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B2B Sales Outsourcing: The Build-Operate-Transfer Model
Every growing organization eventually hits the same wall: real market demand and not enough dedicated, specialized sales capacity to capture it. That's as true for a private equity firm trying to accelerate a portfolio company's commercial function as it is for a manufacturer entering a new region, a technology company expanding into a new segment, or a healthcare or legal organization that needs sales talent fluent in a highly regulated, trust-driven buying process. Building that capacity from scratch — or bolting a new go-to-market motion onto an existing team — takes months of recruiting, ramp time, and risk that most operating leaders can't absorb while still hitting a growth number. B2B sales outsourcing solves this differently, but only when the partner treats every industry as genuinely different rather than running the same playbook everywhere. Brickwork built its Outsourced Sales Talent practice around four specialized groups so clients get reps and leaders who already understand their market's language, buying cycle, and compliance requirements — combined with a Build-Operate-Transfer model that adapts to how permanent a client wants the relationship to be. This article breaks down what B2B sales outsourcing looks like across these markets, how the Build-Operate-Transfer model works, and how AI-driven insight and specialized talent combine into a real go-to-market engine — not a lead list. Why Scaling a Specialized Sales Team In-House Is Hard — In Any Industry Hiring a sales team from scratch is slower and riskier than most leadership teams expect, and the challenge compounds the more specialized the market. A new BDR or AE typically needs two to three months just to learn the product, the market, and the CRM before they're fully productive — longer when the sale involves regulatory nuance, technical specifications, or a private equity hold-period timeline. Add recruiting time, and a single hire can take a quarter or more to start contributing meaningfully. Lean commercial teams also carry concentrated risk. If a key sales rep or leader leaves, the organization doesn't just lose a person — it loses the messaging, the pipeline knowledge, and the momentum they built. This risk is especially acute for portfolio companies operating against a defined hold period, industrial firms with long, technical sales cycles, and organizations in regulated fields where finding a rep who already understands the compliance landscape can take months on its own. What B2B Sales Outsourcing Actually Means at Brickwork B2B sales outsourcing isn't a call center reading a script, and it isn't a list of leads dropped in an inbox. Done well, it's a fully managed extension of a client's team — BDRs, SDRs, Account Managers, and Account Executives who are recruited, trained, and led by a partner whose entire business is producing sales results. At Brickwork, that team is backed by a leadership group with more than 100 years of combined sales leadership experience. The partner isn't just supplying headcount — it's running the pipeline engine that produces pipeline in the first place: recruiting, onboarding, coaching, messaging, and reporting, all included. The Build-Operate-Transfer Model: Sales Capacity That Matches How You Want to Scale Brickwork's outsourced sales teams run on a Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model, which gives clients control over how permanent the arrangement becomes: Build — Brickwork recruits, hires, and stands up a dedicated team — BDRs, SDRs, Account Managers, Account Executives, and sales leadership — mapped to the client's target market, messaging, and ideal customer profile. Operate — Brickwork manages day-to-day performance: coaching, CRM discipline, reporting, and AI-driven insight, so the team performs like a mature in-house function without the client having to build the management layer. Transfer — Whenever it makes sense for the client — after a defined term, a milestone, or an exit event — top-performing team members can transfer onto the client's own payroll, preserving institutional knowledge and pipeline continuity instead of starting over. The model is flexible by design. Some clients stay in Operate indefinitely because it's more efficient than building the function themselves. Others use it as a bridge to a fully in-house team. Private equity operating partners often use it to stand up a portfolio-ready commercial function that can transfer cleanly at exit. Specialized by Design: Four Practice Areas Built Around How Different Markets Buy A generalist sales rep can learn any product, but specialized markets reward reps who already speak the language on day one. Brickwork organizes its Outsourced Sales Talent practice around four groups: Capital & Value Creation, private equity firms and portfolio companies. Talent that understands hold-period timelines, EBITDA-driving pipeline metrics, and how to stand up or accelerate a commercial function across a portfolio. Built, Grown & Moved, manufacturing, agriculture, construction, logistics, and energy. Reps and leaders fluent in longer sales cycles, technical buying committees, and physical, capital-intensive products and services. Knowledge & Innovation, technology, professional services, legal, and education. Talent skilled at selling complex, consultative, or subscription-based offerings to sophisticated, informed buyers. High-Stakes Trust, healthcare, biotech, safety, medical devices, and legal. Reps trained to navigate compliance, credentialing, and long, trust-based buying cycles where a single misstep can cost the relationship. Every practice area draws on the same shared recruiting standards, Sales Academy training, and AI infrastructure — so clients get a team that already understands their market's buying process from day one, backed by the scale of a much larger organization. AI-Driven Market Insights: The Edge Behind Every Deal The biggest shift in outsourced sales over the last few years isn't headcount — it's what AI does with the data that headcount generates. A modern outsourced sales team doesn't just make more calls; it makes smarter ones, because AI is embedded in how those calls get planned and evaluated, and tuned to the buying patterns of each practice area. How AI Shows Up Day to Day Lead qualification, AI helps surface which accounts and contacts are worth a rep's time first, based on real buying signals specific to the client's market. Meeting preparation, reps walk into calls with AI-assisted context on the account, so conversations start further along. Technique reinforcement, AI roleplay tools let consultants practice objection handling and messaging before it matters in a live deal. Monthly insights and recommendations, patterns across outreach and conversations get turned into concrete