Three-Component Account Progression Framework Offers ABM Teams a Baseline for Measuring Pipeline ImpactThe framework breaks ABM measurement into three layers: a static account progression table, a real-time event layer that tracks engagement as it happens, and an impact-and-velocity reporting component. Accounts are indexed into stages — starting at 'unaware,' defined as zero enga

Retroactive Data Analysis Turns Account Progression History into an ABM Forecasting EngineBy mapping historical marketing and sales data backward into the progression framework, teams can calculate precise baseline velocities — for example, that it takes 55 days on average to move an account from unaware to aware, or 38 days from aware to engaged — and identify which

SDR Rejection Reasons in Salesforce Revealed Thousands of Flawed MQLs at Google CloudSQL quality scoring, as practiced on the Google Cloud demand generation team, combined standard marketing criteria — ICP fit, job title, behavioral engagement score — with a largely overlooked signal: the disqualification reason subfield that SDRs were required to complete in Sal

Account-Level ABM Funnel Requires Different Metrics at Every Stage, from Impressions to Hand-RaisersTracking ABM performance at the account level demands a tiered metrics architecture rather than a single lead score. Ad impressions, clicks, and website visits — with homepage visits weighted differently from pricing or demo page visits — define the 'aware' and early 'engaged' st

Eight Months of People Alignment at Google Cloud Preceded Any ABM Process, Speaker ArguesAchieving sales-marketing alignment at an enterprise level took eight months and rested on three conditions: the marketing leader holding genuine autonomy over the full demand generation function including budget, channels, and web assets; a mirrored counterpart on the sales side

A $25-a-Month Claude Subscription Can Replace a Custom ABM Reporting Dashboard, Practitioner SaysThe recommended tech stack for implementing the account progression framework runs four layers: Clay — or alternatives such as Common Room or ZoomInfo — for building and enriching the target account list; Google, Meta, LinkedIn, and specialist tools like Primer for executing and

Thought Leadership Requires Four Pillars Working Together, Not Just a Big FollowingAshley Faus argues that thought leadership rests on four interdependent pillars: credibility (whether people trust your claims without needing external citations), profile (reach and the prestige of the outlets you appear in), prolificacy (how frequently you publish and speak), a

Ghostwriters and AI Are Fine for Thought Leaders — As Long As the Thinking Is YoursFaus draws a sharp line between outsourcing writing and outsourcing thinking. Using a ghostwriter or generative AI to repurpose, format, or distribute ideas is legitimate, she argues — but only if the person has first done the hard intellectual work: wrestling with problems, deve

Content That Genuinely Changes Expert Minds Is Rare, Even on Curated FeedsFaus estimates that even within a carefully curated LinkedIn feed, content that causes a genuine expert to question foundational assumptions appears only rarely. She distinguishes between tactical posts — useful execution tips that help practitioners do their jobs better — and th

Leaving 'Well Said' Comments on LinkedIn Does Not Make You a Thought LeaderFaus is direct: commenting regularly, curating other people's content, or posting agreeable reactions adds no original thinking to a professional platform and therefore does not constitute thought leadership. She singles out AI-automated comments as making this problem worse by f

The Pressure to Post at Volume Erodes the Depth That Makes Thought Leadership MatterFaus admits she spent close to a decade developing the framework she is now known for and is genuinely uncertain whether she has another one of that calibre inside her. Research she attributes to Dan Sanchez suggests that as creator audiences scale, content tends to broaden and s

Contrarianism Is Not Thought Leadership — But Genuine New Ideas Often Look ContrarianFaus separates the tactic of taking opposing positions for attention from the reality that truly new ideas tend to unsettle existing consensus — and therefore feel contrarian as a byproduct, not a goal. Simply saying the opposite of prevailing wisdom, she argues, produces nothing

Sales Teams Are Drowning in Meetings That Never CloseAdem Manderovic argues that measuring sales reps on meetings booked — rather than contracts signed — is the root cause of bloated, ineffective pipelines. He points to a personal test in the financial sector where he replaced cold-call scripts with a short animated video sent ahea

Sales Consultant Mike Weinberg Calls Out the 'Compliant Seller' Trap Draining Tech PipelinesThe biggest lie in modern sales, according to Mike Weinberg, is that obedience to the customer earns the deal. A generation of salespeople who launched their careers just before or during the COVID-era tech boom — when inbound demand was so strong that order-taking passed for sel

Mike Weinberg: Pitching Before Discovery Is 'Sales Malpractice'Weinberg uses a deliberately uncomfortable medical analogy to expose one of selling's most common failures: walking into a first meeting with a demo queued up and slides loaded before learning anything about the customer's actual situation. The doctor who prescribes a drug withou

Salespeople Are Born and Made — But the COVID Boom Hid a Generation's GapsWeinberg offers a striking real-world example to argue that sales talent is both innate and teachable: a salesperson who attended one of his five-hour workshops absorbed three or four simple principles — asserting herself more, reclaiming control of her calendar, and cutting back

A Needle in a Training Room: The Analogy That Makes Salespeople Feel Their Own MalpracticeTo open discovery training sessions, the host arrives having purchased a syringe and a vial of saline from the pharmacy. He fills the needle in front of the room, holds it up, and asks for a volunteer. The room freezes. He then asks participants to imagine walking into a doctor's

Automation Has Flooded Email and LinkedIn — Leaving the Phone Unexpectedly OpenWeinberg makes a precise and counterintuitive observation about the current prospecting landscape: he receives hundreds of electronic messages each month through his public email address and LinkedIn inbox, the overwhelming majority of them automated pitches or spam. The number o

Weinberg's Most Unpopular Sales Opinion: Being Respected Matters More Than Being LikedAsked for his most contested view, Weinberg lands on something that runs directly against the foundational sales cliché that people buy from people they like. High-performing salespeople, he argues, are often difficult to be around — demanding inside their organisations, critical

A Single Glance Changed Everything: What Theater Taught Ashley Faus About AuthenticityWhile performing in a musical theater production, Ashley Faus discovered that looking up to make eye contact with a fellow actor — rather than sitting with her head in her hands — produced a visceral emotional reaction that the scripted words alone never could. Her castmate confe

AI Flagged a Fortune 500 CEO's Own Words as 'Demeaning' — and That Failure Reveals a Deeper ProblemWhen Bill Sherman fed an AI tool a direct quote from a retired Fortune 500 CEO as part of a manuscript review, the system flagged the language as demeaning — apparently unable to reconcile the executive's actual voice with its trained model of how a senior leader should communica

Author Wrote Entire Book on Human Trust Without AI — and Says the Choice Was the PointAshley Faus spent years delaying her book on human-centered marketing because she refused to let any ghostwriter — human or artificial — put words to her ideas. She drew a sharp distinction between a ghost writer, which she considers acceptable, and a ghost thinker, which she doe

A Palm Springs Trip Planned Three Ways Shows Why Human Recommendations Still Beat AIPlanning an anniversary trip to Palm Springs, Ashley Faus ran the same question through Google, ChatGPT, and a trusted colleague who had just married there. Google returned an overwhelming flood of listicles; ChatGPT produced what she described as a repackaged summary of the same

Stanford Research Explains Why Video Calls Are Exhausting — and Why That Matters for TrustResearch from the Stanford Human Computer Interaction Institute identified three mechanisms behind Zoom fatigue: video proximity forces eyes to focus at an unnaturally close range; a slight processing delay causes the brain to work harder than it consciously registers; and partia

Atlassian Marketer Exposes the Hidden Cost of Forcing Buyers Through Linear Sales FunnelsWhen Ashley Faus at Atlassian was tasked with buying new software, she skipped straight to pricing — a move that confused sales representatives who had no script for a buyer who had already decided to purchase. Sales reps pushed her back to awareness-stage demos and problem-frami

Vienna's Anti-Instagram Travel Campaign Measured Success in Visa Requests, Not LikesThe City of Vienna ran a campaign that explicitly asked visitors not to post their trip on social media — and deliberately targeted tech workers in Silicon Valley with the message to simply show up and be present. A curated microsite offered itineraries, and a physical visitor ce

As Institutional Trust Collapses, Personal Branding Emerges as Content Marketing's Last DifferentiatorCiting the Edelman Trust Barometer, a longitudinal annual study, Faus argued that declining public trust in governments, traditional press, and religious institutions is redirecting credibility toward individuals — specifically peers, community members, and business leaders peopl

Chewy's Baby Onesie and Atlassian's Labor Puns Show How Brands Win by Celebrating Customers, Not ProductsWhen a Chewy customer called to cancel a pet food subscription after having a baby, a support agent sent a congratulatory onesie and a book — triggering a LinkedIn post that spread far beyond any ad campaign. Atlassian went further: when a software developer publicly live-tweeted

Atlassian Turned an Agile Community Argument About Decimal Points Into a Multi-Platform Content StrategyA product feature debate inside the Agile software community — specifically whether estimation tools should allow decimal-point values — gave Atlassian an opening to demonstrate what its content team calls the omni-channel playground. The company hosted a full hour-long YouTube r

Sales Trainer Mike Weinberg Shows Why Leading With Your Company's Story Kills DealsThe most common mistake salespeople make, according to Mike Weinberg, is opening a pitch by talking about themselves — their company's size, history, or brand pride. Using a Mack Trucks dealership as a live example, Weinberg built a 30-second power statement that never mentions t

A Disastrous 20-Minute Presentation Gave Mike Weinberg His Most Useful Sales FilterMike Weinberg traces his "so what" test to one of the worst meetings of his career, when a channel partner opened a pitch to the president of a billion-dollar division by spending 20 minutes showing slides of office buildings, client logos, and proprietary process flowcharts. The

Sales Coach Argues the Phone Is Now More Effective Than It Has Been in a Decade — Because No One Uses ItIn a market flooded with automated email sequences and templated LinkedIn messages, Mike Weinberg makes a counterintuitive case: the telephone is performing better than at any point in the last ten years precisely because so few salespeople use it well. He offered specific cold-c

The 'Bridge Line' Technique That Flips the Opening of Any Sales PitchMike Weinberg argues that the single most important skill in sales is not closing or objection handling but the ability to tell a compelling story about what you do — and the critical variable is where that story begins. His "bridge line" is a sentence structure that pivots any s

Weinberg Reframes Cold Calling: You Are Not Interrupting, You Are RescuingThe anxiety most salespeople feel before a cold call, Mike Weinberg argues, is rooted in a false premise — that they are imposing on someone. His reframe, instilled by his father when he entered sales, is that a well-targeted prospect is likely stuck with the wrong provider, unaw

Selling to Senior Executives Is Easier Than Selling to Middle Management, Weinberg Says — Here's WhyThe instinct to avoid senior executives and stick with familiar mid-level contacts is one of the most costly habits in sales, according to Mike Weinberg. The conventional fear is that C-suite and ownership-level buyers are more intimidating and more demanding. Weinberg inverts th

Marketing's Sacred Funnel Is a Measurement Tool Misused as a Strategy, Atlassian Marketer ArguesAshley Faus, a marketing leader at Atlassian, argues that the traditional sales funnel is only useful in hindsight — it describes what happened after deals close, not how buyers actually behave. She illustrates the point with a personal story: when she approached vendors to get r

Atlassian's Ashley Faus Proposes a Five-Intent Framework to Replace Revenue-Only Content ThinkingRather than treating all content as a vehicle for pipeline, Faus breaks it into five categories defined by what the audience intends to do next: buy, trust, use, get help, or learn. Each calls for a different success measure — buy-intent content should prompt a demo booking; trus

Brands Have Trained Audiences to Distrust Them, Making Employee Voices the More Credible ChannelYears of pressure to tie every asset to revenue has made brand content feel reflexively promotional, Faus argues — so much so that audiences now assume anything published under a company logo is a sales pitch, regardless of its actual content. Individuals who work at those compan

Faus's 'Content Playground' Framework Lets Buyers Navigate Depth and Intent on Their Own TermsUsing fitness publishing as an analogy, Faus demonstrates how the same topic — building muscle — can be addressed at a conceptual level (why protein matters), a strategic level (fast- versus slow-digesting protein sources), or a tactical level (five chicken recipes to hit your ma

B2B Marketers Should Stop Chasing Viral Reach and Focus on the Right Ten ViewsThe wave of TikTok-style creator content entering B2B marketing imports the wrong success metric along with the format, Faus argues. A video with a million views earns ad revenue; a video shown in a single enterprise sales call can influence a several-hundred-thousand-dollar deal

Security Penetration Tester's Tricks Become a Marketing Lesson in Cross-Domain ThinkingAshley Faus draws her sharpest marketing insights not from marketing itself but from fields like theater, physical security testing, and baking. She describes following a penetration tester named Jack Hyde, who exploits social programming — notably, that virtually everyone will h

Why a French Cooking Technique Explains What Most Content Strategy Gets WrongThe reason a 47-step content strategy checklist fails, according to Ashley Faus, is the same reason people panic mid-recipe when they realize they're missing an ingredient: the advice skips the emotional texture of the experience. Faus uses mise en place — the chef's discipline o

A College Textbook Assigned in a Product Development Class Still Shapes How This Marketer Solves ProblemsFrans Johansson's book The Medici Effect, assigned to Faus during a new product development course in college, introduced her to the idea that the most original solutions emerge at the intersection of unrelated fields. The example that stuck: architects in a desert climate, unabl

A Weighted Decision Matrix for Career Satisfaction — and a Warning About Moving the GoalpostsFaus evaluates her own career contentment through what she calls a career satisfaction matrix: five weighted categories — title, actual work deliverables, compensation, work-life integration, and professional growth — each scored and multiplied to produce a single number. The exe

Auditions Are Scarier Than Performances — and the Reason Applies Far Beyond the StageThe most anxiety-inducing moment for Faus as a performer isn't standing in front of a large audience — it's the audition, because that is the only context where the room is explicitly there to judge whether she is good enough. Once she is actually performing, she notes, the dynam

How a Luxury Real Estate Agent's Lifestyle Became His Most Effective Sales ToolFaus illustrates how personal identity can become business strategy through the example of a luxury real estate agent in her network who has built his entire practice around inhabiting the same social world as his clients. By attending charity golf tournaments and art galas, wear

