Who is this for
You lead a B2B sales or business development team.
You’re squeezed from both directions: targets and forecasts from senior leadership, support and coaching from your reps.
You’re under pressure to hit team quota, keep good people, protect their time from internal noise, and somehow find space to coach.
You don’t have spare hours for theory. If Sales Reset is going to help, it has to make next week’s 1:1s, huddles and deal reviews better.
The core idea: quota and customer outcomes
In almost all B2B teams, sellers are judged on one dominant metric: quota.
If enough revenue lands, the system assumes sales are doing their job. What happens to customers after the sale is “someone else’s problem”.
Sales Reset keeps achieving quota non-negotiable and adds a second accountability that changes priorities, plans and behaviours:
In every qualified opportunity, your team helps customers define clear, valuable outcomes that your business can actually deliver.
Those outcomes show up in proposals, reviews, and post-sale conversations, not just in discovery notes
This is not a “nice philosophy”. It is a different way for you to use your leadership leverage:
What you ask about in pipeline calls
How you run 1:1s and team meetings
What you praise, challenge and document in CRM
Done well, this does not slow the team down. It speeds up what matters:
Weak opportunities are qualified out earlier
Stronger ones move faster because outcomes, stakeholders and risks are clearer
“No decision” and late surprises reduce
A proposal exercise that tells you a lot
Pick three recent proposals your team has sent:
One you won
One you lost
One that went quiet or is stuck
Read each proposal as if you were the customer’s COO or CFO. Ask three questions:
Outcomes:
Are the outcomes defined clearly enough that you’d feel confident signing and being held accountable for them?
Stakeholders:
Is it obvious who inside the customer organisation will feel the impact if this works, and who needs to be involved?
Evidence and risk:
Is there even a simple outline of how success will be measured, reported, and what might get in the way?
Then ask yourself one tougher question:
“If 10–20% of my team’s variable pay depended on these outcomes being achieved and evidenced, would I still be comfortable with this proposal?”
If the honest answer is “no” more often than “yes”, you’ve just surfaced the gap Sales Reset is here to address.
That’s not a criticism of your team. It’s a signal that the system around them has never required this level of outcome clarity.
What Sales Reset will change in your week
Sales Reset doesn’t start with a big programme. It starts with small shifts in how you already lead.
In your 1:1s:
Ask at least two questions about outcomes, stakeholders and implications before you ask about dates and value
Examples:
“In their words, what outcome are they actually trying to achieve here?”
“Who else on their side will really feel it if this works or fails?”
“What did you choose to dig deeper on in the last call?”
In pipeline calls:
For a few key deals, replace “When will this close?” with:
“What have they agreed success will look like, and who owns that?”
“Where in the last conversation did you ask a second, third and fourth question on the most important point?”
Listen for whether your reps are talking about outcomes and people, or just stages and dates
In team meetings:
Move one short segment from broadcast to facilitation:
“Who’s had a conversation in the last fortnight where a deeper set of questions changed what the customer said they really wanted?”
Stay with one example and unpack the questions they asked, and what changed
In CRM:
Add one or two simple inspection points on key opportunities:
“Customer outcome in their words”
“Named internal owner”
Ask about those fields in reviews; they’ll quickly stop being “nice to fill in later”
None of this adds extra meetings. It changes how you use meetings and systems you already have.
Two-week experiment: change the questions, not the targets
For the next two weeks, you could commit to three simple shifts:
In every 1:1, ask at least two outcome-and-stakeholder questions before you discuss the forecast
In every pipeline review, pick 3–5 deals and ask: “What outcomes have they spoken about in their words?” before “When will it close?”
Each day, add at least one CRM comment per rep that pulls attention back to outcomes (“What will success look like for them?”)
Watch what changes:
Reps start talking more about customer outcomes and stakeholders, not just numbers
Some opportunities get re-classified or qualified out sooner
You hear your own questions coming back when they describe customer conversations
You’re still accountable for the team number. That doesn’t change.
What can change is this: every interaction you have with your team either reinforces quota-only thinking, or helps them behave more like outcome architects with customers.
What’s in the Playbook for team leaders right now
Right now, the Sales Reset Playbook for team leaders is in early build. You’re seeing version one of everything.
So far, there are core articles on:
How the way you coach and communicate with your team shapes the way they talk with customers
How to weave coaching skills into 1:1s, team meetings, digital channels and CRM comments
How to use AI summaries and transcripts as raw material for better coaching, not as a replacement for it
New team leader pieces will land in your inbox as they’re published, and every article is added to the online archive so you can come back when you are ready.
If you try any of the ideas from this Quick Start, we’d genuinely welcome hearing what happens. Use the comments at the bottom of the articles to share:
Where this helped you change a conversation, decision or review
Where you hit friction with your team or with colleagues
What you’d like more examples or tools for
Your feedback will directly shape which team-leader topics we build next, and how practical they are for your world.
