For three years a CEO explained his best rep away with five words: "Maria’s just a natural." That story was costing $905K a year. I spent a Tuesday afternoon with her and found what she did differently. Then we built it into something everyone could use.
Infrastructure doesn’t drift.
From the archive
"Maria’s just a natural." That’s what you tell yourself when you’ve stopped being curious. It feels like acceptance. It’s actually negligence - and in this case it was costing $905K a year.
When I arrived, a previous consultant’s 23-point improvement plan was sitting in a drawer. CRM reconfiguration, new deck, comp restructure, referral program. Not one item touched. A list of 23 things isn’t a plan - it’s a guilt trip with bullet points. Every morning the CEO walked past that drawer, felt vaguely terrible, and did nothing, because where do you start when everything is supposedly urgent?
You don’t. You freeze. We left the drawer closed and fixed three leaks, one a week, in order.
I didn’t interview Maria. I watched her - because when you ask people what they do, they tell you what they think they do.
Before every first call, Maria ran four questions - trigger, cost of inaction, decision authority, timeline. The other four reps had no filter and chased everything. That gap burned $310K a year.
Deliverable: a one-page scorecard, laminated, on every desk, used before every first call. By day ten one rep said, "I feel like I just got 30% of my week back." He had.
The others opened with "tell me about your business" - an abdication dressed as curiosity. Maria opened like a doctor confirming a diagnosis: five sequenced questions moving from surface pain to a quantified, urgent problem.
Deliverable: a one-page framework - question sequence plus what to listen for. Two reps resisted until we listened to their own calls. "I’m not actually asking anything useful, am I?" No.
"We need to think about it" killed 45% of weak-rep deals and only 12% of Maria’s. She forced specificity: "is it more information, someone else to involve, or something that gave you pause?" Worked 88% of the time.
Deliverable: a two-page playbook, five objections, tested responses - frameworks not scripts, every one built on acknowledge → clarify → reframe → advance.
Close rate 19% → 26%. Sales cycle 5.6 → 4.2 months. New-hire ramp 210 → 75 days. $740K of incremental Year 1 revenue - 82% of a rigorous projection, capped only by two client-side delays. But the number that doesn’t show up in a spreadsheet: for the first time in three years, the CEO walked into his quarterly review without dreading it. His forecast meant something.
We didn’t implement 23 things. We built three that mattered. And Maria didn’t become less valuable - she became scalable. You’re not making people smarter. You’re making success impossible to avoid.
One essay a week on the work underneath B2B revenue. No pitch.
A 45-minute call. I tell you where the leaks are, whether or not we work together.
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