Asking Prospects for Quotes Unlocks Insider Intelligence That No Website Can ProvideReaching out to target buyers to ask for their opinions on a relevant industry topic — rather than to pitch a product — starts genuine two-way conversations and surfaces information that sits behind a company's firewall. In one example, a technology vendor selling to banks used c

ABM Teams Need Agreed, Measurable Criteria to Declare an Account 'Engaged' — Not Gut FeelingMoving an account from the awareness stage to the product-validation stage requires a written engagement threshold that every member of the team — marketing and sales alike — can apply without ambiguity. One real client example sets the bar at two or more visits to non-SEO blog p

Sales Consultant Mike Weinberg: Salespeople Spend Shockingly Little Time Actually SellingAsked what he would do first as a new sales manager walking into a stalled team, Mike Weinberg offers two moves. He would sit down one-on-one with every salesperson and ask them to bring a written business plan alongside a focused, strategic list of target accounts — because, as

Rushing to the Demo Is Killing Tech Sales Deals, Weinberg ArguesA culture of speed in technology sales is quietly undermining the deals it is meant to accelerate. Mike Weinberg describes a pattern he is seeing across multiple clients: salespeople skip the discovery phase entirely and race straight to a product demonstration, often because inb

The Challenger Sale Model Valid but Not Scalable for Most Sales Teams, Weinberg and Paul ArgueThe The Challenger Sale — the widely cited sales framework built on the idea that top performers win by reframing how customers think about their own problems — works, but only for a narrow group of salespeople who already possess the depth of experience and intellect to pull it

How a 27-Page Bid Contract Became a Cartoon — and Won 8 in 10 DealsAs head of sales in banking and insurance, Adem Manderovic noticed that lengthy bid contracts were almost always rejected — because, as he concluded, nobody actually read them. He stripped a 27-page proposal down to two pages of sales copy, then further into an educational cartoo

Disruptor.co's 'Commercial Access Gates' Strategy Targets Buyers in BulkRather than pursuing one company at a time, Manderovic's team overlays B2B firmographic data — financials, department growth, past employer affiliations, DISC personality profiles — with B2C data to locate physical or digital spaces where dozens of ideal buyers already gather. He

Sales Guru Aaron Ross Blames 'Anxiety Economy' for Short-Term ThinkingRoss argues that stress physically compresses strategic thinking, pushing sales teams toward quick-fix metrics — more calls, more meetings — while abandoning the slower, relationship-driven work that actually builds durable revenue. He traces the problem back to how his own Predi

Ross: AI Will Force Sales Teams to Develop Creativity Over ProcessRoss illustrated the activity-trap problem with two handmade cards: one labelled 'Artificial Impatience' mocking companies that adopt AI just to appear modern, another called 'Flat Out Busy' depicting workers pushing a car with flat tires while an executive screams to go faster.

Aaron Ross Outlines New Sales Book Built Around Team Anxiety and Mental NoiseRoss describes a forthcoming sales book structured around three layers: execution at the top, team friction in the middle, and mental noise at the base. He argues that most struggling companies obsess over the first layer while ignoring the bottom two — and that anxiety cascades

Sales Teams Should 'Catalog the Market' Before Pitching, Framework ArguesRather than opening a sales call by pushing for a meeting, Manderovic advocates a prior step he calls cataloging: structured one-on-one conversations designed to learn who a prospect currently uses, what they like and dislike about that provider, and when their contract expires.

'Predictable Revenue' Book Severed Sales from Market Intelligence, Practitioners ArgueAaron Ross's 2011 book "Predictable Revenue" reshaped B2B sales by reducing success metrics to meeting bookings — a change that, according to Adam Manderovic, quietly dismantled the feedback loop that had previously connected sales teams to real buyer intent. Before that shift, b

CRM-Stored Catalog Data and 'Live Quoting Days' Aim to Fix Pipeline CollapseCatalog intelligence only has lasting value if it is stored in a standardised way inside a CRM — not in a salesperson's personal notes — so that when that person leaves, the organisation retains the data. Manderovic describes the next step as a live quoting day: a structured pres

Sales Teams Are Knowingly Closing Unserviceable Deals, Practitioners WarnBecause salespeople are compensated on closed deals rather than successful customer outcomes, Manderovic argues many are consciously pushing through contracts they know cannot be delivered — skipping the handover process that would expose those gaps. A salesperson who knows two o

Cataloging Helped Close a Two-Year Stalled Deal in One Month, Practitioner ReportsA participant in Manderovic's CRO school program closed an account he had been pursuing unsuccessfully for two years — within a single month of adopting the cataloging approach. Selling Marketo services to marketers, a notoriously skeptical buyer group, he ran four cataloging ses

Meeting Incentives Drive Low-Quality Pipeline, Sales Practitioners SayWhen salespeople are paid per meeting booked — regardless of buyer intent — they will do whatever it takes to secure that meeting, even if the prospect has no genuine interest in buying. Manderovic argues this incentive structure offloaded the job of identifying in-market buyers

To Win CFO Trust, Marketers Must Abandon 'Success Theater' and Commit to Pipeline ROI ThresholdsThe fastest way for a marketing leader to gain credibility with finance is to openly identify what isn't working — and set explicit financial targets before spending begins. Rather than reporting favorable metrics after the fact, the approach is to tell the CFO upfront: a $100,00

Data Already in Your CRM Can Reveal Which Customer Segments Drive 3x Lifetime ValueReframing attribution as a tool for predicting future outcomes rather than assigning past credit unlocks a more useful question: which customers are worth acquiring, and at what cost? A small-business CRM company discovered through its own data that home services contractors — ro

CRM Campaign Hierarchy, Not Expensive Attribution Software, Can Reveal Which Programs Accelerate DealsA simple regression on campaign data already sitting in Salesforce can answer the most important attribution question: which programs appear on deals that close, and which ones accelerate movement between pipeline stages? By structuring campaign hierarchy — events at the top, the

Segmenting Target Accounts From General Traffic Is the Fix for Misleading Engagement MetricsClick rates, open rates, and website conversion figures can mask a serious problem: high engagement from audiences that will never buy. The fix is to separate target-account traffic from general traffic at the reporting level, including chatbot interactions enriched with CRM data

Executive Jenna Kilner Details Her System for Prioritizing Energy as a Mother of ThreeJenna Kilner, a VP of Marketing and mother of three, has developed a personal system for managing her energy that involves ruthless prioritization. She focuses on identifying the most critical tasks and allowing less important ones to "slip," a shift that became essential after h

Jenna Kilner Advocates for Developing Thinking and Adaptability in Career GrowthJenna Kilner argues that sustained career growth hinges on an individual's ability to think and adapt, rather than simply accumulating specific knowledge. She emphasizes that "knowledge expires faster than judgment," pointing to the rapid evolution of fields like marketing where

Jenna Kilner Argues Leaders Must Stay Close to Work Details for Credibility and EmpathyJenna Kilner asserts that effective leaders must remain deeply connected to the operational details of their work to maintain credibility and offer valid opinions, carefully distinguishing this approach from micromanagement. She believes this engagement is crucial for coaching wi

Jenna Kilner Reflects on Early Career Rush, Urges Slower Approach to Professional GrowthReflecting on her 15-year career, Jenna Kilner identifies a past belief she held strongly: being in a constant rush to achieve professional milestones. She expresses a wish that early mentors had encouraged her to slow down and more fully appreciate the journey of career developm

Jenna Kilner Emphasizes Humility as Crucial Leadership Trait Amidst Constant ChangeJenna Kilner asserts that humility is a critical leadership trait, especially in rapidly changing environments. She argues that while courage is necessary for leaders to act and make decisions, it must be tempered with the humility to acknowledge potential flaws, the limits of on

Jenna Kilner: Build Confidence by Embracing Imperfect Knowledge and Trial-and-ErrorJenna Kilner advises that building confidence, both for leaders and team members, involves breaking down complex challenges and letting go of the need for complete knowledge before taking action. She emphasizes that one can never know everything before "jumping in," and a key asp

Sales Career Ladders Once Required Two Years in Customer Success FirstAdam Manderevich built his entire commercial philosophy from a career path that no longer exists: before anyone could work in business development, they spent at least two years in customer success, learning credit approvals, legal sign-offs, settlement processes, and account man

The Case Against Booking Meetings: Why 'Cataloging' Beats Cold OutreachUsing a role-play scenario — a PipeDrive rep calling a company that just signed with HubSpot — Manderevich demonstrates why chasing the meeting is the wrong instinct. The buyer who just committed budget to a competitor isn't lost; they're a future opportunity. By asking what they

How One Sales Book Wiped Out a Generation of Commercial ExpertiseThe argument is blunt: Aaron Ross's book Predictable Revenue didn't just change how sales teams operate — it erased an entire category of commercial knowledge. Once HubSpot and Salesforce built meeting-to-conversion metrics into their platforms, that measurement became the behavi

Australia's Small Market Forced a Precision Sales Approach the US Is Only Now DiscoveringAustralia's entire population is roughly the size of Texas — around 25 million people — which means a single aggressive outbound campaign can exhaust a company's total addressable market in weeks. That constraint, Manderevich argues, is why Australian sales practitioners were nev

Quantifying Fake Traffic: Businesses Can Measure Revenue Loss from BotsTo demonstrate the financial impact of fake traffic to C-suite executives, businesses can quantify wasted ad spend and projected revenue loss. With an estimated 20% to 40% of internet traffic being fake, a significant portion of advertising budgets is spent on clicks from non-hum

Businesses Must Embrace 'Good Bots' as AI Customers EmergeMarketing and sales operations teams require a fundamental mental shift to recognize that not all bots are detrimental to business. The rise of "machine customers" and legitimate AI agents conducting research and even making purchases means a blanket blocking approach to automate

Marketing Leader Shares Philosophy for Work-Life Balance and DetachmentA marketing leader shares his personal system for maintaining work-life balance and alignment with his core values, emphasizing a detached mindset towards professional outcomes. Rather than viewing work and life as separate, often conflicting, spheres, he advocates for giving one

AI-Powered Automation Drives Sharp Increase in Fake Internet TrafficThe sharp escalation of fake internet traffic is primarily attributed to AI-powered automation, which significantly lowers the barrier to creating sophisticated bots. Financial incentives for malicious actors also play a role, but the ease with which AI can generate bot scripts m

Fake Traffic Erodes Marketer Trust in Data, Demands Critical ThinkingThe persistent presence of fake traffic on the internet is significantly eroding marketers' and analysts' trust in their own data, leading to a psychological impact that undermines confidence in reporting and budget decisions. Presenting data with transparency is crucial, requiri

Conspiracy Theory or Reality? The Rise of Bot-Generated Internet ContentThe "dead internet theory," a pessimistic idea positing that most online content is generated by bots rather than humans and secretly manipulated by governments and corporations, is gaining increasing relevance. While the conspiratorial elements remain unproven, the undeniable su

Musk Puts 50-50 Odds on Starship Heat Shield Surviving Next Test FlightElon Musk has laid out three concrete objectives for Starship's fourth test flight: the heat shield must survive peak reentry heating, the booster must execute a controlled return and simulate a tower catch without actually being caught, and the ship must perform a precise powere

SpaceX Discloses Unsolved Heat Shield Problems Ahead of Starship Flight FourElon Musk offered an unusually detailed account of the engineering problems still plaguing Starship's heat shield, identifying at least four distinct challenges with no guaranteed solutions. The tile gap problem is particularly delicate: ceramic tiles must be spaced to accommodat

Ice Blockages in Valves Caused Starship Flight Three Roll Thruster Failures, Musk SaysMusk identified the root cause of the roll thruster failures that destabilized Starship during its third test flight: ice forming inside valves from moisture present in the oxidizer-rich gas tapped off the Raptor engine's preburner. Because SpaceX uses that hot preburner exhaust

Musk Projects Starship Will Lift Over 200 Tons to Orbit with Full ReusabilitySpaceX's new permanent manufacturing facility at its Texas launch site is designed to produce up to 100 Starship vehicles per year, with Musk describing the longer-term global production target as potentially reaching 1,000 ships annually. On payload capacity, Musk projected that

Next-Generation Raptor Engine Eliminates External Flanges with Integrated CoolingThe next iteration of SpaceX's Raptor engine will look strikingly bare compared to current versions, which are covered in external insulation and dozens of bolted flanges. Musk explained that the redesign routes cooling fluid through internal circuits built into every component,

Starship Receives Thousands of Hardware and Software Changes Between Each FlightMusk revealed that Starship undergoes thousands of individual hardware and software modifications between test flights, describing the number as reaching into the thousands when examined at the component level — even though many changes are minor in isolation. He also disclosed t

A 30-Second Shirt Pitch Reveals the Secret Architecture of Effective SellingA salesman at a Hammer shirts store in downtown Chicago opened with a single, disarming line: these shirts are not for everyone — they are for people who take care of themselves. Jeff Shore, a sales trainer recounting the experience, was sold before the man finished his opening.

