The Library · Long-Form
Writing on slope construction.
Long-form essays, deal breakdowns, and field-tested frameworks. Read in sequence, or pull what fits your current cycle. New writing publishes monthly — the Dispatch covers the weekly cadence.
Index
The writing.
Thirteen essays across thesis, application, case studies, and audience-specific work. Read in order, or pull what fits the seat you're in.
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Thesis
Application
Case Study
For Leaders
For Sales Pros
The vertical trap.
A B2B services company built a three-year slope on one vertical. When the segment compressed, half the pipeline vanished in a single quarter. The lesson — and the rebuild — separates segment success from system success.
Pipeline review is not deal inspection.
Most leaders run one and call it the other. They are different operations. The audit that exposes the gap — and the four questions that install real deal inspection in your forecast meeting.
The comp reset that cost a quarter.
A B2B services org missed by eleven percent and diagnosed it as a motivation problem. Six months later, two reps gone and the slope still eroding, they found the real issue. It wasn't comp.
The middle-of-the-deal move.
AEs who close are doing something AEs who pitch don't. It's not in discovery. It's not in close. It's in the middle — the twenty-minute call that surfaces the procurement objection three weeks before procurement does.
The Tuesday forecast question.
One question, asked at the same point in every forecast meeting, that exposes pipeline truth more than any dashboard. The three forms of real change — and what nothing major actually means.
The $38M Illusion: When momentum looked like product–market fit.
A four-block diagnostic on an org that booked $38M in a single quarter — and what the slope actually showed underneath. The most important quarter in the company's history was also its most misleading.
Pipeline coverage is a lie we all tell ourselves.
3x coverage gets treated as a safety metric. It's a comfort metric. The difference matters when the quarter actually has to land — and the math of pipeline quality is what survives.
The I.R.C. pre-mortem.
Before the quarter starts, name the three things most likely to break the slope. A short framework for converting forecast anxiety into operating discipline.
Why your top rep can't be replicated (and what to do about it).
The reflex is to build playbooks from the top performer. The trap is that the top performer is rarely doing what they say they're doing. Here's how to actually find the signal — and what to install once you do.
Compounding is a cadence, not a comp plan.
Most orgs try to comp their way into compounding behavior. The pattern fails for predictable reasons — and the orgs that compound build cadence first, then let comp reinforce it.
Forecast survivability vs. forecast accuracy.
Accuracy measures how close you landed to the call. Survivability measures whether the call would have held if the top deal disappeared. Most leaders optimize the wrong one.
What every won deal had (that the lost ones didn't).
An exercise for any IC: pull your last twelve closed deals — six won, six lost. The patterns that emerge are usually the ones you weren't tracking.
The Domination Curve: An introduction.
The first essay in the series. Why almost every sales organization confuses a spike for a system, and the diagnostic framework that closes the gap.
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