list, because that’s the customer who takes their call, makes the introduction, gives the referral, and buys again.

Take an honest look at your own accounts this week. For your best customers and your most promising prospects, ask yourself a simple question: are you in the black or the red? Have you been depositing value, or have you been withdrawing against a balance you never built?

If the account’s overdrawn, the fix isn’t another withdrawal. It’s a deposit — something genuinely useful to them, with nothing in it for you. Start there, and give the balance time to grow before you ask for anything else.

Good relationship management makes the difference between a salesperson who’s always chasing and one who’s always being welcomed.

Don’t miss my next Webinar, on August 20:  It’s Not Your Comp Plan:  How to Hire, Develop, and Manage Salespeople That Perform!

LinkedIn Post of the Week:  Can You Sell A Second Application to Your Customers?  Join the Discussion Here!

There’s a school of sales thought that’s been around for as long as I’ve been in this business, and it goes something like this: to succeed in sales, you have to believe. Believe in your company. Believe in your product. Believe in yourself. Get your own conviction right, the thinking goes, and the sales will follow.

I read a piece recently from one of the old lions of the sales world making exactly this argument, complete with a self-test to measure your belief and a couple of moving stories about salespeople who found their conviction and watched their numbers take off. And I’ll be honest with you – it’s not entirely wrong. Belief matters. But the way these gurus tell you to get it, and what they think it does, is backwards. And that backwardness is costing salespeople real money.

The Problem With “Just Believe”

Here’s the first thing that jumped out at me. In the old-school version, a sale requires three beliefs, and every one of them is about the salesperson. Believe in your company, your product, yourself. Notice who’s completely missing from that list?

The customer.

This is the fundamental flaw in a whole generation of sales teaching. It treats the sale as a function of the salesperson’s internal state – as if you could psych yourself up in the mirror before your morning calls, walk in radiating conviction, and close on the strength of your own certainty.  That’s the “rah-rah” football coach approach. It’s the salesperson’s belief doing the work, not the customer’s need.

But sales isn’t something you do to the customer through the force of your own conviction. It’s something you do with the customer, by understanding their world well enough to help them make a good decision. The most believing salesperson in the world, convinced to his bones that he’s selling the greatest product on earth, will still lose if the buyer doesn’t need that product, or needs it configured differently, or resents the way he’s being sold. Belief doesn’t change any of that. Investigation does.

Where Belief Actually Comes From

The stories these old-school pieces tell usually give the game away, if you read them closely. One of them described a salesperson who’d been doing okay but not great, until a customer thanked him for a birthday card and told him it was the only one she’d received. Something shifted for him after that, and within six months his sales had doubled. The author’s explanation? “For some unknown reason.”

Unknown reason. That phrase is the whole problem.

There’s nothing unknown about it. That salesperson saw, with his own eyes, that something he did had a real impact on a real person. He didn’t manufacture belief by staring into a mirror and repeating affirmations. He earned it by witnessing evidence – proof that his work mattered to the people he served. And once he had that evidence, his behavior changed, his customers felt the difference, and the results followed.

That’s the pattern in every one of these conversion stories, if you look. The insurance agent who finally believed in his product believed because he watched a policy he’d sold pay off a widow’s mortgage and put her kids through college. That’s not belief pulled from thin air; it’s belief built on evidence.

And that’s the thing the gurus have exactly reversed. They tell you belief comes first and produces results. In reality, doing the work right comes first, the evidence follows, and the belief is a byproduct. You don’t believe your way into good selling. You sell the right way, you watch it work, and belief is what you’re left holding.

Why This Distinction Matters

This isn’t just a philosophical quibble. The direction of causation changes everything about what you actually do on Monday morning.

If you think belief comes first, you spend your energy on your own psychology – pep talks, affirmations, motivational videos, working yourself into a state of conviction before you dial. And when the sales don’t come, the only conclusion available to you is that you didn’t believe hard enough. So you double down on the psychology, which does nothing, because the problem was never your belief.

If you understand that evidence comes first, you spend your energy on the customer instead. You investigate. You ask better questions. You define success in the customer’s terms and then actually deliver it. And when you watch your solution do something real for someone – solve the problem, save the money, remove the headache – the belief takes care of itself. You don’t have to work at it. It’s simply the natural response to seeing your work matter.

One of these paths is a hamster wheel. The other compounds.

The Danger of Belief Without Evidence

There’s a darker side to “just believe” that the motivational crowd never mentions. Belief that isn’t grounded in evidence doesn’t just fail to help – it can actively hurt.

A salesperson with total, unshakeable belief in his product, untethered from any real understanding of the customer, becomes the guy who’s convinced he knows what’s best for you. He’s not investigating, because he already knows the answer. He’s not listening, because he’s too busy being certain. His belief has curdled into the exact opposite of curiosity, and curiosity is the single most important skill a salesperson has.

That’s the salesperson who tells you what you need before he’s asked you a single real question about your situation. We’ve all been on the receiving end of him, and none of us bought from him twice. His conviction, the very thing the gurus told him to cultivate, is what makes him unbearable to deal with.

Real belief – the kind built on evidence – has humility baked into it, because it was earned by paying attention to customers rather than by ignoring them. It makes you a better listener, not a worse one, because you learned it by listening in the first place.

What to Do Instead

So if you’re not going to psych yourself up in the mirror, what do you actually do?

Do the work that generates evidence. Investigate your customers thoroughly enough to understand what success genuinely looks like for them. Sell in a way you’d be comfortable explaining to their face and yours – no manipulation, no pressure, nothing you’d have to hide. Then pay attention to what happens. Watch your solution work. Collect the evidence.

Follow up with the customers you’ve sold, not to squeeze them for the next order, but to see how it actually turned out. That feedback loop is where belief comes from, and it’s also where you get better, because you learn what worked and what didn’t from the only people whose opinion counts.

And when you have a genuine win – when a customer tells you that what you sold them made a real difference – don’t file it away and forget it. That’s your evidence. That’s the raw material of the only kind of belief that’s worth anything, the kind you didn’t have to manufacture because you earned it.

The old lions aren’t entirely wrong that belief matters. They’re just wrong about where it comes from and what it does. Belief doesn’t close sales. The work closes sales, and belief is what you’re left with after you’ve watched the work pay off – for the customer first, and then for you.

Get the order right, and everything else follows.