Sales Trainer Mike Weinberg: Lead With Customer Problems, Not Your ProductThe most common mistake in sales, according to Mike Weinberg, is also the most instinctive one: opening with the product. The moment a salesperson leads with what they sell, buyers raise their defenses, the conversation collapses into a commodity comparison, and any chance of jus

Every Salesperson Inherits the Sins of Every Bad Salesperson Who Came BeforeWeinberg puts a precise name on something buyers rarely articulate and sellers rarely acknowledge: accumulated baggage. Every customer who has ever been lied to, manipulated, or had their time wasted by a salesperson carries that residue into the next sales conversation — and the

Sales Expert Weinberg Recalls Being Poorly Sold to at an Audi DealershipWeinberg, who coaches salespeople for a living, describes walking into an Audi dealership for a family sedan and sitting through seven uninterrupted minutes of a salesman demonstrating technology he had no interest in. The story lands hard precisely because of who is telling it:

Weinberg Redefines 'Story' in Sales: Not Narrative Art, But a Precision Set of Talking PointsWeinberg draws a distinction that most salespeople miss: the word 'story' in a sales context does not mean a crafted narrative with a beginning and end. It means the specific collection of talking points a salesperson uses to describe what they do and who they help — and that col

Weinberg: Sales Complexity Is Often a Smokescreen for Poor ResultsWeinberg's mission to simplify sales rests on a pointed observation: the salespeople most likely to insist that selling is complicated are the ones who are struggling the most. Complexity, he argues, functions as a smokescreen — if no one can understand what you're doing, no one

Sales Consultant Mike Weinberg: Managers Who Lead by Email Are Leading Nobody AnywhereThree activities should consume the majority of a sales manager's working week, according to Mike Weinberg: one-on-one meetings with individual salespeople — split between pipeline accountability and coaching — field work spent alongside reps on actual sales calls, and structured

The Traits That Make a Great Salesperson Often Make a Terrible Manager, Weinberg ArguesThe skills that drive elite salespeople — selfishness with time, intense self-focus, ego, competitive hunger — are almost the precise opposite of what makes a good sales manager, according to Mike Weinberg, who lived the transition himself. A top producer thrives by protecting th

Flat Commission Structures Reward Mediocrity and Punish Top Performers, Weinberg SaysCompensation plans that pay nearly the same commission to a star performer and a struggling one are, in Mike Weinberg's view, achieving the opposite of their intent. Top producers should be so well compensated that leaving never crosses their minds; underperformers should feel fi

Only 10 to 15 Percent of Salespeople Are Genuinely Elite, Weinberg Estimates — and a Boom Economy Hid That for YearsA long economic expansion masked the real distribution of sales talent, according to Mike Weinberg. Many salespeople who appeared to thrive through the 1990s and 2000s were simply relational or technically competent people carried along by hot industries, compelling products, or

Hire the Sales Athlete Over the Industry Expert, Weinberg's Consultant Advises — Because Passion Cannot Be TaughtWhen a hiring decision came down to an industry expert versus a natural-born sales hunter, a recruiter Weinberg trusts gave unambiguous advice: take the athlete every time. Industry knowledge can be learned; the drive to sell cannot. Weinberg endorses the view, arguing that genui

LATAM Boeing 777 Dragged Its Tail for 723 Metres Before a Jump-Seat Pilot's Shout Forced It AirborneCleared for takeoff at Milan Malpensa at 13:25, Flight 80073 began its roll with engines throttled back to 92.8 percent of maximum thrust — the limit imposed by the crew's incorrectly calculated assumed temperature of 56 degrees Celsius. The aircraft accelerated slowly down one o

A Spoken Number Sent a Loaded Boeing 777 Down the Runway 100 Tonnes UnderweightWhen a training captain mentally subtracted taxi fuel from the aircraft's gross weight during a hurried pre-departure calculation at Milan Malpensa, he dropped a digit and announced a takeoff weight of 228.8 tonnes to his colleague. The actual weight was 328 tonnes. Instead of ca

A Boeing 777's Own Computer Warned the Crew Not to Take Off — They Did Not Know What the Warning MeantWhen the crew of LATAM Flight 80073 entered their calculated V-speeds into the flight management computer, the system refused to display its own reference speeds and instead returned a cryptic message: "VETS UNAVAILABLE." The reason was that the aircraft's computer, which knew th

Wrong Takeoff Weight Errors Are a Recurring Pattern in Commercial Aviation, Investigators WarnTaking off with thrust set for a significantly lighter aircraft creates two compounding dangers: the plane may not reach flying speed before the runway ends, and if the pilot rotates at the artificially low calculated speed, the wings cannot yet generate enough lift to climb. The

EASA Mandates Takeoff Performance Monitors on New Jets, But Most Existing Aircraft Won't Require Retrofit Until 2033Italy's national aviation safety agency, ANSV, concluded that procedural ambiguity in LATAM's pre-flight workflow contributed to the incident — specifically, the absence of an explicit prohibition on verbalizing performance data during independent calculations, and unclear guidan

LATAM Flight 80073 Dumped Fuel Over Rural Italy for 36 Minutes Before Landing Safely With 398 On BoardAs the damaged Boeing 777 climbed away from Malpensa, warnings confirmed what the runway had already made clear: the tail strike had ruptured pressure lines for the auxiliary power unit's fire extinguisher bottles and triggered a structural alert. The crew followed the abnormal p

Sales Firm Replaces Meetings-Booked Metric With Six-Bucket Conversation SystemJoey Gilkey measures his SDRs on two things: completed conversations and disposition discipline. A completed conversation means reaching the intended contact, confirming they are the right person, delivering a pitch, and sorting the outcome into one of six buckets — meeting, acti

Reforming Sales Teams Is Easy — Reforming Sales Leaders Is NotRetraining an SDR to pursue conversations instead of meetings takes almost no time, Gilkey argues. The real obstacle is leadership: managers locked into 90-day sprint cycles, quarterly kickoffs, and short-term targets cannot sustain the 12-to-18-month horizon the model requires.

Venture Capital, Not One Book, Broke B2B SalesBefore the SDR model took hold, senior salespeople earned their way to the front line only after years inside customer success — they understood contracts, legal approval chains, and service delivery before ever touching a prospect. That career path is now largely extinct. Adam M

SDR Firm Tests Video Sales Letters, Reports Double the Activation RateJoey Gilkey's team is running what he calls audience activation: SDRs call a tightly defined prospect list — CROs at companies of a specific size and industry — with a single ask: permission to send a link to a short, persona-specific video. On a standard campaign, roughly 20–28%

Top U.S. Private Equity Firm Weighs Eliminating Over 1,000 SDR RolesA top-three private equity firm in U.S. tech — currently managing more than a thousand SDRs across its portfolio — is actively discussing cutting that number to zero, according to Gilkey, who is in those board-level conversations. He is pushing back in favour of reducing to aroun

SDR/AE Split Model Called Structurally Broken From the StartThe practice of separating sales development from closing — popularised after Aaron Ross's book *Predictable Revenue* — fractured what was designed to be a single role, argues sales strategist Joey Gilkey. Placing inexperienced 22-year-olds in front of C-suite buyers who lack the

Sales Coach: Managers Who Skip One-on-One Time Have 'Lost Their Minds'Sales consultant Mike Weinberg argues that the collapse of in-person coaching is the root cause of underperforming sales teams — and that no manager can substitute for it by burying themselves in a CRM dashboard or sending accountability emails at midnight. He outlines a three-st

Weinberg Wrote 'Sales Management Simplified' Angry — and Aimed It Directly at His Own ClientsWhen Mike Weinberg wrote 'Sales Management Simplified', he knew he was taking a financial risk: the book was essentially a mirror held up to the executives who hired him. His core argument — that sales training alone accomplishes little if the leadership culture, compensation str

Scott Brinker Finds Deep Satisfaction in Empowering Others' SuccessScott Brinker expresses profound joy in witnessing others achieve success and experience moments of clarity, describing it as "light bulbs going off." He views this ethos as a core principle for innovation, drawing parallels to his work leading the ecosystem at HubSpot. There, he

Martech Success Hinges on Human Dynamics, Not Just Technology, Says Scott BrinkerScott Brinker asserts that successful Martech implementations are overwhelmingly driven by human change management, not by the technology itself. He points to a common failure where companies invest heavily in tools but neglect the people aspect, attributing a 90% human factor to

Scott Brinker Advocates for Cross-Disciplinary Bridging as Key Career SkillScott Brinker credits his career success to "cross-pollination," specifically his ability to bridge the worlds of software engineering and marketing. Despite candidly admitting he was a "very mediocre software engineer," his technical understanding allowed him to translate comple

Introvert Scott Brinker Recommends One-on-One Interactions for Effective NetworkingScott Brinker, identifying as an introvert, advocates for one-on-one interactions as a far more effective and less draining approach to networking than traditional large-scale events. He criticizes the superficiality of small talk at conferences, preferring focused conversations

Scott Brinker Urges Marketers to Embrace AI for Competitive AdvantageScott Brinker advises mid-career marketing professionals to actively embrace the rapid possibilities of artificial intelligence to differentiate themselves and secure a competitive edge. He acknowledges the overwhelming pace of AI development but stresses that most individuals an

New AI Standard Set to Revolutionize Martech ComposabilityScott Brinker highlights a historical tension in Martech composability: while flexible, adaptable solutions greatly benefit brands by allowing them to quickly adjust to rapid change, vendor incentives have traditionally not aligned with offering truly composable systems, preferri

Delaware Court Ruling Puts Every Corporate Officer Personally on the Hook for Risk OversightA 2022 Delaware court decision has quietly reshaped the legal exposure of every corporate officer in America, extending fiduciary duty — long the exclusive concern of boards and CEOs — to all executives, including CMOs, CHROs, and their peers, with personal liability attached. Th

McKinsey Research: Only 3–7% of Fortune 2000 Data Is Fit for AI Decision-MakingThe most dangerous flaw in enterprise AI deployments is not the technology itself — it is the data being fed into it. According to McKinsey research cited by Mark Stouse, chairman and CEO of Proof Analytics, only three to seven percent of data held by Fortune 2000 companies is of

AI Agents Have No Internal Clock and Fail on Unexpected Conditions, Expert WarnsCurrent AI tools carry a surprisingly basic design gap: they have no internal clock or calendar. That means a user who asks an AI to complete a task by a specific time is effectively issuing a deadline into a void — the system has no mechanism to track the passage of time or hono

Sales Industry's 'Dust Bowl' Moment: How Automation Eroded Core Selling SkillsThe American Midwest's dust bowl of the 1930s and 40s offers an unexpectedly sharp metaphor for what has gone wrong in modern sales. Just as mechanised farming delivered a short-term productivity surge before eroding the topsoil entirely, the automation tools of the 2010s made hi

A 2008 Measurement Shift Broke B2B Sales — and Leaders Still Don't Know ItA single change in how sales success was measured — switching from open opportunities to meeting sets, driven by Aaron Ross's "Predictable Revenue" model around 2010-2011 — cascaded into a global skills crisis that most senior sales leaders are now too embedded to even recognise.

Australia's Small Market Forced a Buyer-First Discipline That Global Sales Teams Are Now Scrambling to LearnOperating in a market smaller than the state of Texas meant Australian sales teams could never afford to blast and burn through prospects the way their American counterparts routinely did. That constraint quietly built a buyer-centric rigour — meeting people where they were, maki

AI Is Making Bad Sales Practices Faster, Not Better, Practitioners WarnArtificial intelligence does not fix a broken sales motion — it accelerates it. Teams that lack the fundamentals of market validation and list segmentation are now deploying AI to build more efficient spam cannons, while simultaneously hiring layers of GTM engineers and data scie

No Child Wants to Be a Salesperson — and the Industry Has Only Itself to BlameThe question of why no child grows up dreaming of a career in sales carries a historical parallel that reframes the entire profession: 500 years ago, doctors were widely regarded as quacks and charlatans — and today they are among the most universally respected people in society.

CRO School Was Built to Fix What 'Predictable Revenue' BrokeTwo decades of watching go-to-market fundamentals erode — driven by measurement changes that followed the "Predictable Revenue" model's rise after 2008 — led to the creation of Closed Circuit Selling and CRO School. The core diagnosis is that splitting the sales role into SDRs an

The Pre-2011 Sales Method That Outperformed the Entire SDR IndustryLong before software fragmented sales into specialized roles, Adem Manderovic was running closed-door fashion events that generated more revenue in two hours than three weeks of storefront trading — by simply keeping handwritten notebooks of what each customer liked. He carried t

ABM Pilots Fail When Sales Reps Face Conflicting KPIs, Practitioners WarnA sales rep asked to conduct deep account research, buying committee mapping, and sustained multi-channel engagement while simultaneously hitting a quota of 200 cold calls a week will always choose the cold calls — because that is what pays the salary. The fix requires written co

ABM Pilot Measurement Requires Separating What Teams Control From What They CannotA sales rep who uploads a target account list into a standard outreach sequence and receives no replies has not run an ABM program — but without tracking leading indicators, that distinction is invisible. The framework proposed here divides metrics into two groups: leading indica

Vague ABM Language Kills Execution — Playbooks Must Define Exact Daily ActionsAsk ten sales reps what "nurturing a target account" means and you will get ten different answers — ranging from sending a LinkedIn connection request to a structured daily routine of monitoring buyer signals, leaving substantive comments on their posts, and publishing content de

Sales Teams Revert to Broad Prospecting When Account Qualification Criteria Are Not Written DownWhen quota pressure rises, alignment around an ideal customer profile collapses — and the reason, according to this analysis, is almost always the same: there is no formally documented, leadership-approved set of criteria for qualifying, disqualifying, and prioritizing accounts.

