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Guides

Practical Guides for Better B2B Selling

Notes from actual sales teams: what tends to go wrong in prospecting, discovery, coaching and everything after the training day, and what usually helps. Written to be useful on a Monday, not to be impressive in a slide.

Category

Prospecting

Reaching out first with something worth reading, across calls, email and LinkedIn. Training on this: prospecting training

Cold Outreach

Most cold outreach doesn't fail because there isn't enough of it. Sellers are already calling, emailing and messaging plenty of people. It fails because most of what gets sent could have gone to anyone, and the person receiving it can tell.

B2B Sales Prospecting

B2B prospecting rarely fails on volume. It fails because most of what gets sent could have gone to anybody, and the person receiving it can tell.

Why Sales Teams Don't Prospect

Most teams that have stopped prospecting still know how. The activity didn't get worse. It quietly stopped being something anyone had to account for.

Sales Prospecting Metrics

Why activity counts measure effort rather than effectiveness, and what's actually worth tracking to tell whether prospecting is working.

Cold Calling Objections

Most of what gets called an objection on a cold call isn't one. It's a reflex, and treating it as an argument to win is what ends the call.

Cold Call Opening Lines

An opener isn't a line to find, it's a job to do: earn the next ten seconds by being obviously relevant to this person rather than anyone with their job title.

How to Make a B2B Cold Call

The mechanics of a live B2B cold call: what the first ten seconds are for, how to get to a real question, and what a genuine next step looks like.

LinkedIn Prospecting

LinkedIn-specific mechanics: connection requests, messages versus InMail, voice notes, and reading engagement as a signal rather than a metric.

AI for Sales Prospecting

Where AI genuinely speeds up prospecting research and drafting, and why it makes the volume trap easier to fall into, not harder.

Category

Discovery

Understanding what's actually wrong before anyone starts talking about a product. Training on this: discovery training

Sales Discovery Questions

Most "best discovery questions" lists solve the wrong problem. Sellers rarely fail because they don't have enough questions. They fail because they stop one follow-up short of understanding what they've just been told.

How to Run a Discovery Call

A discovery call is not an information-gathering exercise with a demo bolted on the end. It's a conversation where both sides work out whether there's genuinely something worth solving.

Why Sales Discovery Calls Fail

Discovery calls rarely fail loudly. They go pleasantly, everyone agrees a next step, and nobody learned anything that would change how the deal is run.

Sales Discovery Call Checklist

A checklist for preparing properly and for checking, afterwards, whether the call actually did its job. Not a running order to work through live.

Sales Discovery vs Qualification

Most teams run these as two stages. They aren't. Qualification is what you're entitled to conclude from real discovery, not a separate exercise you do afterwards.

AI for Sales Discovery

Where AI genuinely helps with discovery, preparing, capturing and following up, and why it can't do the part that actually matters: listening.

Category

Deal Execution

Progressing and closing deals: stakeholders, objections that arrive late, negotiation and deal reviews. Training on this: B2B sales training

B2B Sales Negotiation

Negotiation in multi-stakeholder B2B and SaaS deals: why the discount conversation is usually a symptom, and what to fix earlier.

B2B Sales Objections

Objections that surface mid-deal after real evaluation: price, competitor comparison and "we need to think about it", and why the handling is different.

Selling to Multiple Stakeholders

Why deals stall when discovery stops at the champion, and what changes when the economic buyer describes the problem themselves.

How to Run a Deal Review

A practical structure for reviewing individual deals: fewer deals, more depth, evidence rather than opinion, and an action for the manager.

Helping Buyers Build a Business Case

A champion who believes in your solution still has to convince other people, in a room you're not in, using words you didn't give them.

Category

Sales Management & Coaching

Coaching specific behaviour instead of reviewing pipeline and hoping. Training on this: sales management training

How to Coach Sales Reps

Most sales coaching isn't coaching. It's a status update with feedback attached. The difference is whether the seller leaves knowing what they'll do differently in the next call.

Building a Sales Coaching Culture

Why one good coaching conversation doesn't create a coaching culture, and what actually has to be built underneath it to make coaching happen every week.

