Systems. Models. AI. Exploring how better thinking builds better organizations.
Buxtehude
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The job of sales management is not to standardise behaviour. It's to understand why successful people succeed — and improve the conditions that make it repeatable.
piped.video/watch?v=eVHeu4Mv…
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The most expensive mistake I see in sales management. And I've made it myself.
It starts with something completely reasonable: you look at your best salesperson and ask what she does differently.
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Maybe the demos work.
Or maybe she earns those demos because she qualifies ruthlessly, because customers trust her, because she says no to deals your others chase for months.
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The job of sales management is not to standardise behaviour. It's to understand why successful people succeed — and improve the conditions that make it repeatable.
piped.video/eVHeu4MvBQk?si=71Zw…
Revenue, bookings, market, competitors: things you care about and cannot control.
Opportunity quality, coaching, qualification, pipeline: things you can actually change.
Almost everything we report on sits in the first list. Almost everything we can change sits in the second.
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A conversion rate only means something if everyone counts the same thing.
The framework barely matters — BANT, or one you invent. What matters is that everyone means the same thing by "qualified."
Without that, your pipeline is a set of private opinions.
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There is a German word for work that keeps you busy without changing anything: Beschäftigungstherapie — occupational therapy.
Reporting isn't that. A manager who can't explain the numbers isn't credible.
But a week made almost entirely of it is.
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A question worth answering honestly, for last week:
Of your forty hours as a manager — how many went into explaining what already happened, and how many into improving what hasn't?
Most managers are surprised by their own answer. I was.
piped.video/eVHeu4MvBQk?si=SV9U…
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Conversion rate is not a lever. You cannot pull it.
Nobody ever improved conversion by demanding better conversion.
It tells you whether the improvements you made upstream were real. If it doesn't move, your improvement wasn't one.
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Every sales manager gets the same resource: roughly forty hours a week.
Some of it explains yesterday — reporting, forecasts, CRM admin. The rest improves tomorrow — coaching, opportunities, qualification.
Both are real work. Only one of them can still change the outcome.
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Picture the monthly sales meeting. Revenue, bookings, forecast, deviations, explanations.
Smart people, a full hour, real energy — spent on numbers that are already fixed.
Not one decision in that room can change a single one number.
piped.video/eVHeu4MvBQk?si=n5FP…
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Managers don't manage revenue.
They manage the system that creates revenue.
Revenue is an output. Outputs can be measured, explained, celebrated — but they can't be managed. Systems can.
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