— Features content from Carson Heady, a sales expert offering insights and strategies for B2B sales and sales management. —
During a struggling month at a call center managing 800 campaigns annually, Heady abandoned a pattern of public criticism and instead opened a morning standup with music, applause, and recognition of individual contributors doing well — without even deploying the team's most lucrative leads. The res
The pace of change in customer engagement has accelerated to the point where sales approaches that worked five weeks ago — not five years ago — may already be obsolete. Buyers now arrive at conversations having researched products deeply enough to understand how they fit their own business better th
The single greatest structural risk in a startup is a founder who cannot push back on investors. When unrealistic expectations get set at the board level, the distortion travels down through every layer of the organization — pulling teams in conflicting directions and eroding the trust that early-st
Running employee surveys without any intention of acting on the results is not a neutral exercise — it is corrosive. Heady argues that feedback mechanisms only earn their value when leaders close the loop, describing how he structured designated team spokespeople empowered to deliver unfiltered asse
The sales book most worth reading right now, according to Carson Heady, is 'The JOLT Effect' by Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna — and its central argument upends a long-standing assumption. Customers don't stall on decisions because they fear missing an opportunity; they stall because they fear making a