Becoming a First-Time Sales Manager

Being promoted for selling well is not preparation for managing people who sell. The first six months are mostly about giving up the thing you were rewarded for.

Sales Coaching

Sales coaching develops behaviour, not deals. Most of what gets called coaching is a status update with feedback attached, and sellers can tell the difference from the first question.

How to Run a Sales Coaching Session

A coaching session needs a shape: time for the seller to go first, a real call on the table, one behaviour, and a specific thing to try with a date to revisit it.

Sales Coaching Questions

The value of a coaching question isn't the asking, it's what the seller does with the answer. Most managers have enough questions already; they're short on the follow-up.

Sales Forecasting Accuracy

Why B2B forecasts stay optimistic, and what changes when close dates stop being the thing being managed.

Sales Onboarding

Ramp is a design problem: what to teach first, what good looks like, and why new sellers need permission rather than correction.

AI for Sales Call Coaching

Using AI to review calls and prepare coaching conversations, and where the manager's judgement still has to do the work.

How to Hire B2B Sales Reps

Hiring sellers for a consistent standard: what interviews actually test, what to make candidates do, and why the ramp plan is part of the hire.

Sales Team Structure

Splitting roles, SDR to AE ratios and when to add a management layer, judged by what the structure is meant to fix.

Category

SaaS & B2B Sales

How software and B2B teams actually run deals, and where they get stuck. Training on this: SaaS sales training

Renewal and Expansion Selling

Why renewal and expansion conversations start too late, and what has to happen in the months nobody is watching.

Navigating Procurement and Security Reviews

Why procurement and security turn up late in SaaS deals, and what to ask months earlier so they don't reset the timeline.

Running a Software Trial or Pilot

Trials and pilots that expire without a decision, and the agreement that has to exist before one starts.

Category

Training & Behaviour Change

Turning what a team knows into what it consistently does. Training on this: B2B sales training

Why Sales Training Fails

Most sales training doesn't fail in week three. It fails at the point it was bought, when nobody could say what should look different afterwards.

What Is a Sales Methodology?

A sales methodology is a shared way of describing and running a deal. Most teams don't lack one. They have three, half-remembered, and none of them describe what actually happens on a call.

How to Facilitate a Sales Training Session

If you're the one talking for most of the session, you're presenting. Facilitating means the sellers do the work while you keep it on the rails.

How to Choose a Sales Training Provider

Most sales training providers look similar on a website. The difference shows up in what happens after the session, not what's promised before it.

How to Plan a Sales Kickoff

Most SKO planning starts with the agenda template. The better starting point is deciding what should be different in a call three months later, then building backwards from that.

Sales Kickoff Mistakes to Avoid

Most sales kickoffs don't fail because of a bad venue or a flat speaker. They fail in ways that only show up three weeks later, in the calls nobody's watching.

Sales Kickoff Agenda

A kick off agenda has three different jobs to do at once. Most get built by simply listing everything that needs covering, which is exactly why the practice time is the first thing to get squeezed.

Sales Kickoff Checklist

Most of what makes a kick off worthwhile gets decided well before anyone books flights, and most of what determines whether it stuck gets decided weeks after everyone's gone home.

After the Sales Kickoff: Making It Stick

Almost nothing about whether a sales kickoff worked can be judged on the day itself. The gap between how the room felt and what actually changed is where most kick offs quietly lose their value.

What Is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement is the work of making it easier for sellers to sell: content, tools, onboarding, process and training. The boundaries are blurry, and in smaller teams the job usually belongs to nobody in particular.

How to Build a B2B Sales Process

Building a sales process from how your deals actually run: buyer evidence over seller activity, fewer stages, and the exit criteria that make it usable.

How to Measure Sales Training Effectiveness

Satisfaction scores measure whether people enjoyed the day. They don't measure whether anything changed afterwards, and those two things aren't reliably related.

Training

Guides help people understand something. Changing how a team actually sells usually takes practice and coaching, B2B sales training is where that work happens.

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