adjustments to messaging and targeting, delivered back to the client every month. Building an End-to-End Sales Operation: Top of Funnel to Closed Deal A real sales operation doesn't stop at booking a meeting. It has to carry a lead through every stage, with clear ownership at each handoff — regardless of whether that lead is a portfolio company prospect, an industrial buying committee, a technology evaluator, or a credentialed healthcare decision-maker. Filling the Funnel: Multi-Channel Prospecting Outbound calls, email, and LinkedIn messaging work together to generate new-logo pipeline. It typically takes around eight touches to secure a first meeting — and organizations that skip cold calling altogether see roughly 42% less pipeline growth than those that keep it in the mix. Qualifying and Managing the Middle of the Funnel BDRs and SDRs qualify leads against defined criteria before they ever reach an Account Executive, so AEs spend their time on conversations that are actually worth having. Everything is tracked in the client's CRM, giving full visibility into where every lead sits. Converting Pipeline into Revenue Account Executives take qualified opportunities through discovery, demos, and proposals to close. Because the earlier stages of the funnel are already qualified and well-documented, AEs can focus on selling instead of chasing down basic information. The Team Behind the Engine Talent quality determines whether an outsourced sales motion works — across every practice area. Brickwork's recruiting process routes every candidate through a recruiter interview, a manager interview, and a benchmark assessment before they're ever matched to a client. Niche and industry-specialized roles get an additional client-facing interview. Every hire then enters a structured Sales Academy — more than 200 hours of training a year, new-hire and client-specific onboarding, sales certification, and AI-assisted roleplay — with a program timeline that typically reaches full operational performance in four to six weeks, and sustained performance within 90 days. Table: Comparing your options for building sales capacity. Approach Speed to Start Upfront Cost & Risk Access to AI & Market Insights Best For Build In-House 3–6+ months to hire and ramp High — salary, benefits, tools, management overhead Limited until you invest separately in tools and training Organizations with the budget, timeline, and internal expertise to build a long-term function Hire Independently 1–3 months, one role at a time Moderate — but risk concentrated in a single hire Depends entirely on that individual's experience Filling one specific, well-defined seat Outsource via Build-Operate-Transfer 2–6 weeks to full productivity Lower — pay for a managed, specialized team, not headcount and infrastructure Built in — AI-enabled qualification, coaching, and reporting from day one, tuned to your industry Any organization — PE portfolio company, industrial firm, technology company, or regulated healthcare/legal team — that needs pipeline results fast, with the flexibility to transfer the team in-house later What Results Look Like The model behind B2B sales outsourcing has been tested at scale, across industries. Brickwork's Outsourced Sales Talent practice has put more than 1,300 sales professionals through its program since 2010, working with over 1,000 clients — from private equity portfolio companies to industrial manufacturers to technology and healthcare organizations — to build and augment their pipelines. So, Is B2B Sales Outsourcing Right for You? Organizations don't need to choose between growing fast and building sales the right way — regardless of industry, stage, or ownership structure. B2B sales outsourcing, done as a fully managed, AI-enabled operation built on a flexible Build-Operate-Transfer model, gives private equity portfolio companies, industrial firms, technology and professional services organizations, and high-stakes regulated businesses alike the pipeline engine of a much larger sales organization — without the time, cost, and risk of building it alone. The organizations that get the most out of this model treat it the way they'd treat any in-house team: they expect real management, real training, and real reporting on results, delivered by talent who already understand their specific market. When specialized expertise and AI-driven insight are built into every stage — and clients retain the option to transfer that team in-house whenever it makes sense — pipeline stops being a guessing game and starts being a system. What is B2B sales outsourcing? B2B sales outsourcing is when a company hires an outside partner to recruit, train, and manage some or all of its sales function, including BDRs, SDRs, Account Managers, and Account Executives, instead of building that team in-house. What is Brickwork's Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model? Build-Operate-Transfer is a three-stage engagement model. Brickwork builds a dedicated sales team for the client, operates it day-to-day with full management, coaching, and reporting, and, whenever the client is ready, transfers top-performing team members onto the client's own payroll, preserving pipeline knowledge and continuity. How is outsourced sales different from a lead-gen agency or call center? A lead-gen agency typically hands over a list of contacts and stops there. A full outsourced sales operation manages real people through the entire funnel, prospecting, qualifying, meeting, and closing, and reports on results the way an in-house sales leader would. Does this model work for private equity portfolio companies? Yes. Brickwork's Capital & Value Creation practice specializes in standing up or accelerating commercial functions inside portfolio companies, with a structure designed to align with hold-period timelines and, where relevant, transfer cleanly at exit. Can sales outsourcing work in regulated or highly technical industries like healthcare, manufacturing, or legal services? Yes. Brickwork's Built, Grown & Moved and High-Stakes Trust practices place talent trained specifically for technical buying committees, credentialing requirements, and compliance-sensitive sales cycles, rather than applying a generic sales playbook to a specialized market. How long does it take to get an outsourced sales team up and running? Most programs reach full operational performance in four to six weeks, with sustained, ramped performance building over the first 90 days. Fractional sales leadership placements can start even faster, since they draw from a partner's existing bench. How does AI factor into an outsourced sales engagement? AI supports lead qualification, meeting preparation, messaging, and coaching, and it powers monthly insights that turn outreach data into concrete recommendations. It supports the sales team, it doesn't replace the relationship-building a real rep still has to do.
