Not just winning the sale. Taking greater care about what customers achieve.
For decades, I've worked with salespeople and their leaders to improve the conversations that lead to commercial decisions.
The best of those conversations establish what an investment needs to achieve, whose expectations matter and what must be agreed before anyone commits.
AI is making more of this work practical. I believe that will change what organisations expect of their salespeople, and what leaders need to put in place.
What changes when more becomes possible?
Understanding what everyone expects an investment to achieve has always mattered. Doing it thoroughly, across everyone involved, has demanded considerable skill, time and careful documentation.
AI can now help capture conversations, develop proposals and make assumptions, differences and unanswered questions visible. Salespeople can give more attention to the people involved while using that record to develop a better shared understanding.
But technology alone cannot establish a new standard. Leaders shape what their organisation expects, supports, reviews and rewards.
Two accountabilities
In most sales teams, salespeople are judged on one question: โDid they win the business?โ
REMAINS
Salespeople remain accountable for achieving commercial results.
INCREASINGLY
Alongside that, they can become increasingly accountable for how rigorously they establish and agree the expected outcomes of everyone with a stake in the decision. That includes their own colleagues who will deliver what is being sold.
Customers own their outcomes. The additional accountability concerns the quality of the work done before commercial commitments are made.
OUTCOME-ACCOUNTABLE SELLING
I call this Outcome-Accountable Selling:
In Outcome-Accountable Selling, salespeople remain accountable for achieving commercial results and become increasingly accountable for how rigorously the expected outcomes of all key stakeholders are identified, defined, aligned and agreed before the relevant commercial commitments are made.
This builds on decades of practice. AI opens up possibilities whose implications deserve serious exploration.
What could this mean for your organisation?
If your salespeople could consistently work this way, what could it change for your customers, your colleagues and your business?
What would your leaders need to support? What would you want to see in proposals, management conversations and performance reports? Where would existing practices help, and where might they pull in a different direction?
The answers will depend on your organisation: its ambitions, people, capabilities, relationships and commercial pressures.
Those are conversations I find particularly interesting.
ABOUT
I've spent more than forty years working independently as a B2B sales trainer, coach and consultant, helping other people develop their sales teams.
That experience has shaped Outcome-Accountable Selling and my understanding of how difficult meaningful change can be.
Exploring this with your team
A conversation between us may raise questions worth exploring with colleagues.
If so, we can arrange a facilitated team session to consider what this approach could mean in your circumstances. We can explore where you are already well aligned, where progress might come readily and where the obstacles could be substantial.
With everyone's agreement, we record the discussion and use it to develop a first draft proposal. It makes the emerging understanding, assumptions, options and recommendations visible for your team to correct and develop.
The next step follows from what we discover together.
Continue the conversation
If these ideas have caught your attention, I'd welcome a conversation about what they could mean for you and your organisation.
You don't need a defined project or a finished view. We can begin with what interests you and see what becomes worth exploring.
Follow the developing thinking
What does AI make possible in selling? What will it take to put those possibilities into practice? What should leaders increasingly expect?
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PRACTICAL HELP FROM SALES RESET
Sales Reset provides short videos, AI prompts and practical resources for salespeople and sales leaders.
Use them to develop your customer conversations, improve proposals and keep making progress. The practical work also raises questions that inform the wider thinking explored here.