ABM Pilots Need Baseline Scores and Defined Success Criteria Before Launch, Not AfterComparing a three-month ABM pilot to a playbook refined over several years is, as described here, an inherently unfair and misleading exercise. The alternative is to score current process performance on a zero-to-five scale before the pilot begins — covering areas like account pr

ABM Pilots Require 8 to 15 Hours Per Week From Sales Reps — and That Cost Needs Leadership Sign-OffEffective participation in an ABM pilot demands between eight and fifteen hours of a sales rep's week — roughly one to two full working days — and that figure needs to be made explicit to both the rep and their manager before the program starts, not discovered mid-flight. The rec

Product Marketers Warned Against Assumption-Driven Strategy and 'Throw It Over the Wall' LaunchesAshley Faus, a product marketing leader, identifies three recurring failures that undermine go-to-market efforts. The most common is assuming what problems an audience faces rather than asking them directly — a shortcut that produces positioning stuffed with meaningless words lik

Ashley Faus's Four-Pillar Test Separates Genuine Thought Leaders from Title-HoldersThought leadership is not about seniority, contrarianism, or volume of output — it is about innovation that moves an audience to think and act differently. Ashley Faus distills this into four interdependent pillars: credibility (being cited rather than asked to cite sources), pro

AI's 'Mediocrity at Scale' and Deceptive CTAs Are Quietly Destroying Marketing TrustTwo distinct forces are eroding audience trust in marketing, according to Ashley Faus. At the industry level, AI has made it cheaper than ever to produce both undifferentiated content and outright misinformation — deepfakes, hallucinated citations, fabricated case law — making it

A Broken Lead-Scoring Experiment Revealed the Fundamental Flaw in Marketing FunnelsAshley Faus traces her rethinking of marketing's foundational model to a specific failure: setting up a lead-scoring system in Marketo by arbitrarily assigning point values, watching it run for a quarter, and discovering that the resulting 'leads' had no budget, no authority, and

Companies Don't Have Thoughts — and That's the Core Problem with Brand Thought LeadershipThe premise that a company can be a thought leader collapses under one observation: companies don't have thoughts, people do. Ashley Faus points to major consulting firms — Deloitte, McKinsey, PwC, BCG — as the clearest illustration. Their research carries weight not because of t

Fitness Analogies Crack Open Marketing's Single-Touch Attribution DelusionAshley Faus uses fitness not as motivational decoration but as a structural argument against how marketers measure success. Her sharpest example: asking which single mile of running caused someone to lose 60 pounds is as absurd as crediting the final touchpoint in a sales cycle f

Austin Hay Cultivates Personal 'Life Flywheel' for Happiness Beyond Career MilestonesEmerging from his journey as a startup founder, Austin Hay has developed a personal system focused on aligning with happiness, prioritizing consistent time for building, writing, and learning. He emphasizes optimizing the "money to time ratio" – maximizing financial outcomes whil

Professionals Risk Obsolescence if They Don't Master AI, Says Austin HayAustin Hay warns that professionals spending all their time in meetings are at risk of being "cooked" by artificial intelligence, arguing that such roles will become highly inefficient or even eliminated. He advises dedicating at least one hour daily to automating boring tasks, s

AI Transforms Project Management and Strategic Planning, Drastically Cutting TimeAustin Hay highlights practical applications of AI that significantly streamline professional workflows, dramatically reducing the time required for complex processes. He cites using the Linear MCP (Multi-Code-Path/Multi-Agent-Planning) to categorize and manage project tickets, a

AI Creates 'Super Saiyan' Professionals, Concentrating High-Value JobsAustin Hay introduces the concept of "Super Saiyan" professionals, highly adept AI users capable of performing the work of five to ten people. While some roles, like event planning, remain difficult for AI to fully replace due to the need for human relationships and physical pres

Foundational Tech Skills Crucial for Guiding AI, Says Austin HayAustin Hay asserts that understanding foundational programming mental models is critical for anyone looking to effectively leverage AI, particularly as tools like Claude Code become more prevalent. He emphasizes that proficiency in command line, object orientation, and at least o

Austin Hay Maps AI's Rapid Evolution from Chatbots to Autonomous AgentsAustin Hay outlines the rapid progression of AI capabilities, noting that many users are still at the early stages of comprehending its full potential. He describes an evolution from basic chat interfaces, like those found in ChatGPT or Claude, to more integrated "co-work" spaces

Cataloging the Market: A Direct Approach to Market IntelligenceAdam Manderovich introduces “cataloging the market,” a business development strategy originating in big finance and talent management that uses direct conversations to gather crucial market intelligence. This approach, which draws on methods institutionalized by figures like Mark

Cataloging the Market Yields Invaluable Intent Data for Sales and MarketingThe process of cataloging the market provides an invaluable source of intent data, offering specific insights into competitor relationships, annual contract values (ACVs), and common customer objections. This detailed intelligence paints a clear picture of the market landscape, e

Cross-Functional Alignment Critical for Effective Customer TargetingAdam Manderovich stresses the importance of cross-functional collaboration in defining and scoring factors critical to a business's target customer profile. He recommends involving key stakeholders from marketing, sales, and customer success in this process to ensure complete ali

How to Conduct Market Cataloging for Actionable InsightsCataloging the market involves directly contacting ideal target accounts—typically via phone, but also through digital channels like Instagram or LinkedIn DMs—to conduct specific, direct conversations. The core of this process is asking detailed questions about their current solu

Cataloging the Market: A Proven Path to Operational Success and Reduced ChurnAdam Manderovich defends “cataloging the market” as a direct and proven method for gathering essential customer intelligence, despite potential skepticism about its simplicity. Drawing parallels to its historical effectiveness in large-scale finance, manufacturing, and contract a

How Sornson Turned a Client's Request to Spend Less Into a Push to Spend Ten Times MoreWhen a Texas client told Sornson that his company was spending too much — roughly $1.5 million a year — and wanted to cut back, Sornson's response was the opposite of accommodation. He told the client he did not want them spending $1.5 million a year either; he wanted them spendi

Sornson's 'Ambition' Method Reframes Sales Targets to Make Perfection UnnecessaryCompeting for the maximum possible revenue from an account rather than for quota produces a counterintuitive structural advantage: even a mediocre result becomes a good one. Sornson borrows the title of sports psychologist Bob Rotella's book — 'Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect' — to

Sales Consultant Dennis Sorenson Argues 'Total Account Potential' Should Replace Quota as North StarThe instinct to ask what is realistically achievable in a sales account is, according to Dennis Sorenson, exactly the wrong question. Drawing on his years at NCR and Teradata, Sornson argues that sellers should instead map the absolute ceiling of what an account could ever spend

Misaligned Sales Compensation Left a Rep Feeling Like a Failure for MonthsRyan Pugh describes a role that required landing entirely new business on an 18-month sales cycle, while his company's compensation plan was built around a three-to-six month close window. By the seventh month, management was asking why he was failing — a question that stung, bec

Sales Pros Warn Against the 'Show Up and Throw Up' Presentation MethodDrawing on Mike Weinberg's book, the group zeroes in on two chapters they argue are undervalued: chapter 11 on structuring sales calls and chapter 13 on presentations. The discussion turns confessional when Matt Nelson recalls walking a full executive team into a meeting with a l

The 'So What Test' That Separates Effective Sales Stories from Feature DumpsZach Mofield and Ryan Pugh discuss a framework from Mike Weinberg's book that challenges salespeople to strip their pitch down to a single question: so what? The argument is that most sales conversations fail because they catalogue capabilities rather than address the buyer's act

Firmable CEO's Simple Math for Scaling from $2M to $10M ARRPaul Perrett, CEO of Firmable, describes working backward from a $10 million ARR target just weeks before this conversation: divide the goal by average contract size to get the required customer count, apply a 35% win rate to determine how much pipeline must be generated, then de

Firmable Runs Three Demand Channels — and Watches Each One DifferentlyFirmable's growth engine rests on three distinct pipelines — SDR outbound, inbound marketing, and a partner channel — each tracked by its own economics. The SDR channel has proven reliable enough that a trained rep generates over $100,000 in pipeline per month from their second m

Firmable's SDR-Only Approach Failed at Past Companies — So He Built an Ecosystem InsteadPaul Perrett admits the SDR function never fully worked at several of his previous companies, which shaped his conviction that outbound alone cannot sustain long-term growth. At Firmable, roughly 70% of demand now arrives through what he calls ecosystem activation — word of mouth

Post-Summit Content Strategy Generates 34 Sales OpportunitiesFollowing a major virtual summit, Iridium generated 34 sales-qualified opportunities by implementing a multi-stage, data-driven follow-up process. The company first contacted new attendees with emails and calls offering dealer status and product trials. They then hosted a dedicat

Multi-Channel Promotion Strategy Secures 2,300 Registrations for Virtual SummitA multi-channel promotion strategy launched a month and a half before a virtual summit successfully secured over 2,300 registrations. The campaign utilised a mix of email announcements, social media posts, and paid Facebook ads. A crucial element was leveraging informational part

Organic Endorsements and Targeted Offers Drive Sales at Non-Promotional Tech SummitEven though a virtual summit was designed as a non-promotional, educational event, it successfully generated sales-qualified opportunities through two key methods. First, the host company, Iridium, benefited from what it called "lucky" organic endorsements, as partner companies s

Clear Rules and Audience Focus Are Key to Recruiting Corporate SpeakersTo successfully recruit speakers for a new virtual summit, particularly from large corporations, organisers focused on four key principles. First, they communicated a clear message that the event's purpose was educational, not to poach customers. Second, they remained open to par

Free Event Uses 24-Hour Scarcity Model to Drive Live AttendanceA virtual summit boosted live participation by making the event free for all attendees and partners but restricting access to session recordings. Each day's video content was available for only 24 hours before disappearing, creating a sense of urgency and leveraging the "fear of

Tech Summit Recruits Microsoft by Pitching Industry Education, Not Product SalesTo recruit major corporate speakers like Microsoft and MTS for its virtual summit, Iridium pitched the event as a collaborative effort to promote technologies across the market, rather than a sales opportunity for its own platform. The central idea was to create an open forum for

Sales Coach Mike Weinberg Calls the '57% Statistic' One of the Most Damaging Myths in Modern SellingA single statistic, widely cited from a Corporate Executive Board study on buyer behaviour, has quietly hollowed out the prospecting habits of an entire generation of salespeople, according to sales consultant Mike Weinberg. The figure — that today's buyer completes 57 percent of

Sales Consultant Mike Weinberg Built a Book Out of Four Years of Screenshots of Bad AdviceMike Weinberg started keeping a running note on his phone roughly four years before his book existed — filling it with screenshots of what he describes as harmful sales advice spreading across LinkedIn: posts declaring prospecting dead, scripts promising results 'every time,' and

Sales Consultant Mike Weinberg Argues Sellers Should Lead With Customer Problems, Not Company CredentialsMost companies commit what Mike Weinberg calls the cardinal sin of sales messaging: they talk about themselves. Whether it's boasting about 89 years in business, listing product features, or describing what they manufacture, the instinct to lead with identity rather than impact r

Weinberg Makes the Case for Mandatory Annual Business Plans — With One Unusual TwistMike Weinberg considers the individual annual business plan non-negotiable for every sales professional, but the version he prescribes goes further than most. It contains five sections: goals, strategies, actions (including a metric he particularly values — the count of meaningfu

Sales Managers' Retreat Into CRM Screens Is Producing a Generation of Amateur SellersThe hands-on sales mentor — the manager who rode along in the car, grilled a rep before every meeting, and debriefed every call — has largely disappeared, according to Mike Weinberg, author of "New Sales Simplified." In their place are managers buried in administrative work, mana

Weinberg: 80% of What Drives Sales Results Today Is the Same as 25 Years AgoDespite an industry flooded with new platforms, plug-ins, and self-proclaimed LinkedIn gurus, the fundamentals that produced top sellers a quarter-century ago still account for roughly 80% of what separates high performers from the rest, argues Mike Weinberg, whose book "New Sale

Over-Serving Your Best Customers May Be the Costliest Mistake in SalesOne of the most counterintuitive arguments Mike Weinberg makes is that salespeople routinely hurt their own results by spending too much time with the customers they like most — often because those relationships feel safe and rewarding — even when those accounts have no room left

Weinberg's One-Third Rule: Carve Out a Full Third of the Sales Week for Creating New OpportunitiesThe single biggest reason salespeople fail to bring in new business, Mike Weinberg contends, is not skill — it is that they never actually allocate time to the work. Most sellers default to service tasks, then use whatever selling time remains to push their hottest deals toward t

Impressive Past Sales Numbers Can Be a Trap When Hiring — the Territory May Have Done the WorkRecruiting a proven industry veteran with a track record of big numbers is an obvious hiring instinct, but Mike Weinberg warns it can be a costly mistake. A candidate's past performance may reflect the size of their territory, the quality of leads handed to them, or the momentum

Sales Expert Advocates 'Blind Date' Offer to Deliver Immediate Value in MeetingsSales expert Jason Bay champions the 'blind date' offer as a superior approach to initiating sales interactions. This strategy involves a sales development representative (SDR) selling the expertise of the individual a prospect will meet, rather than focusing solely on a product.

Provoke Emotion with 'Trigger, Tension, Trust' for Effective Sales MessagingTo stand out in outbound sales, Jason Bay asserts that a compelling message must provoke an emotional response, achieved through his 'three T's' framework: Trigger, Tension, and Trust. The Trigger answers 'why now' by identifying a current market or business event, Tension highli

Mystery Shopping Creates 'Irresistible' Offers in Modern Sales OutreachEffective sales offers must provide such compelling value that declining a meeting feels irresponsible, a standard achieved by one client selling outsourced chat support. This company, through its marketing team, mystery-shopped 300 e-commerce competitors, gathering data on chat

Outbound Sales Performance Plummets: Average Reps Require Hundreds of Contacts Per MeetingCurrent outbound sales statistics reveal a stark reality: the average email generates a mere 0.3% booking rate, meaning a representative must send 330 emails to secure a single meeting. Phone outreach fares even worse, with a 0.2% booking rate, demanding 500 calls to achieve the

Sales Leaders Boost Pipeline by 30% with 'Martini Glass' Disqualification StrategyModern sales success hinges on adopting a 'martini glass' pipeline approach, where representatives disqualify a significant portion of accounts to focus intensely on the highest-fit opportunities, according to sales expert Jason Bay. This strategy, the first pillar of his framewo

Compelling Offers Increase Sales Meeting Bookings by 28%, Combating Buyer RemorseIn an environment where 58% of B2B sales meetings are deemed a waste of time and 56% of buyers experience regret after a purchase, sales professionals must offer compelling value beyond a mere product demonstration. Jason Bay emphasizes that a strong 'offer' is the second key to

Book Launch Live-Stream Turns Authors' First Glimpse of Their Copies Into a Viral MomentWhen the first physical copies of Nancy Duarte and Patti Sanchez's book "Illuminate" arrived in the office lobby, a quick text to Ashley Faus triggered an impromptu live-stream. The authors, visibly emotional seeing their book for the first time, walked back through the office an

Atlassian's 5,000-Person Summit Tested Live-Streaming's Real-World Limits — and PassedAt Atlassian's user summit in Las Vegas, the Jira software team broadcast directly to their product's Twitter account using an iPhone mounted on a gimbal with a small clip-on microphone. Mid-broadcast, the gimbal shifted orientation from horizontal to vertical without warning. Ra

Sales Trainer Mike Weinberg's 'Power Statement' Puts Customer Problems FirstThe most powerful shift a salesperson can make is to stop talking about their company and start talking about their customer's pain. Mike Weinberg calls his framework for doing this a "power statement" — a structured set of talking points that opens with the problems a seller sol

Top Salespeople Always Have a Written Target List. Most Salespeople Don't.When Mike Weinberg asks struggling salespeople to show him their prospect list, they open a CRM and scroll through nine pages of contacts. When he asks top performers the same question, they produce a printed spreadsheet of 19 names, a handwritten legal pad, or a whiteboard cover