Account-Based Marketing Agency: When an ABM Agency Is the Right Growth Move
Account-based marketing has a way of sounding simpler than it is. Pick a list of high-value accounts, create more relevant campaigns, align sales and marketing, and focus resources where the revenue potential is highest. That is the theory. In practice, B2B account-based marketing asks a company to make coordinated decisions across targeting, positioning, content, paid media, sales outreach, data, measurement, and follow-up. When those pieces are owned by different teams—or no one owns them at all—ABM can turn into a collection of expensive tactics without a clear operating model. An account-based marketing agency can help close those gaps. But bringing in an agency is not automatically the right answer. The best time to do it is when the business has a meaningful account opportunity, a clear reason to focus, and enough internal commitment to act on what the program uncovers. What an ABM Agency Should Actually Help You Do A credible ABM partner should do more than run LinkedIn ads against a named-account list. Media may be part of the program, but it’s only one layer. The agency’s real job is to help build a connected growth motion around a defined group of accounts. That usually includes: Clarifying which accounts and buying groups deserve concentrated attention Turning broad ICP criteria into usable account tiers and prioritization rules Identifying the business issues, triggers, and proof points that matter to each segment Building content and conversion paths around the way those buyers make decisions Coordinating paid media, email, website experiences, events, outbound, and sales follow-up Defining engagement signals and making sure sales knows what to do with them Measuring account progression, pipeline influence, conversion, and revenue (not just clicks and form fills) The company has not agreed on its ICP or target market Sales leadership does not support the account list or follow-up model The offer is still unclear or difficult to differentiate There is no realistic path to reach and engage the buying group CRM and account data are too unreliable to support basic orchestration Leadership expects immediate pipeline from a cold audience with a long buying cycle The company wants personalization but is unwilling to narrow its focus Prioritize accounts and define tiers Map buying groups and role-specific needs Use existing customer, pipeline, intent, and engagement data Connect content strategy to account plays Coordinate marketing activity with sales outreach Handle personalization without creating an unsustainable content machine Measure progress before closed revenue appears Transfer knowledge and processes to the internal team Do we have a defined group of accounts or segments worth treating differently? Can we explain why these accounts should care about our solution now? Will sales actively participate in account selection, outreach, and follow-up? Do we have enough budget and time to run a coordinated program, not just a one-off campaign? Are we looking for a partner to build a repeatable motion (not just another channel vendor)? The breadth and depth of ABM often requires outside support. Many internal teams can execute parts of the motion. Few have the capacity, specialized skills, and cross-functional authority to design and manage the whole thing. Signs an ABM Agency May Be the Right Growth Move 1. A Relatively Small Number of Accounts Could Materially Change Your Business ABM makes the most sense when certain accounts are worth more than the average lead. That may mean larger contract values, strong expansion potential, strategic logos, portfolio-wide opportunities, or a defined set of companies that closely match the solution. When landing 20 of the right accounts matters more than generating 2,000 loosely qualified leads, a focused account strategy becomes easier to justify. 2. Your Team Knows the Market, but the Growth Motion Is Fragmented Many companies already know which industries, company types, or accounts would make ideal customers. The problem ends up being that targeting lives in someone’s spreadsheet, sales has its own list, paid media uses another audience, and/or the website speaks to everyone at once. An growth marketing agency can help turn scattered information into a shared account strategy. That work is especially useful when sales and marketing agree on the opportunity but have not translated it into tiers, plays, content, ownership, and follow-up rules. 3. You Need to Move Faster Than Your Current Capacity Allows ABM creates an execution burden. Someone has to research account clusters, develop messaging, build offers, create ads and landing pages, configure audiences, coordinate outreach, track engagement, and keep the program moving. An experienced agency can provide that capacity without waiting to hire several specialists. It can also help a small internal team avoid spending months learning through preventable mistakes. 4. You Are Entering a New Vertical, Segment, or Enterprise Market Moving upmarket or into a new industry usually exposes gaps in messaging and proof. The buying group changes. The questions get harder. More people influence the decision. Generic demand generation often loses efficiency because the content and campaign experience are not specific enough. A B2B account-based marketing program gives the company a structured way to learn: which problems resonate, which roles engage, what proof is missing, and where sales conversations stall. 5. Sales Is Asking for Better Air Cover and More Useful Engagement Signals Sales teams rarely need another list of people who downloaded an asset. They need context: which accounts are active, what topics they care about, which stakeholders are involved, and whether there is enough momentum to justify outreach. A strong ABM agency should design the program around that handoff. It should also be honest about the definition difference between awareness, account engagement, genuine buying activity, and sales readiness. 6. You Have Tried ABM Tactics, but Not a Sustained ABM Program Running a named-account campaign is not the same as operating an account-based strategy. Companies often test one channel, see limited response, and conclude that ABM does not work. The issue might be the offer, audience, message, account coverage, sales follow-up, or the time allowed for the campaign to build momentum. An effective growth agency can help diagnose what happened and decide whether the effort deserves another (reimagined) attempt. When Hiring an ABM Agency Is Probably Premature An agency partner cannot compensate for every foundational problem, but the right partner should help uncover them before budget is committed to execution. ABM is likely to struggle when: What to Look At Ready for an ABM Agency Too Early to Hire One Account opportunity A small number of accounts could materially change the business The company has not agreed on its ICP or target market Sales participation Sales will actively participate in account selection, outreach, and follow-up Sales leadership does not support the account list or follow-up model The offer You can explain why these accounts should care about your solution now The offer is still unclear or difficult to differentiate Data foundation CRM and account data can support basic orchestration CRM and account data are too unreliable to support basic orchestration Time and budget Enough budget and time to run a coordinated program, not a one-off campaign Leadership expects immediate pipeline from a cold audience with a long buying cycle Willingness to focus A defined group of accounts or segments worth treating differently The company wants personalization but is unwilling to narrow its focus These issues don’t mean abandoning ABM is the answer. Consider starting the work one step earlier. Before campaigns launch, your organization may need to clarify its go-to-market strategy, strengthen positioning, clean and structure CRM data, improve lifecycle and account management processes, or create better alignment between sales and marketing. That broader foundation matters because ABM shouldn’t operate as a standalone marketing tactic. It depends on the full growth engine working together—from audience strategy and messaging to content, campaign execution, data, CRM, sales follow-up, and performance measurement. An agency partner with capabilities across those areas can help identify where the real gaps are, address the most important ones first, and build an ABM program that your business is ready to support. What to Look for in an Account-Based Marketing Agency The right partner should be able to explain how strategy becomes an operating program. During the evaluation process, ask how the agency will: Pay attention to what the agency pushes back on. A useful partner will challenge an unrealistic account list, a weak offer, thin sales participation, or measurement that overstates marketing’s impact. That friction is often more valuable than a polished promise. A Practical Way to Decide Before hiring an agency, pressure-test the decision with five questions: Do we have a