You’re a senior leader with responsibility for growth and risk: CEO, MD, GM, CRO, COO, or perhaps the owner of your own business.
From a sales and business development perspective, you care about:
The revenue required to achieve your business plans
Margin and mix
Renewal and expansion rates
Reputation and referenceability
You see forecasts, dashboards and board packs. You dip into big deals, but you don’t live in day-to-day sales.
You don’t need another “sales methodology”. You need a way to tell whether your system is quietly rewarding the right behaviour.
Sales Reset core idea: revenue quality, not just revenue volume
In most organisations, sales teams are rewarded overwhelmingly for getting orders booked.
If the numbers land, the system assumes everything worked. Whether customers achieve the outcomes they expected is typically not the sales team’s problem. Post-purchase issues are often handled in another function, with separate incentives and different reporting.
Sales Reset keeps your revenue and margin goals intact and adds a missing discipline:
On all qualified opportunities, customer outcomes are defined clearly enough at the point of sale that you can later ask:
“Did we deliver this?”
“If not, why not?”
Those outcomes start to appear consistently in proposals, handovers, reviews and renewal conversations
That shift changes the character of your revenue:
Fewer “no decision” and stalled deals
Fewer mismatches between expectation and delivery
More renewals, expansions and referenceable customers
And critically, once sufficient evidence of process improvement is available, this focus on outcomes can change the behaviours and priorities your company rewards through your compensation and incentive plans.
A simple proposal and outcome audit
Pick three or four significant pieces of business from the past 6–12 months:
One major new logo
One important renewal or expansion
One deal that created noise internally, or failed to meet expectations
Ask someone you trust to bring you:
The original proposal or commitment sent to the customer
A short internal view on what has actually happened since
Then ask three questions for each:
Outcomes:
In the proposal, are the customer’s outcomes clearly defined enough that you’d be comfortable signing it yourself and being held accountable for them?
Feasibility:
Before the commitment went out, was there any evidence that Delivery, Customer Success, Product, Finance or Legal validated the feasibility, risks, and timing?
Evidence:
Today, can anyone show you simple evidence that you’re on track to deliver those outcomes, or that you already have?
Finally, ask yourself:
“If 10–20% of sales variable pay had been linked to these outcomes being delivered, would everybody still be comfortable with what we promised and how we managed it?”
If the answer is “not yet”, that’s not a reason to panic.
It tells you your current system has been designed for one thing only: bookings.
Sales Reset is about redesigning a few key elements so the system can start to reward customer outcome achievement as well.
What Sales Reset changes at your level
As a senior leader, you don’t need to live in scripts and call structures. Your leverage points are design decisions.
Typical moves in a Sales Reset direction include:
Making outcome clarity a visible gate for larger deals
For significant opportunities, require a short, standard check before proposals go out:
Customer outcome thesis that uses the customer’s words
A named internal sponsor on their side
A basic view of how success will be reported and to whom
A feasibility and risk view from Delivery or CS
Changing what you review, not just what you target
Without touching revenue, margin or growth targets, you can change your questions:
“On our top deals, which outcomes has the customer actually articulated?”
“Who internally owns those outcomes?”
“Where do we see evidence of deeper questioning and stakeholder involvement in transcripts or notes?”
“Which proposals have been reviewed by Delivery, CS, Product, Finance and Legal?”
Using AI to see patterns, not anecdotes
With AI summaries and transcripts, you can ask for a small set of contrasting examples:
Old pattern: fast pitch, shallow questions, vague outcomes
New pattern: more thinking from the customer, clearer outcomes, sometimes a deliberate qualify-out
You do not need to listen to everything. You need enough to see whether conversations are genuinely changing.
None of this requires a reorganisation. It is a small number of visible signals that tell your sellers:
“We care about the quality and deliverability of what you promise, not just the booking date and value.”
A contained experiment that respects risk
Rather than announce a grand “transformation”, you can run a contained Sales Reset pilot on a narrow band of business.
For example:
Choose a band of opportunities by value, strategic importance or risk
For those only, require an outcome-and-feasibility check before proposals go out
Ask Sales, Delivery and CS to note:
Where current processes make it hard to involve the right people
Where outcome information is missing or thin
Where incentives quietly reward optimistic bookings over realistic commitments
Within a quarter or sooner, you’ll see three things:
Where sellers need more support to use coaching skills with customers
Where your current systems slow good deals or let risky promises through
Where incentive design and reviews are out of step with outcome accountability
The friction you uncover is useful information, not failure. It is your roadmap for a more aligned system.
At the same time, you should see early signs of speed where it matters: cleaner pipelines, fewer “no decision” outcomes, and less time spent on deals that were never real.
What’s in the Playbook for senior leaders right now
Right now, the Sales Reset Playbook for senior leaders is in very early stages and evolving fast.
Current articles focus on:
What it really means to ask your sales team to use coaching skills with customers
How system design decisions (compensation, reviews, proposals, AI) shape seller behaviour under pressure
How to think about pilots, evidence and risk when you explore a Sales Reset
As a subscriber, you’ll receive senior-leader-relevant pieces by email, each one designed to respect your time and tie directly to real decisions you can make.
Every article is added to the online archive, so you can point colleagues at specific pieces when you need shared context.
If you decide to try any of the experiments suggested here, we’d genuinely welcome hearing what you learn. Use article comments or reply to the emails to share:
Where this helped you see your system differently
Where you ran into political or practical constraints
What you’d like more tools or examples for
Sales Reset is both a strategic shift and a long-term discipline.
At the senior level, your role is not to fix sales technique, but to make sure the way you design targets, reviews, proposals, and AI use makes it easier, not harder, for your teams to define and deliver real outcomes for customers.
Where a Vision Workshop fits
If you’re curious about a Sales Reset but not ready to redesign anything yet, a Vision Workshop might be your best next step.
It’s a focused, one-off session led by Peter Button, the founder of Sales Reset with you and a small group of senior colleagues where we:
Look at how your current system (targets, reviews, proposals, AI, CS) really shapes seller behaviour today
Map where clearer customer outcomes and evidence could reduce risk and improve renewal and expansion rates
Identify one or two contained areas where a Sales Reset-style pilot might make commercial sense
There’s no commitment to a programme. The aim is simple: give you and your senior team a clearer, shared view of what outcome-focused selling would mean in your world, and whether a contained pilot is worth exploring now or later.
