The Library · Long-Form
Writing on the craft of selling.
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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Case Study
For Leaders
For Sales Pros
The July ghost: a live deal, or a slow goodbye?
In summer, a dead deal and a paused deal send the same signal: silence. The reps who land Q3 are the ones who tell them apart in July, not September.
The summer pipeline lie: it freezes on contact.
Pipeline that looks healthy in June predicts almost nothing about Q3. The three calendar distortions that inflate your number on the way in and pull the floor out on the way out, and the one June move that gives you an honest August forecast.
The vertical trap.
A B2B services company built a three-year run 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 numbers 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 breakdown of an org that booked $38M in a single quarter, and what the trajectory 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.
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.
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Long-form publishes monthly. The Dispatch covers the weekly cadence: shorter signals, applied moves, one issue every Tuesday.
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