defined group of accounts or segments worth treating differently? Can we explain why these accounts should care about our solution now? Will sales actively participate in account selection, outreach, and follow-up? Do we have enough budget and time to run a coordinated program, not just a one-off campaign? Are we looking for a partner to build a repeatable motion (not just another channel vendor)? A strong “yes” to most of these questions is a good signal that outside ABM support could accelerate growth. Having mixed answers typically indicates the aforementioned foundational work needs to happen first. ABM Works When Focus Becomes Operational When the value of B2B account-based marketing is articulated as simply as: every message uses a company name or every target receives a custom ad, that’s misleading. ABM’s value comes from making disciplined choices about where to compete, what to say, how to engage the buying group, and what sales and marketing will each own, together. An ABM agency is the right growth move when it helps the organization make those choices faster, execute them consistently, and build a motion the internal team can sustain. What does an account-based marketing agency actually do? A credible ABM partner does more than run LinkedIn ads against a named-account list. The agency’s job is to build a connected growth motion around a defined group of accounts: clarifying which accounts and buying groups deserve attention, turning broad ICP criteria into usable tiers, identifying the issues and proof points that matter to each segment, coordinating paid media, email, website, events, outbound, and sales follow-up, and measuring account progression and pipeline influence rather than just clicks and form fills. When should a company hire an ABM agency? When a relatively small number of accounts could materially change the business, when the team knows the market but the growth motion is fragmented, when you need to move faster than internal capacity allows, when you are entering a new vertical or enterprise market, when sales is asking for better air cover and more useful engagement signals, or when you have tried ABM tactics but never operated a sustained ABM program. What is the difference between ABM tactics and an ABM program? Running a named-account campaign is not the same as operating an account-based strategy. Companies often test one channel, see limited response, and conclude that ABM does not work. The real issue is usually the offer, audience, message, account coverage, sales follow-up, or the time allowed for the campaign to build momentum. What should you look for when evaluating an ABM agency? Ask how the agency will prioritize accounts and define tiers, map buying groups and role-specific needs, use existing customer, pipeline, intent, and engagement data, connect content strategy to account plays, coordinate marketing activity with sales outreach, handle personalization without creating an unsustainable content machine, measure progress before closed revenue appears, and transfer knowledge and processes to your internal team. Also pay attention to what the agency pushes back on. Is ABM just personalized advertising to named accounts? No. Describing ABM as every message using a company name, or every target receiving a custom ad, is misleading. ABM’s value comes from making disciplined choices about where to compete, what to say, how to engage the buying group, and what sales and marketing will each own, together. How many accounts do you need for ABM to make sense? There is no fixed number. The test is relative value: ABM makes the most sense when certain accounts are worth more than the average lead through larger contract values, expansion potential, strategic logos, or portfolio-wide opportunity. When landing 20 of the right accounts matters more than generating 2,000 loosely qualified leads, a focused account strategy becomes easier to justify.
Go-to-Market Playbook: What It Is, What Goes in It, and Who Builds It
If you’ve ever watched two salespeople describe your own company two different ways, you already know why you need a go-to-market playbook. One rep leans on the relationship. Another leans on price. A third has never fully landed on what makes you different in the first place. None of them are wrong, they just never had a shared script to work from. A go-to-market playbook is that shared script. It’s the single document that tells every rep, new hire, and leader how you win deals: who you sell to, what you say, how you qualify, how you quote, and what “good” looks like at each stage. Without one, growth depends on a handful of people who happen to carry the story in their heads. With one, growth becomes something you can teach, repeat, and scale. What a Go-to-Market Playbook Actually Is A go-to-market playbook isn’t a slide deck that lives in a shared drive and never gets opened again. It’s a living operating document for your sales team, closer to a training manual than a strategy memo. The best playbooks get used in real deals, in onboarding, and in weekly coaching, not just referenced once during a kickoff. It’s also different from a go-to-market strategy template, though the two are related. A strategy template usually maps the big picture: target markets, positioning, pricing tiers, channel mix. The playbook picks up where the strategy leaves off and gets tactical, the exact questions a rep asks on a discovery call, the objections they’ll hear and how to handle them, the quote format that goes to every customer the same way. What Goes Into It A strong go-to-market playbook usually includes: Positioning and messaging, your value proposition stated the same way by everyone, tied to what actually wins deals, not what sounds good in a boardroom Ideal customer and buyer personas, who you sell to and who influences the decision A discovery framework, the qualifying questions that keep deals from stalling later because something basic got missed Objection handling, the answers to the pushback you hear on repeat, written down instead of reinvented every call Quoting and proposal standards, one template, one process, so quotes don’t turn into six-email round-trips before they reach the customer Onboarding and ramp plan, how a new hire goes from “knows the product” to “can run a deal solo” Sales cadence and pipeline stages, what happens weekly, and what “stage 3” actually means so forecasts mean something I’ve seen this play out directly with a services company scaling into a new market. A diagnostic of their sales process turned up six gaps, no CRM, no shared value proposition, scattered quote templates, no formal onboarding, all traceable to the same root cause: everything ran through two people’s heads instead of a documented system. The fix wasn’t more headcount. It was building the playbook that let the team’s existing knowledge scale beyond those two people. Who Builds It The playbook can’t be built from a template alone, it has to be built from what’s actually happening in your sales conversations. That usually means: Sales leadership brings the process knowledge, what’s working, where deals stall, what reps actually say Top performers contribute the language and instincts that close deals but rarely get written down RevOps or a fractional GTM advisor structures it into something usable and keeps it tied to CRM data, not gut feel Marketing aligns messaging so sales and marketing tell the same story Many SMBs bring in outside help for this, not because their team doesn’t know how to sell, but because building and maintaining the document takes dedicated time most sales leaders don’t have alongside a full pipeline. A fractional GTM partner can run the discovery, capture what’s already working, and turn it into a document the team will actually use. The Bottom Line A go-to-market playbook turns tribal knowledge into a repeatable system, the difference between a sales team that scales and one that’s capped by how many deals two or three people can personally carry. If you don’t have one yet, start smaller than you think: document the discovery questions and objection responses your best rep already uses. That’s the first page of the playbook, and it’s usually the one that pays back fastest. What’s the difference between a go-to-market playbook and a go-to-market strategy? The strategy sets the big picture: target markets, positioning, pricing tiers, and channel mix. The playbook is the tactical layer underneath it, the exact discovery questions your reps ask, the objections they’ll hear and how to answer them, and the quote format that goes out the same way every time. Put simply, the strategy tells you where to play, and the playbook tells your team how to win once they’re in the conversation. How long does it take to build a go-to-market playbook? It depends on how much is already documented versus living in your team’s heads. A focused first version, positioning, discovery questions, and objection handling, can come together in a few weeks when you pull from what your best reps already do. From there it grows. Most teams start small, ship the sections reps reach for most, and add to the playbook as the process matures.