Weinberg: In Sales Storytelling, Sequence Matters as Much as ContentA power statement has three parts — customer problems and outcomes, a brief description of what is actually sold, and the seller's differentiators — but Weinberg's core argument is that the order in which those parts are delivered determines whether the message lands. Most salesp

Salespeople Avoid Prospecting Not Out of Laziness But Because They Don't Know What to SayThe conventional explanation for why salespeople neglect prospecting is that they simply don't want to do it. Weinberg offers a more charitable and more actionable diagnosis: most people avoid hunting because they are uncertain — uncertain who to call and uncertain what to say wh

Weinberg's Five-Part Framework Reduces Complex Sales Failures to Fixable FundamentalsSales effectiveness, Weinberg argues, is the salesperson's responsibility first — not the marketing team's, not the economy's. Drawing on a conversation with a struggling technology company whose sales team had coasted on pandemic-era demand and now faced a market reordered by in

How You Sell, Not What You Sell, Is the Real Differentiator for Service BusinessesRecruiters and service professionals who struggle to articulate what sets them apart may be looking for differentiation in the wrong place. Both Weinberg and the sales author Anthony Iannarino make the same underlying argument: in a market where product and pricing are broadly co

Aaron Ross: Anxiety Cascades From Investors to Customers, Killing Sales TeamsAaron Ross argues that most sales execution failures stem not from bad tactics but from two underexamined layers: team friction and what he calls mental noise. He illustrates how anxiety flows downward in any organisation — an anxious investor pressures a CEO, who pressures a VP

Ross: Stress Pushes Sales Teams Toward Tactics That Don't WorkRoss frames today's business environment as an "anxiety economy" in which pressure compresses thinking, pushing salespeople and managers toward short-term fixes — more calls, more templates — rather than the slower relationship-building that actually produces durable results. His

When Everyone Has AI Superpowers, Nobody Does, Ross WarnsRoss contends that AI will produce infinite copycat content and noise, erasing the advantage of any process-driven edge. The real constraint on growth, he argues, is management culture that punishes the slower investigative pace needed to actually understand customers — a culture

AI Moderators Uncover Deeper Consumer Truths Due to Perceived NeutralityArtificial intelligence moderators are proving uniquely capable of uncovering uncomfortable truths and deep-seated fears that human interviewers might not access. Individuals exhibit a greater willingness to disclose sensitive information, such as personal finances, insecurities,

Expert Warns Against Using LLMs for Pricing, Advocates Diverse Synthetic PersonasA critical aspect of effective synthetic user research involves moving beyond single, monolithic personas to represent a broad distribution of personalities and diverse traits. Rather than creating one "average nurse" for example, researchers should model a range of individuals w

Synthetic Users Build Internal Buy-In for Deeper Human ResearchSynthetic users serve as a crucial stepping stone in market research, functioning as a proof of concept that helps build internal organizational support and budget for more extensive human studies. By allowing stakeholders to quickly explore diverse market segments—even those tra

Synthetic Users Uncover "Why" Behind Marketing Funnel BehaviorSynthetic users offer a powerful method for uncovering the underlying "why" behind behavioral data within marketing funnels, addressing a critical gap where observed actions (like dropping off a pricing page or unsubscribing) lack clear motivations. This approach involves leverag

Non-Human "Synthetic Users" Boost Stakeholder Interest in Real Human ResearchContrary to intuition, the use of non-human "synthetic users" is effectively humanizing market research by significantly increasing stakeholder interest in engaging with real human subjects. Traditionally, static research reports offer limited interaction, but synthetic user tool

Atlassian Strategist Declares the Marketing Funnel Dead, Proposes a Playground ModelAshley Faus contends that the classic awareness-to-purchase funnel forces buyers through a sequence that rarely matches how they actually make decisions. Her alternative — designing content like a playground — means someone should be able to jump straight to pricing, skip back to

A Three-Intent Framework Maps Content Ownership Across Sales, Marketing, and SupportFaus proposes that most content ownership disputes inside companies stem from imprecision about what a piece of content is actually meant to make the audience do. Her framework separates output into buy intent, use intent, and affinity intent — with marketers owning the first, do

Atlassian Resolves Content Overlap Between Teams Through Cross-Linking and Values-Based HiringAt Atlassian, the primary defence against content silos is not process but people: Faus says the company hires specifically for values — 'play as a team' and 'build with heart and balance' — so that an employee who discovers overlapping content instinctively looks for a collabora

Reading a Prospect's 10K Filing Can Unlock Their Bonus Structure — and Your Sales PitchBefore any sales conversation, reviewing a prospect's social media reveals personality cues — humor style, hobbies, communication tone — that tell a rep how to calibrate their approach. For publicly traded companies, the annual 10K report goes further: a section on executive comp

Deliver a 50-Point Website Audit Before Asking for a Meeting — Not AfterThe fastest way out of the 'just another sales rep' category is to deliver something genuinely useful before making any request. The principle borrows from product design: every button a user clicks must return value, or they stop clicking. Applied to sales, that means a cold ema

A Virtual Trophy Ceremony at Salesforce Turned Prospects Into CustomersRather than relying on mass outbound campaigns, a targeted marketing-sales collaboration at Salesforce produced measurable pipeline by staging a virtual awards ceremony that honored both existing customers and prospects for standout marketing campaigns or e-commerce websites. Phy

Sales Playbooks Should Segment Buyers by Tenure and Personality, Not Just Job TitleStandard sales playbooks sort prospects by industry, company size, or role — but those categories miss the psychology that actually drives buying decisions. Segmenting instead by how long someone has been in their position changes the entire pitch: a new executive wants to be mad

Org Charts Miss the Real Power — a Stakeholder Map Captures ItFormal reporting structures rarely reflect who actually controls a deal. A stakeholder map framework goes beyond titles to track political capital, informal influence, budget authority, and whether each person is a champion, a neutral, or a blocker. A chief of staff with no execu

AI Can Make Sales Playbooks Dynamic — With Persona-Specific Prompts for Every Buyer TypeStatic playbooks go stale, but AI-powered agentic workflows can pull from a company's entire case study library and surface the most relevant example by industry, company size, and problem statement in real time. Beyond content retrieval, playbooks built on persona profiles can n

Sales Consultant: Sellers' Biggest Problem Is They Simply Don't Spend Enough Time SellingMike Weinberg, author and sales consultant, argues that the single greatest reason sales teams stagnate has nothing to do with talent, messaging, or process — it is that the people hired to sell spend surprisingly little of their time actually doing it. His prescription for any n

Rushing to the Demo Is Slowing Down Tech Sales, Weinberg SaysSales consultant Mike Weinberg identifies premature product demonstrations as one of the most common self-inflicted wounds in technology sales. When a prospect raises their hand through inbound marketing and asks to see a product, salespeople — under pressure to move quickly — sk

Storytelling Beats Feature Lists — But Only When the Audience Is Ready for ItA job recruitment post that Faus wrote framing her own career struggles — graduating into a recession, being told she was capable but unhireable — drew 40,000 views and hundreds of comments, far outpacing any straightforward job listing. The post worked, she argues, because it ga

Social Selling Works When Brands Talk About Problems, Not ProductsFaus challenges the assumption that social media users are never in a buying frame of mind, pointing to a clear signal most brands miss: when someone publicly declares a need — posting on social media asking for tool recommendations — they are actively inviting a pitch. The harde

Leadership Lesson: The Problem Was Preparation, Not the Other PersonAshley Faus, a marketing executive at Atlassian, describes the moment a manager told her bluntly that she was the problem in a fractured working relationship. The diagnosis was precise: she prepared herself thoroughly for every meeting but never gave her more senior colleague the

BuzzFeed-Style Talk Show Earns 1.2 Million Views for a B2B PlatformFilmmaker Nausheen I. Chen recalls pitching something unusual to a B2B marketplace client whose previous product videos followed an unbroken formula: name the product, explain what it does, move on. Her team scrapped that template and produced a BuzzFeed-style talk show — two peo

How a Confident Speaking Style Can Quietly Shut Down a TeamAshley Faus describes a counterintuitive shift she made as a leader: staying on mute in meetings where her team owned the work, and replacing phrases like "I recommend" with "in my experience" or "I'm curious to hear." The change was not about humility as an abstract virtue — it

Atlassian Marketing Lead Offers Four-Pillar Test for Identifying Internal Thought LeadersAshley Faus, who oversees thought leadership at Atlassian, evaluates potential internal spokespeople across four dimensions: credibility, profile, prolificacy, and depth of ideas. Rather than relying on self-assessment, she uses Atlassian's internal blogging culture as a live tes

Slow Down to Close More: Sales Consultant Argues Discovery Must Precede DemosThe counterintuitive advice Mike Weinberg gives salespeople is to move in two opposite speeds at once: prospect aggressively to fill the pipeline, then deliberately slow down the moment a real opportunity appears. Rushing into a demo or proposal before understanding who makes the

The Best Sales Hunters Are 'Selfishly Productive,' Not Relationship-ObsessedTrue new-business hunters are rare, Mike Weinberg argues, partly because a generation of salespeople built careers during economic booms or in hot industries where the market did most of the work for them. The result is sales floors full of people who have never really had to hun

A 24-Year Sales Framework That Puts Market Intelligence Before the PitchAdam Manderovich's 'Closed Circuit Selling' framework begins where most sales processes skip: sending business development teams into the market to catalogue prospects' timing, current suppliers, pain points, and contract sensitivities before a single proposal is written. That in

Personal LinkedIn Profile with 2,300 Followers Doubles Impressions of Corporate Page with 500,000When Atlassian's social media manager republished Ashley Faus's post about returning to the office on the company's corporate LinkedIn page — which had nearly half a million followers at the time — it performed dramatically worse than her personal account with roughly 2,300 follo

LinkedIn Algorithm Tactics Lose Edge as Platform Begins Throttling Engagement HacksSeveral widely-used LinkedIn tactics — placing links in comments rather than posts, coordinating rapid employee engagement after publishing, and using at-mentions instead of hashtags to trigger company-page interactions — are being throttled by the platform as adoption spreads. F

Atlassian's Instagram Engagement Fell by Half When Pandemic Forced Polished, Branded ContentWhen Atlassian could no longer take candid office photos during the pandemic and shifted to cohesive, brand-consistent Instagram content, engagement roughly halved. By contrast, a phone photo of a logo sticker held up at an event generated nearly 500 likes, a casual shot of the c

Atlassian's Product Managers Took to Twitter to Personally Answer User Complaints — and Shifted SentimentDuring a Jira product update, Atlassian deployed an unusual tactic: engineers, product managers, and marketers answered critical user questions directly from their personal Twitter handles rather than the official brand account. The shift in tone was immediate — users who had pos

A Birth Announcement Built on Atlassian's Incident-Management Tool Became a Customer-Loyalty MomentA developer used Atlassian's Statuspage — a tool designed to communicate service outages — to document the real-time birth of his child, posting updates framed as an IT incident report. Atlassian's social team spotted it, sent congratulations, and offered a gift code for a baby o

HubSpot and Atlassian Embrace Unofficial Brand Advocates Instead of Shutting Them DownGeorge B. Thomas, whose entire home office is painted in HubSpot's signature orange and who has attended the company's annual Inbound conference for ten consecutive years, is not a HubSpot employee. He runs Sprocket Talk, which he bills as the largest unofficial HubSpot resource

Sales Coach Turns 20 Calls a Day Into 100 Before Noon — From an Airport Security LineStranded between flights at Philadelphia Airport, a sales consultant grew frustrated watching a new outbound rep spend weeks making just 20 calls a day despite an eight-hour workday. He pulled three people onto a conference call — the rep, their manager, and a senior leader — and

Why Your Best Company Spokespeople May Not Be Your FoundersAshley Faus argues that founders and CEOs are often the wrong choice for thought leadership roles because their job demands projecting stability — and genuine thought leadership, by nature, is disruptive. Using Sam Altman as an example, she notes that markets hang on his words wh

Measuring Thought Leadership With Revenue Is the Wrong Metric, Faus SaysAshley Faus makes a structural argument against tying thought leadership programs to revenue: the two operate on fundamentally different timelines and serve different psychological purposes. Revenue belongs to 'buy intent' content — things that solve an immediate problem — while

Two Questions That Can Unlock Executive LinkedIn PresenceRather than waiting for a polished content strategy, Ashley Faus recommends executives begin with two daily prompts: 'a question I asked today' and 'a question I answered today.' Both anchor posts in real experience, avoiding the generic advice that reads as preachy. She also adv

The Language of Marketing Betrays Its Dehumanizing Defaults, Faus ContendsAshley Faus argues that most companies claiming to practice 'human-centered marketing' reveal the gap between aspiration and reality the moment they start talking about their results: capturing leads, locking down deals, chasing prospects. Nobody, she points out, wants to be chas

Build Thought Leadership Programs Around the Willing, Not the ReluctantAshley Faus recommends against the standard playbook of buying an advocacy platform and pushing everyone to post. Instead, she targets employees who are willing but lack the skill to create and distribute content — particularly technical leaders like CTOs and engineers who have s

Faus Outlines Four-Pillar Framework for Distinguishing Real Thought LeadersAshley Faus breaks thought leadership into four interdependent pillars: credibility, profile, being prolific, and depth of ideas. The sharpest distinction she draws is around credibility — measured not by how often someone cites sources, but by how often others cite them. Only pr

Sales Consultant Argues Accountability Meetings Must Leave Underperformers Feeling UncomfortableMike Weinberg argues that the single most important discipline a sales manager can adopt is a monthly 15-minute one-on-one structured around three questions in strict order: Did the rep hit their number? Is the pipeline healthy enough to make the next number? If not, what activit

Regular Accountability Reviews Force Underperformers to Either Improve or Self-Select Out, Weinberg SaysConsistent accountability meetings, Weinberg argues, produce one of two outcomes for underperforming salespeople: either they lift their effort because they can no longer tolerate showing up empty-handed, or they eventually admit the role is not right for them — and both outcomes

The Psychology of Sales Accountability Mirrors the Psychology of Selling, Weinberg ObservesDuring a live conversation, Mike Weinberg arrived at an analogy he says he had never consciously made before: the productive discomfort a sales manager creates in an accountability meeting is structurally identical to the tension a skilled salesperson creates in the mind of a pro

