The Only Difference Was The Room They Were in.

Hey friends,

I want to tell you about two clients I worked with couple of months ago.

Same stage. Similar team size. Similar product.

Both are early-stage, and both were trying to build a sales engine that scales. I worked with both of them the same way:

• Same frameworks
• Same approach
• Same amount of time from me every week

The results were not the same. One team was performing. The other was struggling.

And for a while, I kept looking in the wrong place for the reason.

The team that was performing

When I joined their calls, I noticed something straight away. If someone got a deal wrong, a teammate jumped in to help.

If a rep was having a rough week, the others helped.

When there was a win, even a small one, the room felt it. Everyone was celebrating on slack.

But, nobody was soft on performance. Actually the opposite.

The founder pushed hard (and so did I). The energy was collaborative. The feedback was strong across the team.

People felt like they belonged to something.

The team that was struggling

The second team was different. Everyone worked hard, but not together.

Feedback culture did not exist yet. When someone struggled, they struggled alone. Often I jumped in 1:1s to lift up reps morale.

The founder was pushing on numbers, but the energy in the room was flat.

What this tells me

I have thought about this a lot over the past few weeks.

I am not a soft person when it comes to sales performance.

I believe in accountability. I believe in clear targets and honest conversations about who is not hitting them.

I have pushed founders to make tough calls when the right calls needed to be made.

But watching these two teams side by side has reminded me of something important.

Most people do not wake up wanting to underperform.

They wake up wanting to do well.

When they are not doing well, something is usually in the way.

And in my experience, that something is rarely just the individual. Most of the time, it is the environment around them:

• The lack of clarity
• The lack of trust
• The feeling that someone has your back - or that you are entirely on your own

Performance is situational.

The same person, with the same skills, with the same coaching, will produce different results depending on what is around them.

What to do with this

I see founders spending enormous energy on pipeline, forecasting, and hiring decisions.

All of that matters. But before you look at the numbers, look at what you have built around your team.

Ask yourself:

• Do my reps know what good looks like?
• Is there anyone next to them who pushes them forward?
• Do they feel guided, or just monitored?

This is not a culture conversation separate from your sales conversation.

It is your sales conversation.

Build a great place and people will go the extra mile for them and for you.

Build the environment first, the numbers will follow.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

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