How to Improve Sales Performance: 4 Strategies That Work
Most sales leaders assume a slow quarter means the team needs more calls, better leads, or more motivation. Research tells a different story. In a study of over 300 sales calls across 25 organizations conducted by The Sales Board, 63% of salespeople never asked for commitment at all. The problem wasn't effort. It was process. Improving sales performance rarely comes from pushing harder. It comes from giving every rep the same repeatable process: a clear commitment decided before each interaction, questions that uncover real differentiation, value tied to what the prospect already needs, and a defined way to ask for commitment. That shift, from hustle to structure, is the whole answer. The rest of this post is the “why” and the “how.” Why Sales Performance Problems Are Usually Process Problems When a deal stalls or a rep misses quota, the instinct is to add pressure: more calls, more pipeline, more hours. Most reps aren't failing because they aren't trying. They're failing because they don't have a repeatable way to run a sales conversation. Without a process, every call depends on the rep's memory, instinct, and mood that day. Some days that works. Most days it doesn't. A process gives every rep, from your newest hire to your top performer, the same reliable path to a commitment. The 4 strategies below build that path. Install them one at a time and coach them consistently, and you'll see steadier performance across your whole team, not just from your best rep. Strategy One: Decide on Your Commitment Before You Get Started Before every sales interaction, decide what you want the prospect to agree to by the end of it. This is different from deciding what you want to learn or accomplish for yourself. What You Want to Learn or Accomplish What You Want the Prospect to Commit To Learn about the prospect's current process Schedule a discovery meeting Introduce your company Get agreement to review a proposal together Understand who makes the final decision Get a signed agreement Learning goals are useful. They just don't move a deal forward on their own. A meeting can go well, feel productive, and still end with nothing decided. That's a learning goal without a commitment behind it. The commitment you decide on should match the next milestone in your sales cycle. If the next milestone is a discovery meeting, aim for that, not a signed agreement. Map out the milestones in your sales cycle, and the right commitment to ask for at each one becomes obvious. Example: picture two reps on your team, both finishing a first meeting with a new prospect. Rep A: Great talking with you. I'll follow up soon. Prospect: Sounds good. Rep B: Based on what you shared today, I'd like to put together a short proposal and walk through it with you next Thursday at 2pm. Does that work? Prospect: Yes, let's do that. Neither rep did anything wrong in the conversation itself. But only Rep B walked in with a decided commitment to ask for, and only Rep B walked out with the deal moved forward. Coaching tip: before every call, ask each rep one question: “What do you want the prospect to agree to by the end of this call?” If the answer is vague, the call has no target to hit. Strategy Two: Ask Questions That Uncover Your Differentiators Most reps ask the same needs questions every competitor asks: “What are your biggest challenges?” or “What's not working with your current vendor?” These questions are fine, but they potentially surface needs anyone can solve. That's how a sale turns into a price competition. Most salespeople think differentiation happens in the pitch. It doesn't start there. Differentiation gets built during discovery and lands when you present your solution. Skip the groundwork in discovery, and no presentation later can make up for it. Differentiation-focused questioning means asking about the prospect's situation with your specific strengths in mind. Before the call, list out what makes you, your company, and your solution different from the competition. The more of these differentiators you can build questions around, the more differentiated your position becomes. Then build questions that only make sense to ask if that difference matters to this buyer. A useful pattern: start with a general question about the problem, follow up with something more detailed, then ask a question that brings real emotion or urgency into the conversation, not just logic. General: “What would you want to see improved about your current process?” Follow-up: “What kind of errors come up when information is incomplete?” Emotion or urgency: “What would continued errors like this do to your reputation in the market?” Teams that ask mostly open-ended questions close more often. In the Sales Board research, successful calls had 25% more open-ended questions than closed-ended ones. Failed calls had 86% more closed-ended questions than open-ended ones. Example: Rep (closed, generic): Are you happy with your current vendor's response time? Prospect: It's fine, I guess. Rep (open, differentiated): Walk me through what happens on your end when your vendor is slow to respond. Prospect: Honestly, we scramble. Last month a delay cost us a client meeting. The second question doesn't just get a longer answer. It surfaces a need that a fast, reliable response time, if that's your differentiator, directly solves. Coaching tip: have each rep list out their differentiators, then draft a general and a follow-up question for each one before their next call. Strategy Three: Build Value Propositions Around a Differentiator, Not a Feature List A common mistake is presenting a wall of features and hoping the prospect connects the dots. Most won't. Research from The Sales Board found that 82% of salespeople fail to differentiate themselves from competitors, and a feature-heavy pitch is one of the biggest reasons why. A value proposition works because it does the connecting for them: it ties a specific strength directly to a need the prospect already agreed they have. A simple structure: Remind the prospect of the need they already agreed to. State the specific feature or capability that addresses it. Explain what that means for the prospect in time, money, or risk. Ask a question that confirms it landed. Look closely at that structure. Only one of the four steps is about you, your company, or your solution. The other three are about the prospect: their need, their outcome, their reaction. A value proposition built this way stays centered on the customer instead of your solution. Example: Feature dump version: We offer 24/7 support, cloud backup, mobile access, real-time reporting, single sign-on, a