Weinberg Recommends a 3x Pipeline Multiplier as the Core Metric in Accountability ReviewsWeinberg lays out the mechanical structure of an accountability review with a concrete benchmark: if a salesperson closes roughly one-third of their pipeline, they need at least three times their monthly target in qualifying opportunities to have a realistic chance of hitting the

Sales Reps Who Resist Accountability Reviews May Signal a Talent Problem, Not a Management OneWeinberg offers a sharp diagnostic: the accountability meeting, because it is short and focused on real numbers, is something competitive salespeople actively welcome. He illustrates the point with a top performer who is 240 percent of quota — that conversation lasts 94 seconds,

Weinberg: The Only Goal of Prospecting Is to Get the Meeting — Not to QualifyWeinberg draws a direct line between prospecting philosophy and accountability metrics, arguing both are corrupted by the same mistake: measuring activity instead of outcomes. His position on prospecting is deliberately provocative — qualifying, he says, happens at the discovery

The Real Reason Sales Teams Miss Targets Has Nothing to Do With Talent or ProcessWeinberg calls it his 'dirty little secret' as a consultant: the dominant reason companies fail to win new business is not their pitch, their sales process, or the quality of their people. It is simply that the people assigned to sell spend very little time actually doing it. The

Rushing to the Demo Is Slowing Down Your Sales Cycle, Weinberg ArguesPremature product demonstrations rank among the most common self-inflicted wounds in technology sales, according to Mike Weinberg. When prospects raise their hands through inbound marketing and ask to see the product immediately, many sales teams comply — skipping discovery entir

Weinberg Warns That The Challenger Sale Hype Is Making Salespeople Worse at ListeningMike Weinberg offers a pointed critique of the The Challenger Sale methodology and the broader 'insight selling' movement: the ideas are valid, but the prescription to teach and challenge customers is being handed to the wrong people at scale. Weinberg's concern is that salespeop

A 15-Minute Monthly Meeting May Be the Most Effective Sales Accountability Tool Most Managers IgnoreThe framework Mike Weinberg calls the RPA meeting — Results, Pipeline, Activity — runs for 15 minutes, happens once a month, and follows a strict sequence designed to shift psychological ownership from manager to salesperson. It opens with current results against quota, moves to

A Decade of Easy Tech Sales Created a Generation of Reps Who Never Learned to HuntFor roughly ten years, many technology salespeople never had to prospect. Inbound marketing, viral product growth, and a hot economy meant leads arrived without being created — reps received opportunities, ran demos, and advanced deals that customers had essentially already decid

C-Suite Pressure on Sales Managers to Close Deals Personally Is Undermining the Teams They LeadWhen a major deal is in play, many senior executives instinctively ask why the sales manager isn't in the room running it — and that instinct, Weinberg argues, is quietly destroying sales organisations. The pressure to personally involve managers in every significant opportunity

Sales Consultant Mike Weinberg Found That Fixing Individual Sellers Changes Nothing Without Better ManagersAfter years of coaching salespeople on prospecting, messaging, and deal execution, Mike Weinberg hit a ceiling he couldn't explain away: results improved briefly, then reverted. The turning point came during the Great Recession, when six years managing sales teams firsthand convi

The 'Hero Syndrome' Trapping Promoted Salespeople in the Wrong JobPromoting a top salesperson into management seems logical — until that person keeps doing the job they just left. Weinberg calls this the hero syndrome: former high performers who insert themselves into every deal, run presentations on behalf of their reps, tweak follow-up emails

The Clearest Sign That Sales Managers Are Improving: They Start Saying No to the Wrong WorkWhen sales managers genuinely absorb the lesson that their job is to win through their people rather than instead of them, the most visible change is not that they become better coaches — it's that they become willing to stop doing things. Weinberg describes the transformation as

How Turning a 27-Page Contract Into a Cartoon Won 8 in 10 DealsAs head of sales in banking and insurance, Adam Manderovic noticed that elaborate bid contracts were routinely rejected — and realised nobody was actually reading them. He stripped a 27-page document down to two pages of sales copy, then converted it into an illustrated cartoon,

Selling to One Gatekeeper to Reach 50 Buyers: A New Targeting LogicRather than approaching companies one at a time, Manderovic's method — which he calls "top-down targeting" — combines B2B data signals like company financials, department growth, and DISC personality profiling with consumer data to locate what he terms "commercial access gates":

Cold Calling Pick-Up Rates Collapsed From 50% to Under 3%Scott Leese argues that the fury directed at him for predicting cold calling's decline reveals more about fear than disagreement — critics don't think he's wrong, they need him to be wrong because their livelihoods depend on it. The data he cites is stark: two decades ago, half o

How a Misapplied Sales Model Left a Generation of Reps Half-TrainedScott Leese traces today's sales skill deficit to a single misreading of the Predictable Revenue playbook. That model was designed for large enterprise deals where splitting prospecting from closing made economic sense — but it got applied all the way down to accounts worth $500

Sales Teams Killed Email the Same Way They Killed the PhoneScott Leese describes a repeating pattern in sales history: a communication channel works, gets automated at scale, and dies from overuse — phones first, then email, with inboxes now routinely sitting at 74,000 unread messages. His prescription is a return to relationships that p

Founders Who Skip Sales Lose the Recruiting and Product EdgeScott Leese makes the case that founders who hand off sales too early pay for it in ways they rarely anticipate. A founder who has personally built pipeline and closed deals can walk into a hiring conversation with concrete numbers — cycle length, call volumes, conversion rates —

Contrarian Sales Approach Delivered Two $100M Exits Without a Single SDRScott Leese held senior sales leadership roles at three companies during the peak of the Predictable Revenue craze and refused to implement the model at any of them — no SDR teams, no siloed prospecting functions. Two of those companies sold for over $100 million; the third is cu

AI Is Making Human Outreach Indistinguishable — and Worthless to StrangersWhen a campaign of roughly 700 personalised, individually recorded video messages sent on LinkedIn prompted recipients to accuse the senders of using AI, it captured something Leese finds genuinely unsettling: authenticity has become unverifiable in digital channels. He can see n

Sales Consultant Cuts 16-Month Deal Cycle to Three Weeks With One RewriteAdam Mandich discovered that standard bid contracts — dense with company credentials but silent on what the buyer actually gains — were quietly killing deals even when his employer had the best price and a global brand. He rewrote them as persona-specific sales copy that embedded

Rewriting Bid Contracts as Sales Copy Converts Eight in Ten ProspectsAdam Mandich found that transforming dense corporate bid documents into persona-targeted sales copy — complete with pre-empted objections and animated into short videos — produced an 8-out-of-10 contract conversion rate and shrunk a 16-month sales cycle to three weeks. The core i

Calling Churned Customers Beats Market Research Tools, Mandich ArguesRather than relying on intent-data platforms, Adam Mandich argues the most valuable source of buyer objections is a simple phone call — to existing customers asking why they bought, to churned accounts asking why they left, and to lost deals asking what could have changed their m

Abandon the Dream Client List and Build From Intent Signals, Mandich SaysWhen handed a list of 500 aspirational targets, Adam Mandich's first move is to throw it out. Instead, he builds prospect lists from observable signals: job advertisements that reveal budget, new hires in senior roles who are statistically more likely to switch vendors within the

HubSpot and LinkedIn Trained Marketers to Chase the Wrong Metric, Mandich SaysThe root cause of sales-marketing misalignment, Adam Mandich argues, is a widespread misconception: most people believe marketing's job is to generate leads, when its actual function is to create and capture demand. That confusion has been reinforced, he contends, by the business

The Aaron Ross 'Predictable Revenue' Split Created a Commercial Acumen Gap, Says MandichAdam Mandich traces a specific inflection point in B2B sales dysfunction: the widespread adoption of Aaron Ross and Collin Stewart's Predictable Revenue model, which separated sales development from account management and customer success. Before that split, salespeople typically

Jessie Lizak on Learning Podcasting in Secret Before Pitching Her BossBefore proposing a company podcast at her firm, Jessie Lizak spent her own time quietly learning the craft — launching a personal show to master the technology and build confidence. The gamble paid off: by episode 30, the resulting company podcast had cracked the top 50 marketing

How Jeb Blount Turned the Worst Sales Team in the Company into the Best — in Nine MonthsWhen Jeb Blount was promoted to his first true sales management role at 26, a veteran leader pulled him aside and delivered a single directive: if you are not with your people, you are unemployed. Blount was handed the company's worst-performing territory — ranked 52nd out of 52

Top Sales Managers Spend Twice as Much Time with Their Best People, Data Shows — and That's the PointData from a technology company cited by Jeb Blount shows that managers leading the highest-performing sales teams spend more than twice as much time with their top reps as managers of underperforming teams do. Blount argues this is not favoritism but competitive logic: there are

Sales Managers Have Stopped Developing Their People — and Most Organisations Have Stopped NoticingMike Weinberg makes a pointed observation: he cannot remember the last time a frontline sales manager bragged to him about turning around an underperformer or developing a young rep into a top performer. Fifteen years ago, he heard it regularly. Now, he says, coaching has become

Weinberg's Four-Quadrant Framework Tells Sales Managers Exactly Where to Spend Their TimeMike Weinberg organises every sales team into four categories: chronic underperformers, inconsistent performers, consistent performers, and ultra-high performers. Each group demands a different managerial response. For top performers, the job is to remove obstacles and provide co

New Sales Managers Are Losing 30 to 40 Hours a Week to Meetings That Have Nothing to Do with Their JobDrew Ellis, a recently promoted sales leader at SAP featured in Mike Weinberg's new book, puts the core problem plainly: no one at the end of the year will excuse a missed sales number because a manager attended every Zoom meeting and completed every compliance training. Results

The Ego That Makes a Great Salesperson Often Destroys Them as a ManagerThe traits that produce a top-performing individual sales contributor — high ego, self-focus, tight control of personal time, and a drive to win alone — become liabilities the moment that person is handed a team. Mike Weinberg, who admits he was a poor first-time sales manager hi

Sales Coach Mike Weinberg Says Managers Should Treat Sellers Like a Golf Pro Treated HimA round of golf with a world-class instructor left Mike Weinberg shooting a personal best by four strokes the next day — and convinced him that the gap in sales management is almost never technique. It was the coach's method that did it: careful preparation before the round, quie

John Barrows: A Manager Who Can't Do the Job Has No Right to Demand ItJohn Barrows once turned on his manager during a Friday cold-call blitz, asking publicly how many cold calls the manager himself had made that day — a response he acknowledges was borderline fireable. What redeemed the dynamic wasn't a reprimand but what happened the following we

Mike Weinberg's View of Sales Flipped When He Watched the Slim-Fast Owner Sell to WalmartMike Weinberg grew up watching his father's sales team stack nail-polish displays in drugstores and wanted nothing to do with the profession. His conversion came when he joined Slim-Fast Foods — then the fastest-growing company in the world — as assistant to its owner, and flew w

Weinberg: Promoting Top Sales Reps Into Management Is Setting Them Up to FailThe qualities that make an outstanding individual sales contributor — single-minded focus, a large ego, competitive drive, the instinct to close personally — are almost precisely the wrong qualities for a sales manager. Mike Weinberg makes this case directly, describing the trans

Barrows Applies the 'JOLT Effect' to Sales Management: Show Candidates the Worst Case FirstJohn Barrows draws a parallel between a sales research framework called the JOLT Effect — which argues that buyers stall not from indecision but from fear of making the wrong choice, and that the antidote is explicitly naming worst-case scenarios rather than painting utopian outc

Weinberg Blames Executives, Not Managers, for the Sales Coaching CrisisSales managers are buried under hundreds of daily emails, back-to-back virtual meetings, and redundant forecasting spreadsheets demanded by finance teams that ignore the CRM — leaving no time to do the two things that actually move sales performance: holding people accountable an

Thought Leaders, Subject Matter Experts, and Influencers Are Not Interchangeable, Ashley Faus ArguesMost companies conflate three distinct types of content creators — thought leaders, subject matter experts, and influencers — and measure them against the same goals, which Faus says guarantees disappointment. Thought leaders drive long-term trust and industry direction; subject

The Marketing Funnel Only Reflects the Seller's View, Not the Buyer's JourneyAshley Faus proposes replacing the traditional awareness-consideration-decision funnel with what she calls a playground methodology — a framework that treats buyer behaviour as purposeful but non-linear rather than chaotic. Her central critique of the funnel is that it only regis

Jargon Is Not the Enemy: Why Speaking an Audience's Language Beats Keyword OptimisationFaus argues that what marketers dismiss as jargon is actually insider language — the vocabulary that signals community membership and earns credibility. In kiteboarding, describing a windy session as 'lit' conveys precise meaning instantly to fellow riders; the same word lands as

B2B Marketing Turns Back to Intimacy as Scaled Digital Channels Grow Too NoisyA measurable backlash against mass-reach digital marketing is pushing B2B brands toward deliberately unscalable tactics: exclusive dinners for ten or fifteen people, account-based marketing, employee-generated content, and offline presence. Faus cites the city of Vienna's 'Visit

AI Transparency in Marketing Means Disclosing Tools and Models, Not Just IntentFaus makes the case that disclosing AI use should be standard practice, citing Christopher Penn of Trust Insights as a working example: his newsletters state upfront what percentage a human wrote and which specific models handled the rest. The real question, she argues, is not wh

Zero-Click Content and Eroding Trust in Experts Are Reshaping Content StrategyThree converging forces are upending how brands reach buyers. The Edelman Trust Barometer, tracked from 2021 through 2025, consistently finds that people trust peers and neighbours over CEOs, journalists, and technical experts — meaning brands must surface real human voices rathe

Quarterly Shoot Day Produces 12 LinkedIn Videos for Around €1,000 — If You Can Find the Right Person to Front ThemA full quarter of weekly video content can be produced in a single shooting day for roughly €1,000 — about €500 for a freelance videographer and €500 for editing — making budget a secondary concern. The real constraint is securing a subject-matter expert willing to prepare, show

B2B Agency Grew from 7 to 65 People by Targeting 20,000 Specific LinkedIn Users with VideoStalling at seven employees despite strong talent, a B2B marketing agency redrew its strategy by mapping its ideal customer to a pool of roughly 20,000 B2B marketers at Dutch scale-ups — then set out to make every one of them recognise the agency's name. With no advertising budge

