Thoughts on Selling - Value Selling, Sales Leadership, Sales Enablement Insights

A deal stalls. The buyer goes quiet. And the industry has one answer: more. More sequences, more touches, more tooling. Then somebody says the rep needs to want it more.

The rep is almost never the problem.

In this episode, Lee reads Chapter One of The Second Meeting, the first book in the Acelera Sales Fables. Before the reading, he tells the origin story. Alex Mercer started as Stacy, a brief appearance in a nonfiction manuscr...

Cory Dunham failed the same calculus class twice — for the same reason both times. He wouldn't ask for help.

That story sits at the center of this conversation. Cory is an executive coach, keynote speaker, business strategist, and private pilot who's spent 40 years in business learning that the voice telling you not to raise your hand is not you. It's a recording from years ago, and it only shows up when it doesn't serve you.

W...

Most companies believe revenue growth solves everything. Doug C. Brown has spent three decades proving otherwise.

Doug is CEO of CEO Sales Strategies, and his work starts from an uncomfortable premise: the money you're looking for is already inside your business. You've paid to acquire it. It's sitting in underpricing, in proposals nobody followed up on, in a fulfillment process that takes eight weeks when it should take one. It jus...

Michael Skriver started in finance and IT, then — as he puts it — upgraded to sales. He's spent his career leading complex B2B organizations across Europe and Asia, and he came into this conversation with a line his CEO once dropped on three thousand people: you have no clue how to sell, you're a bunch of traders.

That CEO was right. And what he taught Michael next is the through-line of this episode: if you say you're c...

Buyer confidence is at an all-time low — and more data isn't fixing it. In this episode, Lee sits down with Tom Pisello (The ROI Guy), value-selling pioneer and founder of GeniusDrive, to unpack why B2B deals stall even when the numbers are solid.

Tom and Lee explore Aristotle's three buy buttons, the shift from FOMO to fear of messing up, why trust now drives 50% of the purchase decision, and what vendors need to do different...

Chris Carter has been in the SAP ecosystem for decades — and he's watched AI go from expert systems on a Commodore VIC-20 to a tool that's genuinely changing how enterprise companies forecast, plan, and sell. He's not impressed by the hype. He's impressed by the people who actually use it well.

In this episode, Chris and Lee cover what separates the sellers who are winning right now from the ones firing off AI-generated emails...

Gina Smith spent 27 years selling medical devices into hospital operating rooms — and she got there entirely by accident. No role models. No sales background. A career in HR she was tired of.

One conversation with a sales manager who couldn't fill a role. And a "mercy interview" she then went out and won.

In this episode, Gina and Lee dig into what actually drives sales performance in high-stakes, complex environments — ...

Danny Bobrow has spent 36 years in marketing and communications. He discovered a hard truth about sales effectiveness: getting the phone to ring is only half the battle. What happens after it rings—how calls are handled, how trust is built, how resistance is navigated—determines everything.

That discovery led him to create the Persuasion Blueprint, a framework built on brain science, first impression research, and hard-w...

Kris Rudeegraap is the co-founder and co-CEO of Sendoso, the largest direct mail and gifting platform in the world. Before building a company with global warehouses, a drop-ship network across continents, and $150 million in funding, Kris was a top seller who got creative when email stopped working.

This conversation covers the origin story of Sendoso, the psychology of reciprocity, and why dimensional mail is the channel that never...

Juan García is the co-founder of Tuio, an AI-native insurance company based in Spain. Before starting Tuio, Juan was an engineer at Cisco, a strategy consultant focused on marketing and sales, and the builder of Orange Insurance in Spain's new ventures division. That's where he saw just how broken insurance was—and decided to do something about it.

This conversation covers revolutionary thinking, the psychology of digital-nati...

Joe Terry and I go way back—I met him when he was CEO of Corporate Visions, and he's been on a 30-year journey studying what separates leaders who connect from those who collide.

He's also the co-author of Surrender to Lead, a USA Today bestseller that reframes everything we think we know about leadership.

This conversation got deep fast. We talked about the action trap—that seductive belief that if we just do more, the ...

Dramatically improve your sales effectiveness, value selling impact and sales enablement best practices by focusing on communicating. Really connecting.

Frankie Kemp has one of those backgrounds that sounds made up: acting school, award-winning comedy writer, NLP practitioner, and now a communication coach for technical specialists at companies like major pharma, energy, and finance firms. She's helped close multimillion-pound deal...

Enterprise sales is under pressure to adopt AI sales strategies. But...in enterprise sales, the mindset of the sales rep still dictates success or failure.

James Stephan-Usypchuk has been building predictive AI systems for 15 years—long before ChatGPT made it mainstream. He's a cancer survivor, serial entrepreneur, and someone who's worked with BlackRock, Blackstone, and private equity firms on deal origination. And he has a p...

Javier Lozano Jr. on Sales and Marketing Alignment, AI, and Fixing Leaky Pipelines

The Business Value Hypothesis is still the king of the sales sales strategy. And your sales people need to focus on selling with a perspective or point of view. And marketing must support this approach.

If your sales and marketing teams aren't aligned on revenue, you don't have a pipeline problem — you have a structural problem. In this episode I...

In this episode, I sit down with Drew Sechrist, the former Salesforce veteran who helped take the company from zero to $1 billion. Now the CEO of Connect the Dots, Drew is on a mission to kill the cold call forever.

We discuss the "Osmosis Deficit" facing remote sales teams, why you can't close enterprise deals over Zoom, and the "LL Bean" lesson on solution selling that I learned in a shoe department. Drew explains why your network...

I've been saying for years that B2B selling is broken. Alex Raymond — founder of AMplify, author of The Growth Department, and host of Account Manager Secrets — thinks account management is broken too. So naturally we had a lot to talk about.

Alex has spent the last decade figuring out how companies can grow faster and more profitably through the customers they already have.

And the data he brings to this conversation is ...

I recently sat down with Carole Mahoney, a self-described "hot nerd," author of Buyer First, and a woman on a mission to redeem the sales profession. Carole didn't start out loving sales; in fact, she started in marketing specifically to make salespeople obsolete. But she realized that to help small businesses grow, she had to embrace selling—not as a manipulation, but as a mechanism for change.

In this episode, we explore how...

Episode SummaryIn this episode of Thoughts on Selling, Lee Levitt sits down with Amos Balongo—a leadership expert joining us from Hawaii who is in the business of "manufacturing leaders."

We dig into a critical failure point in most organizations: the gap between Strategy and Communication. Amos argues that many leaders rely on "Positional Leadership" (people follow you because they have to), which yields the bare minimum eff...

Episode Summary

Are your enterprise sales reps drowning in tools but starving for insight? In this episode of Thoughts on Selling, Lee Levitt sits down with Pete Smith, founder of SpotLogic and veteran sales leader, to discuss the "Cognitive Load" crisis in modern selling.

We explore why 84% of enterprise deals stall after the first meeting and how Sales Enablement leaders can help reps stop "winging it" and start winning. From his d...