dedicated account manager, and API integrations with most major platforms. Value-tied version: You mentioned that a system outage last quarter cost you a full day of lost orders. Our platform runs automated cloud backups every hour, so if something goes down, you're back online in minutes instead of losing a day. What would avoiding that kind of downtime save you in overtime and recovery costs each quarter? The second version connects to a need the prospect stated out loud. The prospect doesn't have to guess why the feature matters. The rep already told them. Coaching tip: for every differentiator on your team's list, have reps write the answer to “so what does this mean for the customer, in dollars, time, or risk?” If they can't answer that in one sentence, it's a feature, not a value proposition yet. Strategy Four: Follow a Process for Asking for Commitment The Sales Board research found that reps attempt to gain commitment in only 37% of sales calls. That means in 63% of conversations, no one ever asks the prospect to move forward. The deal quietly stalls, and a stalled deal is more likely to end up lost to a competitor who does ask. Three reasons show up again and again: No commitment was decided on going in, so there's nothing specific to ask for. Buying signals get missed because the rep is focused on what to say next instead of listening. There's no repeatable process, so asking feels risky or awkward. Summarize the value tied to the need the prospect already agreed to. State the price or time investment clearly. Ask directly for the next step. A simple, repeatable process removes the guesswork: Example, asking for the sale: Rep: Based on what we've covered, this solution addresses the delivery delays you mentioned and should reduce them by roughly a third. The investment is $2,000 a month. Would you like to move forward with a 90-day pilot starting next week? Prospect: Sounds good, let's get started. Example, asking for the next conversation: Rep: Based on what you've shared about your onboarding process, I'd like to set up a 30-minute call next week to walk through it together and pinpoint exactly where the delays are coming from. Does Tuesday at 10am work? Prospect: Sure thing, that works for me. The commitment doesn't have to be the sale itself. Early in the sales cycle, it might just be the next conversation. Either way, the process is the same: summarize the value, state what it will take, and ask directly. Coaching tip: role-play the ask in team meetings until it feels automatic. When you review recorded calls, check for one thing first: did the rep ask for commitment, and when? There's More to Sales Performance Than These 4 Strategies These 4 strategies won't cover everything that affects sales performance. Listening skills, rapport building, objection handling, and reviewing your own calls after the fact all matter too. We'll cover those in a future post. For now, installing these 4 strategies across your team is a strong place to start. So, How Do You Actually Improve Sales Performance? It rarely comes down to hiring better talent or pushing harder. It comes down to giving your team a repeatable process: a clear commitment decided on before every interaction, questions that uncover real differentiation, value propositions tied to what the prospect already agreed matters, and a simple process for asking for commitment. A study by the Aberdeen Group compared the results of companies using Action Selling against the results of companies using other leading sales training providers. Action Selling clients saw: 37% of reps hit quota, compared to 24% with other sales training providers Average deal sizes 34% higher, compared to 19% with other sales training providers Customer retention at 27%, compared to 14% with other sales training providers Sales cycles reduced by 26%, compared to 11% with other sales training providers Start with one strategy. Coach it until your team does it without thinking. Then move to the next. Structure beats hustle. What's the difference between a goal to learn something and a goal to gain a commitment? A goal to learn something is about what you want to accomplish for yourself, like understanding the prospect's current process or learning who makes the final decision. A goal to gain a commitment is about what you want the prospect to agree to, like scheduling a follow-up meeting or signing an agreement. You can walk away from a call having fully met the first kind of goal and still have nothing decided, because the second kind is what actually moves a deal forward. How can my team differentiate when we sell a commodity product? Differentiation doesn't have to come from the product. It can come from your company: how you do business, your responsiveness, your track record with similar customers. It can come from you, the salesperson: your expertise, how well you understand their business, and the fact that you're easier to work with than the average account manager they've dealt with before. A commodity product still gets bought from someone. Give the prospect a reason for that someone to be your rep. Why do sales reps avoid asking for commitment? Research shows most reps never formally ask. Common reasons include not deciding on a commitment before the call, missing buying signals during the conversation, and not having a simple, repeatable process to fall back on. How do I know if these strategies are actually improving performance? Track the metrics the Aberdeen Group study used: quota attainment rate, average deal size, customer retention, and sales cycle length. Improvement in these numbers over a quarter or two is a reliable sign the process is working.
Harness Sales Expertise and AI Innovation in Tandem
Key Takeaways: Sales skills fade fast. Without ongoing reinforcement, reps drift back to old habits within weeks of any training event. Tandem by Action Selling turns one-off training into continuous coaching, pairing the 9 Acts methodology with AI so reps can practice on demand. Reps get private, judgment-free roleplay and real-time feedback, so they build confidence before real buyer conversations, not during them. Sales leaders get reporting on engagement, progress, and skill gaps, so coaching time goes where it actually moves the needle. AI does not replace the methodology or the manager. It scales the practice and reinforcement that used to be impossible to deliver rep by rep. None of us, no matter our success, is a finished product. Professional growth isn’t achieved; it’s developed. It is cumulative – bit by bit, little by little over time. It is an active, always-on process.
Your B2B Website Is a Salesperson. Is It Pulling Its Weight?