Marketers Can Prove Early-Stage ROI by Matching LinkedIn Ad Reach with Companies Already in the Sales PipelineRather than waiting for last-click data, this attribution approach starts with a single conversation question: where did you first see us? When asked during sales calls — not through a website form — leads typically give a clear answer. Currently, 80 percent of inbound leads at t

LinkedIn's Talking-Head Video Saturation Pushed One Agency Toward Humor as a Competitive DifferentiatorNoticing that podcast-style talking-head videos had become the default format across LinkedIn, Instagram, and beyond, the agency shifted toward scripted, comedic content — parodies of recognisable movie scenes — to break the pattern and recapture attention. The underlying logic i

Humorous Follow-Up Emails Generated Discovery Calls in a Conservative Tech SectorTo win leadership approval for unconventional marketing, the most effective argument is not a theory — it is a competitor's results. Showing a CEO examples of companies in comparable industries that have succeeded with creative or entertaining content removes abstraction from the

Sales Reps Who Built LinkedIn Presence Got Conference Recognition and Inbound Leads in Niche B2B MarketsWorking directly with individual sales representatives — rather than company accounts — the agency ran personal brand programmes in fintech and process-industry hardware, two sectors not typically associated with social content. In the fintech case, one sales rep proved a natural

Ashley Faus Draws Line Between 'Internal Influencers' and True Thought LeadershipMost early-stage companies don't need a thought leader — they need to find the people already creating content internally and fund them. Ashley Faus points to Laura Ida of Dream Data as the model: a sales professional with nearly 50,000 followers who uses the product she promotes

Faus: AI Transparency, Not AI Avoidance, Is the Answer to Eroding Audience TrustThe problem with AI-generated content isn't the technology — it's the pretence. Ashley Faus invokes the 'uncanny valley' concept to explain why audiences grow suspicious of content that feels almost-but-not-quite human: the brain detects something wrong without being able to name

Outsourced 'Thought Leadership' Backfires When the Human Has to Show UpCompletely delegating content creation to ghostwriters or AI tools carries a hidden cost: the moment the named expert appears in person and cannot speak fluently about the ideas attributed to them, the reputational damage is severe and swift. Ashley Faus describes the surprise pe

ABM Pilots Should Cover 10 Accounts Over 90 Days — Then Stop Before ScalingThe POSOS framework — Pilot, Operationalize, Scale — prescribes a deliberately narrow starting point: one account cluster, one geography, one SDR, one ABM manager, one content person, up to 10 accounts with three buyers each, and a strict three-month window. Crucially, the pilot

Closing $100K+ B2B Deals Requires 417 Touchpoints — Most SDRs Stop at TenEffective account-based marketing demands deep pre-engagement research before a single outreach is sent. That means identifying which strategic projects a target account is already funding, mapping relevant business events such as acquisitions or hiring surges, hypothesizing the

AI Scales ABM Processes — But Only Ones That Already Work Without ItBolting AI onto a failing outbound playbook does not fix it; it amplifies the failure. The prerequisite for any AI-assisted account research is a manually proven, fully documented process that specifies which data signals matter, where to find them, and what action each should tr

Tailor Existing Marketing Activities to Account Clusters Before Spending a Dollar MoreThe first practical step toward account-based marketing is not building new programs — it is redirecting what is already planned. Every scheduled webinar, event, or piece of content can be reframed around the specific challenges of a defined account cluster. A client example show

Industry Data Shows Win Rates Down 18% and Deal Values Down 21% — the Case for ABM Starts ThereConvincing a sales team to change its approach requires more than a new methodology pitch — it requires data that makes the cost of the status quo undeniable. Research from Pavilion found that traditional B2B sales metrics deteriorated across the board: win rates fell 18%, deal v

Eight Active-Focus Accounts at $200K ACV Projects $300–400K in Expected PipelineReporting ABM progress to leadership requires a two-layer framework. Leading indicators — activities, outreach attempts, webinar sign-ups from named accounts — show the effort being invested. Lagging indicators — discovery calls booked, replies received — show early traction. Und

Analogy Ads: How to Visualise Abstract B2B Services in MinutesWhen software services resist obvious imagery, the analogy ad technique offers a fast escape route. The process runs in four steps: identify the core promise (personalised engineering), find a physical parallel (ill-fitting clothes), pull a reference image from Google, and drop i

Live Ad Build: Claude Generates Headlines from a Figma Mockup in Real TimeStarting with a "food expectations vs. reality" image pulled from Google, a rough ad takes shape in Figma in minutes: two side-by-side photos labelled by city branch, a logo, and a placeholder headline about keeping menus consistent across locations. The mockup is then fed direct

'That Moment When': The Sentence Starter That Forces Relatable Ad InsightsThe discipline of beginning every customer insight with the phrase "that moment when" acts as a reliability test for ad concepts: if the sentence reads like a comedian setting up a joke, the insight is probably relatable enough to build on. Applied to a restaurant software client

Gemini Prompt Turns Ugly Stock Photo into Striking Ad VisualRather than settling for an unappetising raw photograph of spoiled food, a Gemini prompt — "turn this into an artistic still-life photography image, make the contrast striking and the colors strong and vivid" — reprocesses the image into something unusual enough to stop a scroll.

Before-and-After Fridge: Turning Inventory Spoilage into a B2B Visual HookApplying the same creative framework to an inventory management problem, the approach starts with a Google image search for "spoiled food" and builds toward a side-by-side Figma layout: a fridge packed with rotting produce on the left, a clean and stocked one on the right, captio

Google Ads Without Visuals: Alliteration, Personification, and Flipped Phrases as Copy ToolsCreative techniques built for visual ads translate directly into Google's text-only format. Flipped phrases — "one size doesn't fit all" — work as standalone headlines. Alliteration collapses a brand's entire value proposition into three words: "Swiss, swift, safe" for an email p

Workshop Moment Exposes a Sales Psychology Weinberg Calls 'False Guilt'During a workshop with the sales team of a multi-billion-dollar company, Mike Weinberg was building momentum around the idea of holding firm on pricing when a salesperson at the back of the room stopped the room cold. The seller said he couldn't feel comfortable charging full pri

Sales Expert Weinberg Admits He Broke His Own Rules — Twice in One WeekMike Weinberg spent weeks recording a podcast series about the mistakes that turn salespeople into mere vendors — then, in the same week the episodes went live, he made those exact mistakes himself. In one case, he agreed to hold a planning meeting with a client's senior executiv

Weinberg: Salespeople Who Lead With 'We Do This, We Do That' Are Selling Themselves as VendorsMike Weinberg identifies the failure to tell a compelling story as one of the most common reasons salespeople get treated like commodity suppliers rather than trusted advisors. The pattern he describes is nearly universal: when asked what their company does, most sellers launch i

Sales Trainer Mike Weinberg: If Your Price Were Lower, You Wouldn't Have a JobThe core argument Mike Weinberg opens with is deliberately provocative: a salesperson's entire reason for existing is to justify why their company charges more than the competition. When he hears a seller complain that lower prices would mean more deals, his response is immediate

Weinberg to Salespeople: Stop Complaining About High Prices — They Are Your Job SecurityMike Weinberg makes an economic case that salespeople should actively want their company to charge premium prices, not resent it. Higher prices require skilled people to defend them, which is why sales roles exist at all. Low-cost market leaders — he uses Walmart and Amazon as ex

Sales Commissions Should Flow From Banked Revenue, Not Booked MeetingsAdem Manderovic argues that paying salespeople on meetings booked, finance applications submitted, or opportunities opened — before a single dollar clears the bank — is structurally insolvent. His fix is blunt: route commissions to marketing, business development, and customer su

The Lost Art of Feedback Loops: What Modern Sales Teams ForgotManderovic points to two practices that largely vanished from sales teams after 2011 — systematically asking both won and lost customers why they bought or walked away, and running live quoting days where key stakeholders gather to field objections in real time and agree on a pat

A Wellness Company's Stagnant Revenue Revealed a Simple Math ProblemManderovic describes a recent engagement with a wellness company whose ad returns looked healthy on paper but whose revenue refused to grow. A straightforward financial model told the story: once average transaction value, customer lifetime value, and operational costs were facto

New Marketing Leaders Should Audit CRM Definitions Before Chasing Growth TargetsBefore optimizing any marketing program, incoming leaders must first establish shared definitions for terms like MQL, lead, and customer — then verify that the CRM actually tracks those agreed definitions. Ashley Faus describes a nonprofit whose marketing team counted every colle

Five-Intent Framework Offers Sharper Metrics for Lifecycle Marketing ProgramsMost marketing teams measure programs almost exclusively through buy-intent actions — book a demo, contact sales, activate a trial — but Ashley Faus argues that lifecycle marketing demands a different lens. She proposes mapping both leading and lagging indicators to five distinct

Sales Complaints About Lead Quality Are the Starting Point for Better Marketing AlignmentWhen sales teams dismiss marketing-generated leads as worthless, that friction is actually a diagnostic opportunity. Ashley Faus uses the example of scraping LinkedIn commenters to build an outbound list — a tactic that signals zero purchase intent — to illustrate how misaligned

Atlassian's Product-Led Growth History Shapes How It Tracks Lifecycle MarketingBecause Atlassian operated for much of its history without a sales team, it built lifecycle marketing around in-product behavior rather than sales pipeline stages. Ashley Faus identifies specific 'sticky actions' — creating a first Jira project, inviting a collaborator, tagging s

The '$10 Game' Offers a Lower-Risk Method for Testing Marketing AssumptionsChanging how an established organization measures marketing success is politically difficult, but Ashley Faus recommends two concrete entry points. The first is piloting new metrics on an emerging product line rather than the core business, where the stakes are lower and proof-of

Founder Admits Staying Too Hands-Off Nearly Killed His CompanyColin Stewart built Predictable Revenue's cold email agency from the ground up, writing every script and process himself — then made a critical mistake when pivoting to an SDR agency: he stayed at the executive level and handed the rebuild to others. The result was a business tha

A Simple CRM Tweak Could Save Sales Teams Years of Wasted EffortMost salespeople know they should stay in touch with prospects who aren't ready to buy yet — they just have nowhere to put them. Colin Stewart's fix is almost offensively simple: delete the "close lost" status in your CRM entirely, replace it with "close lost nurture" for contact

Sales Teams Are Rejecting Good Leads for Not Closing Fast EnoughStewart describes a pattern that drove him to write a book: clients would receive a warm, well-qualified prospect from his agency and refuse the meeting because the contact "probably won't buy in the next 90 days." His argument is that reaching a prospect months before they're in

From Zero to $1M ARR in Three Months — Then the Emails Stopped SendingAfter an early CRM venture called Voltage failed to find buyers, Stewart connected with Aaron Ross and built Carb.io, a cold email platform, first validating the idea as a services agency that reached $1 million in revenue within a year at 70% profit margins. When the software la

Predictable Revenue Shuts Sales Floor After Best Clients Keep Walking Out the DoorStewart closed Predictable Revenue's outsourced sales development operation after recognising a structural trap baked into the model: the highest-quality clients, including Uber when it launched Uber Eats, would stay for four to six months, hire their own team — in Uber's case, 1

CRM Became Management's Reporting Tool — and Sales Reps Stopped Using ItStewart traces a specific moment of decay in CRM adoption: when these systems moved to the cloud, ownership shifted from salespeople — who had built their own workflows inside them — to managers and marketers hungry for data, who responded by mandating required fields and rigid p

A Shirt Store's 30-Second Pitch Shows How Customer-Centred Storytelling Eliminates Price ResistanceJeff Shore walked into Hammer Shirts, a men's clothing shop in downtown Chicago, and within thirty seconds had mentally committed to buying at least one shirt — before ever glancing at a price tag. The salesman's opening line was the key: he told Shore that Hammer shirts are not

Buyers Arrive Hoping for a Good Salesperson — and Usually Leave Disappointed, Weinberg SaysWalking into an Audi dealership looking for a family sedan, Mike Weinberg sat down beside a salesman who then talked uninterrupted for seven minutes about technology Weinberg had no interest in. That experience, he says, is the norm rather than the exception — and it shapes every

Weinberg's Closing Method: Ask 'What Do You Think?', Then Stop TalkingMike Weinberg's preferred approach to closing a sale rests on two moves most sellers resist: surfacing objections on purpose, and demanding a mutual commitment before leaving the room. Rather than applying pressure or running through scripted closes, Weinberg summarises the case

Weinberg Redefines 'Story' in Sales: Not Narrative Art, But a Set of Customer-Focused Talking PointsMike Weinberg draws a sharp distinction between storytelling as a performance skill and what he calls "your story" in sales — the collection of talking points a seller uses to describe what they do and how they help clients. That story, he argues, is the most important weapon in

Sales Consultant Identifies Five Structural Reasons Sales Teams Fail to Win New BusinessWhen executives complain that their teams aren't filling pipelines, sales consultant Mike Weinberg argues the problem rarely starts with selling skills. He identifies five distinct failure points: hiring people wired for relationship management rather than new-business hunting; c

The Sales Story, Not the Product, Is a Seller's Most Powerful Weapon, Weinberg SaysMike Weinberg defines the sales story not as a formal pitch deck but as the living collection of language a salesperson reaches for in every interaction — voicemails, cold emails, opening lines in a meeting, slides in a proposal. The decisive quality of a strong sales story, he a

Weinberg: Salespeople Who See Themselves as Problem-Solvers, Not Pests, Consistently OutperformMike Weinberg traces his foundational sales philosophy to a single piece of advice his father gave him thirty years ago when he entered the profession: your goal is to help your customer win, and as long as that is your motivation, you will always win too. That reframe, he says,

Top Salespeople Own Their Results Even When the Territory Works Against Them, Weinberg ArguesMike Weinberg acknowledges that external headwinds are real — economic downturns, depressed sectors, unfairly carved territories. He describes mentoring a young salesperson handed a list of largely dormant accounts while colleagues in neighbouring territories work richer ground.