Some companies look great from the outside but hide a real problem. Sales are up. The pipeline is full. The team wins deals. But look at where each customer came from. It is almost always a referral, a cold call, or a relationship. The website had nothing to do with it. This is very common for mid-market B2B companies. It is also risky. Referrals and cold calls still work. But they have a ceiling. They only grow when you add people. They lean on a few key players. And they leave one channel doing nothing, the one that could sell even while your sales team sleeps. Your website is already a salesperson. The question is whether it is doing any selling. The Referral Trap Referrals feel great. And they are a good sign. But they prove that people liked your past work. They do not prove you can create new demand on your own. Here is the trap. Referral-based growth feels healthy, right up until it isn't. The pipeline looks full. Win rates are high. Then a top rep quits. A big account leaves. The market slows down. And you have no backup plan to bring in new deals. The best companies treat their website as a way to create demand. Not a brochure. Not a badge for buyers who already trust you. A real tool that finds new buyers, teaches them, and turns them into leads. This matters more in 2026 than ever. Your buyers do their own research first. Even the ones who come from a referral. They type questions into Google. They ask ChatGPT and Perplexity to compare their options. They form opinions about you before they ever talk to a person. If your website is not part of that research, you are not on their list. What Most B2B Websites Actually Do Look at ten mid-market B2B websites in any field. You will see the same setup almost every time. A homepage with a slogan no one outside the company gets. A Services page that lists what they do but not why it helps the buyer. An About page that says “our people are our greatest asset.” And a Contact form that might as well say “reach out when you are ready to buy.” These sites are built for the company, not the buyer. Each part answers a question the company wants to answer. Almost none of it answers what the buyer is really asking. Things like: Do they get my problem? Have they fixed it for someone like me? What will it cost? What happens after I reach out? So the website becomes a checkpoint. Buyers visit it after they already chose to talk to you, just to make sure you are real. It does not create new deals. That wastes an asset you already pay for. How Search and AI Work Together Now Six years ago, visibility was simple. Rank on page one of Google for what your buyers search, and traffic follows. That is still true. But it is no longer the whole story. AI search has changed how buyers look for vendors. Think Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Instead of clicking ten links and sorting it out, buyers now ask one question and get one answer. And the sources behind that answer are not random. They come from the same kinds of sites Google has always liked. Sites with clear know-how, well-organized content, steady publishing, and strong signs of trust. So the path to AI visibility runs right through good old SEO. The common thread is trust. Google uses a test called E-E-A-T. It stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust. That same test decides whether your content shows up in an AI answer. Write clear, useful, specific content that proves you know your work, and you show up in both places at once. For B2B companies, this is a big chance. Most of your rivals' sites do not clear this bar. They have the same brochure problem you do. The company that starts building real, helpful content pulls ahead. And that lead grows over time. Referrals and cold calls cannot match it. Humans Close Deals. Websites Fill the Funnel. Here is what AI has made clear. Big B2B deals are still human. No one picks an IT provider, a marketing agency, or a services firm through a chatbot. The trust, and the read on whether you are a good fit, happen between people. But what comes before that talk has changed. Buyers know more, dig more on their own, and doubt more than they did six years ago. By the time a buyer agrees to a call, they may have read three of your blog posts. They may have watched a rival's case study. They may have asked an AI to compare you to two others. That first call is no longer the intro. It is the test. This raises the bar for your website. Being believable is not enough. It has to be convincing. It has to move a careful, well-read buyer from “just looking” to real interest. Then it has to hand that buyer to your sales team at the right time with the right background. That is not a brochure. That is a sales system. What a Lead-Generating Website Needs A clear answer to the buyer's first question A first-time visitor has one question. “Is this company for me?” Your site should answer that in seconds. Say who you help, what problem you solve, and why you are the right pick. A vague line like “We help businesses grow” says nothing. A clear line like “We build revenue systems for mid-market B2B companies that have outgrown their CRM” says a lot. It makes them want to keep reading. Content that builds trust before the call The best thing your site can do is prove your skill before anyone asks. A set of truly useful content does three jobs at once. Think guides, simple frameworks, and honest points of view from people who have done the work. It builds trust with buyers. It shows Google and AI that you know your field. And it gives your sales team things to share during the sale. This is not about pumping out lots of posts. It is about proof that you can be trusted. Ways to reach out that match the buyer Not every visitor is ready to ask for a proposal. A site with only one button, “Contact Us,” only catches buyers who already decided. Good B2B sites offer a few options. A big-step option for ready buyers, like book a call or get an assessment. A mid-step option for people still checking, like download a guide or join a webinar. And a small-step option for early researchers, like subscribe or read more. The goal is to catch buyers at every stage, not just the ones at the finish line. Tracking tied to sales, not vanity numbers The old numbers were page views, bounce rate, and time on site. Those are just stand-ins. What you really want to know is simple. Which content brings in good visitors? Which paths lead to sales talks? And what is a website lead worth next to a referral or a cold call? Tools like GA4 and HubSpot can answer this when set up right. The shift is from tracking activity to tracking real pipeline. Hold your website to the same bar you hold your sales team. A solid technical base for search and AI Visibility is not just about content. It is also technical. Schema markup, for articles, FAQs, and authors, helps Google and AI see what your content is, who wrote it, and why to trust it. Fast load times, good mobile performance, and a clean site setup decide whether your content even gets found. This work is not flashy. But it holds up everything else. The Math That Makes the Case CEOs who doubt marketing spend often ask the same thing. “What is this really worth?” It is a fair question. Here is a way to answer it before you spend a dollar. Start with the value of one customer. Take their yearly spend and multiply it by how long they stay. Next, find your close rate on good leads. Then figure out how many good leads your website would need each month to pay for itself. At normal B2B close rates and deal sizes, just one extra good lead a month often covers the whole program. That is true even for a site that used to bring in zero. Here is the better way to think about it. Your website is not a cost with a fixed budget. It is a channel with a clear cost per lead. And you can improve that cost over time. A sales rep can get hired away. A referral network stops growing once you have used up your contacts. Your website does neither. It builds on itself. Where To Start Most companies do not need a full rebuild to start getting leads from their site. They need to make a few clear choices. Who is the site for? What should it say? How should it turn visitors into leads? And how will you measure it? Companies that do this well share one trait. They stop treating the website like an IT project or a design task. They treat it like a revenue tool. Every choice, what to write, what to offer, what to track, runs through that lens. Your sales team already works hard. The question is whether your website works at all. Frequently Asked Questions How long before a B2B website starts bringing in leads? Paid search can bring in good traffic within days. Organic search and AI visibility take longer. Plan on three to six months before your content pulls steady traffic. But those gains build over time in a way paid ads do not. Most companies run both at once. Paid for quick wins, organic for long-term value. Do I need a lot of content to rank in search and AI results? Quality beats volume. A tight set of twenty well-researched, truly useful posts on what your buyers search will beat a hundred thin ones. The goal is to be the most useful, most trusted source on the few topics your best customers care about. You do not need to cover everything. Is SEO still worth it now that AI is changing search? Yes. AI search pulls from the same trust signals as regular search. The content, authority, and trust that help you rank in Google are the same things that get you cited by AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. SEO and AI visibility are not two different bets. They are one bet seen from two sides.