Weinberg Describes the Perfect Sales Pitch — One Guaranteed to FailAsked to construct a sales story engineered to fail, Mike Weinberg answers without hesitation: open with slides of the company's buildings, follow with org charts, show a photograph of the founder alongside a timeline of acquisitions, and then walk through detailed flowcharts of

Weinberg Warns Against the 'Sales Voice' — and the Overcorrection That Sends Prospects to SleepMike Weinberg argues that the inauthentic, over-enthusiastic vocal tone some salespeople adopt — what he calls the sales voice — actively destroys trust, because it signals to prospects that something performative rather than genuine is happening. His prescription is straightforw

Cavallo insiste: La liberalización total del mercado cambiario es clave para reducir el riesgo paísDomingo Cavallo, exministro de Economía, contradice la estrategia económica del gobierno, afirmando que el riesgo país de Argentina solo bajará significativamente si se liberaliza completamente el mercado cambiario, se eliminan los controles y se permite el libre movimiento de ca

Cavallo advierte sobre la 'bomba cambiaria' bajo el régimen actual y propone la libertad del dólar para acumular reservasDomingo Cavallo sostiene que el actual régimen cambiario incrementa la probabilidad de una "bomba cambiaria", dado que el Banco Central carece de divisas propias para contener una corrida. En contraste, propone que una liberalización total del mercado, que permita a los exportado

Cavallo critica que el gobierno de Milei priorizó el equilibrio fiscal sobre la reforma monetaria fundamentalDomingo Cavallo, artífice del plan de Convertibilidad, critica que el gobierno de Javier Milei, tras su campaña electoral y la conformación de su equipo económico con Luis Caputo, se ha enfocado en el equilibrio fiscal, pero ha descuidado la reforma monetaria, la cual considera f

Cavallo propone un marco normativo simplificado para la estabilidad cambiaria, siguiendo el modelo peruanoDomingo Cavallo propone un marco normativo simplificado para la estabilidad cambiaria, inspirado en la Ley de Convertibilidad pero sin un tipo de cambio fijo, al estilo del sistema peruano. Su propuesta incluye la eliminación de los controles de cambio, la unificación del mercado

Cavallo: El Banco Central debe capitalizar la afluencia de dólares para acumular reservas propiasDomingo Cavallo enfatiza que el Banco Central debe aprovechar la actual afluencia de dólares proveniente del superávit comercial para acumular reservas propias, en lugar de destinarlas al Tesoro. Para lograrlo, propone la eliminación total de los controles de cambio y la unificac

Cavallo critica la dependencia del FMI y aboga por reservas propias y libertad cambiaria para reducir el riesgo paísDomingo Cavallo critica severamente la dependencia de Argentina de prestamistas de última instancia como el Fondo Monetario Internacional (FMI) o el Tesoro de Estados Unidos, argumentando que esta dependencia incrementa el riesgo país en lugar de reducirlo. Para estabilizar la ec

Airbus Narrows Hydrogen Focus to Fuel Cells, Targets 100-Seat Zero-Emission AircraftAirbus has formally dropped hydrogen combustion from its ZeroE programme, concentrating exclusively on fuel-cell propulsion and liquid hydrogen storage — a combination the company describes as effectively a hydrogen battery driving electric motors. The shift follows a successful

Contrails Warm the Planet as Much as All Aviation CO2 Combined, Cambridge Researcher ExplainsContrails — the white streaks left by aircraft — produce roughly as much atmospheric warming as all the carbon dioxide aviation has emitted since the jet age began, despite lasting only a few hours. Cambridge University Professor Steve Barrett explained the mechanism clearly: wat

GE Aerospace Says Conventional Jet Engine Design Hits Physical Limit, Open Fan Could Deliver 20% Fuel SavingThe chief technology and operating officer of GE Aerospace told an Airbus event that the conventional ducted jet engine is approaching a hard physical ceiling: the duct surrounding the fan generates so much drag that it cancels out any efficiency gains from enlarging the fan beyo

Airbus Launches Ground-Based Contrail Test Chamber as Live Avoidance Trials Run Over Northwest EuropeAirbus is launching a new ground-based experiment called PACIFIC that will position a probe behind a stationary A350's engine to replicate contrail formation in a controlled cloud-chamber environment — removing the unpredictability of airborne testing. The initiative follows flig

Airbus and RSB Launch Book-and-Claim Pilot to Broaden Access to Sustainable Aviation Fuel CreditsAirbus and the Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials have announced a partnership to pilot a book-and-claim system designed to widen access to sustainable aviation fuel without requiring physical delivery to every airport. Under the scheme, an airline or aircraft operator anywhe

Scientists Urge Action on Contrail Avoidance Now, Citing Favourable Risk Calculus Despite Data GapsProfessor Steve Barrett of Cambridge University argued that a generation of peer-reviewed research already provides a sufficient evidence base to begin acting on contrail avoidance, rather than waiting for further uncertainty reduction. His risk calculus is stark: eliminating con

Machine Decisioning Offers Auditable Alternative to Human Bias in Critical FieldsToby Konitzer asserts that machine decisioning extends far beyond marketing applications, holding the potential to significantly reduce systemic biases and suboptimal outcomes in critical areas such as healthcare, hiring, and criminal justice. He highlights that human decision-ma

Deploying Agentic AI on Correlational Data Poses 'Disastrous' Risks, Expert WarnsToby Konitzer warns against the dangerous trend of letting Agentic AI operate freely on data warehouses filled with purely correlational data. He explains that without a clear understanding of causal relationships, AI may recommend actions based on spurious correlations, like sug

Human Psychology Hinders Adoption of Superior AI Experimentation, Expert ClaimsToby Konitzer observes a paradox in decisioning science: despite the mathematical superiority and efficiency of dynamic allocation (reinforcement learning) over traditional A/B testing, many sophisticated companies, even those with numerous PhDs in the field, continue to use fixe

Dynamic Allocation Offers Efficient Alternative to Traditional A/B TestingToby Konitzer explains dynamic allocation, also known as reinforcement learning or multi-armed bandits, as a more efficient approach to experimentation than traditional A/B testing. While traditional A/B testing randomly splits traffic, typically 50/50, to evaluate different inte

Marketers Must Shift from Prediction to Causal Intervention, Expert ArguesToby Konitzer identifies a "prediction trap" in marketing, where highly accurate predictive models, such as those for customer lifetime value (LTV) or churn likelihood, only describe what will happen if nothing changes. He argues these models are not directly useful for marketers

Uninformed AI Can Sabotage Revenue KPIs in 'Boomerang Effect,' Expert WarnsToby Konitzer describes the "boomerang effect" in self-learning AI systems, where uninformed Agentic AI, especially without causal priors, initially applies random and potentially counterproductive treatments. During this "cold start problem" phase, the system can inadvertently s

The Best Salespeople Talk Less and Listen First, Sales Consultant ArguesThe clearest sign of a skilled salesperson, according to sales consultant Mike Weinberg, is restraint: they enter conversations asking questions rather than delivering pitches. Weinberg illustrates the gap with a personal car-buying experience. At an Audi dealership, a young sale

Weinberg Uses 2016 Election as Sales Case Study: Clinton's Wisconsin Absence and Trump's Chaotic Convention Hold Business LessonsSales consultant Mike Weinberg drew two pointed lessons from the 2016 presidential race for his book 'Sales Truth,' framing both candidates' missteps as cautionary tales any salesperson could recognize. Hillary Clinton became the first major-party nominee after clinching the nomi

The 1950s Sales Tactic That Beats Modern Intent DataA practice called "cataloging the market" — calling target accounts directly to ask who they use, what they dislike, and when their contracts expire — gives sales teams richer intelligence than most commercial data providers can supply. Originally institutionalized by Canadian fi

Sales Team Broke National Records by Ditching Meeting MetricsBy converting generic bid contracts into persona-specific animated content, a sales team smashed national and international revenue records — even while missing its traditional "meetings set" targets. The experiment revealed that tailoring outreach to a narrow, well-understood cu

Sales Consultant Mike Weinberg Argues Three Verbs Define Every Salesperson's JobBusyness and likeability are not sales results. Mike Weinberg, whose book "New Sales. Simplified." has been a bestseller for eleven years, argues that every sales activity should be measured against just three verbs: create, advance, and close. His prescription is precise — sales

Weinberg: Selling on Price Is What Happens When Your Story Isn't Good EnoughThe reason companies end up competing on price, according to Mike Weinberg, is almost never their product — it's their pitch. Weinberg argues that most salespeople default to what he calls the "about us" presentation: years in business, equipment, company culture. That approach,

Not All Salespeople Can Hunt: Weinberg on the Hiring Mistake Hiding in Plain SightDuring the pandemic demand surge, many industries filled sales roles with people who were skilled at responding to inbound inquiries — a very different capability from building new business from scratch. Mike Weinberg describes this as a DNA mismatch: relationship managers and or

Owner-Operators Will Always Choose Operations Over Sales — Unless They Build in DisciplineMike Weinberg makes a blunt claim backed by years of consulting across companies of all sizes: when a single leader carries both operational and sales responsibilities, that person will default to operations every single time. The reason is urgency — a staffing problem, an unhapp

Sales Trainer Mike Weinberg Says the Same Five Fundamentals Have Worked for Thirty YearsFrustrated by leading underperforming sales teams, Mike Weinberg left corporate life roughly thirteen years ago and began consulting, eventually writing "New Sales. Simplified.," which has remained a bestseller for eleven years. His core argument is straightforward and deliberate

Failing to Follow Up After a Quote Isn't Politeness — It's Indifference, Weinberg SaysWeinberg illustrates a widespread sales failure with a personal story: a landscaper he had used for twenty years came back, surveyed his property, emailed a quote for a significant renovation — and then never called again. Weinberg read the silence as a signal the contractor simp

Sales Manager Who Skips Field Coaching Is Like a Baseball Manager Who Never Watches the GameMike Weinberg reserves his sharpest criticism for sales managers who believe they can lead through CRM dashboards and late-night emails. When he asks managers how they spend time with their people, he says, some respond with a straight face that they simply don't have time for on

Sales Consultant Mike Weinberg: Fix Leadership Before Blaming the Sales TeamMike Weinberg wrote "Sales Management Simplified" out of frustration with a pattern he kept encountering as a consultant: companies would hire him to fix their salespeople when the real problem sat one floor up. Training salespeople, he argues, only goes so far if the surrounding

ChatGPT as Debate Opponent: Marketer's 22-Page Sparring Session Reveals a Smarter AI WorkflowAshley Faus used ChatGPT to prepare for a live debate at Inbound by running both sides of the argument herself — asking the model which of her arguments an opponent would most want to hear because they were easiest to refute, and which opposing points she should fear most. The ex

Ashley Faus Proposes 'Content Playground' to Replace the Linear Marketing FunnelThe traditional marketing funnel assumes audiences move neatly from awareness to purchase on a marketer's schedule — a premise Ashley Faus argues is demonstrably false. Her alternative, the content playground framework, maps content along two axes: depth (conceptual, strategic, o

Read Job Descriptions You'll Never Apply For — Atlassian Marketer's Counterintuitive Career StrategyAshley Faus has spent nearly eight years at Atlassian while effectively changing jobs every two years — through promotions, lateral moves, and team changes — by treating her role as something to rethink on an 18-month cycle. The core tactic is methodical: she reads job descriptio

The Motorcycle Peace Sign and the Limits of AI: How Lived Experience Shapes Faus's Marketing PhilosophyAshley Faus built the central argument of her book, Human-Centered Marketing, around something AI cannot replicate: the tacit knowledge of being inside a community. The motorcycle peace sign exchanged between riders, the Jeep wave, the surfer's shaka — these gestures only carry m

Atlassian's Team Playbook Shows How the Content Playground Framework Becomes a Real Go-to-Market PlanTurning the content playground from theory into an editorial calendar starts with narrative workshops — brainstorming every topic a team has credibility to discuss, then clustering them into pillars. At Atlassian, that process runs on Confluence whiteboards, with the company's Ro

AI Is Eliminating the Entry-Level Jobs That Produce Senior Leaders — and No One Has a PlanAshley Faus frames one of the least-discussed risks of AI automation as a leadership pipeline problem: if AI absorbs the foundational, entry-level work through which professionals develop expertise, the industry will face a shortage of experienced senior talent within three to fi

Two Sales Managers, Two Philosophies: The Coach Who Let Her Rep FailBradley Hamm's first sales manager, Jennifer, routinely took over client calls during ride-alongs, effectively robbing him of the chance to learn. His second, Sharma, sat in silence while he struggled through pharmaceutical sales calls with physicians at age 25, then delivered he

Tech Sales Teams Hired During the Boom Are Struggling to Survive the SlowdownSales consultant Mike Weinberg estimates that in 30 to 40 percent of the companies he now advises, the core problem is wrong or underdeveloped talent — not strategy or process. His sharpest example, drawn from a surge of technology clients he took on in early 2025, involves sales

Sales Managers Who Play Hero Instead of Making Them Are Burning Out Their TeamsMike Weinberg argues that the sales manager's job reduces to two levers: accountability — making sure people do their jobs by scrutinising pipeline coverage and results — and coaching, which means asking questions and observing rather than prescribing answers. Managers who skip b

What Separates a True Sales Hunter: Low Conflict-Aversion and High CompetitivenessMike Weinberg identifies two non-negotiable traits in salespeople hired to generate new business: a willingness to push through rejection rather than retreat, and a deeply competitive drive to keep score. When a prospect says they are not interested, a genuine hunter does not apo

The Author of Two Top Sales Management Books Admits He Nearly Failed as a Sales ManagerMike Weinberg spent years as the top individual salesperson at three companies before taking a sales executive role — and by his own account, he nearly failed at it. His mistake was assuming that teaching his reps to sell the way he sold would be enough. It was not. The skills th

Technology Companies Are Promoting Sales Stars Into Manager Roles — Then Watching Them 'Super-Rep'Weinberg reports a pattern he encountered repeatedly while consulting for technology companies over the past year: sales managers who respond to underperforming teams not by coaching or holding people accountable, but by doing the work themselves — running calls, shaping proposal

Senior Marketers Face a Dilemma: Train the AI or Develop the Team?Ashley Faus, drawing on 15 years of marketing experience, argues that the real cost of adopting AI is not the subscription fee but the hours a senior professional must spend translating deep expertise into written instructions a machine can follow. Her pointed question: why inves