Migrating Your Website to HubSpot
Somewhere in every migration kickoff, someone asks how hard this is really going to be. The honest answer is that it depends on decisions made in the first two weeks, long before anyone touches DNS. Most migrations don't fail on launch day. They fail earlier, when the redirect map gets treated as a task for later and nobody writes the content model down. So what does a HubSpot migration actually involve, done properly? Five things: crawl the existing site first, build the theme in Git, script the content transport, test every redirect by machine, and treat DNS cutover as a scheduled, reversible event. Do those five and launch day is boring, which is exactly what you want. The rest of this post is the how. The Migration Lifecycle at a Glance Before getting into each phase, here's the shape of the whole project and where each phase tends to go wrong. Phase What You're Doing Where It Goes Wrong Crawl and audit Spider every URL, map content types, prune dead pages Skipped entirely, so every later phase runs on guesswork Theme build HubL templates, modules, fields.json, all in Git Built in the design manager with no version control or rollback Content transport Import or script content and media into HubSpot Imported HTML full of inline styles and links to the old domain Redirects and cutover Build and test the 301 map, then flip DNS Untested redirects, chains, and a TTL nobody lowered in advance Start With a Full Crawl of the Existing Site Before anyone writes a template, spider the current site. Screaming Frog or Sitebulb will do, or a headless crawler if you'd rather script it. Export every URL with its status code, canonical tag, hreflang annotations, and meta fields. That export is your source of truth for the rest of the project. Then cross it against analytics. A page with zero sessions in the past year is a candidate for consolidation, not migration. Every URL you decline to carry over is one fewer 301 to maintain forever, and pruning now is much cheaper than pruning after launch. While you're in there, sort every page into a content type: landing page, blog post, resource, product page, system page. Legacy CMSs accumulate structural junk over the years. Orphaned templates, shadow taxonomies, inline styles nobody remembers adding. HubSpot's template model will force this classification on you eventually, so do it on purpose now instead of discovering it during QA. Build a Theme The HubL Templating Layer HubSpot renders through HubL, a templating language derived from Jinja2. If you've touched Django, Twig, or Nunjucks, you already know the syntax: variable interpolation, if-blocks, filters piped with a vertical bar. The difference is the context. HubL exposes CRM data (contact, content, request) directly in the render path, which is how the smart content and personalization features actually work. Structure the build as a proper theme. That means a fields.json at the theme level holding brand tokens, type scales, and spacing values, so marketers can adjust settings without editing code. It means templates that map one-to-one onto the content types from your crawl. And it means modules: self-contained components with their own fields, markup, CSS, and JS, each doing one job with nothing leaking into global scope. For cross-cutting concerns like JSON-LD, write a macro once instead of pasting script tags into every template. Develop Locally With the CLI The HubSpot CLI syncs your filesystem to the portal, which means the theme lives in Git, goes through pull requests, and deploys through CI like anything else you ship. Teams that build directly in the design manager give up version control, code review, and rollback for no real reason. Put Repeatable Content in HubDB Anything on the old site that looks like a table belongs in HubDB: team directories, office locations, resource libraries, comparison data. Design the columns deliberately. Use SELECT and MULTISELECT for enumerable values instead of free text, use foreign-key rows where real relations exist, and save rich text columns for content that genuinely needs markup. The payoff is dynamic pages. Bind one template to a table and HubSpot generates a URL per row, each with its own meta fields. Two hundred location pages collapse into one template and one table. Query the table server side and paginate. Don't ship the whole table to the browser and filter it in JavaScript; it's slower and search engines see less of it. Moving the Content Itself HubSpot's built-in blog importer handles WordPress exports and RSS feeds reasonably well, though "reasonably" is carrying some weight in that sentence. Check the imported HTML for inline styles, absolute URLs still pointing at the old domain, and images that never made it into the file manager. Past trivial volume, script the transport through the CMS API. Pull from the source system, transform the content (rewrite internal links, remap media to HubSpot's CDN, clean up the markup), and POST to the pages or blog endpoints. Key the script on source IDs so a re-run updates records instead of duplicating them. You will re-run it. Everyone re-runs it. Media gets its own pipeline. Bulk-upload assets to the file manager through the API, capture the CDN URLs it returns, and use that mapping during transformation. The CDN converts to WebP and resizes on the fly through query parameters, so generate srcsets instead of uploading five sizes of every image. The Redirect Map Protects Everything Else Every legacy URL that changes needs a single-hop 301 to its replacement. Build the map from the crawl, not from memory, and check it for chains and loops. A 301 that points at another 301 wastes crawl budget and weakens the signal you're trying to preserve. This is the step that decides whether your search visibility survives the move intact. Load the result into HubSpot's URL redirect tool. For systematic path changes, one flexible pattern redirect with capture groups replaces thousands of static rows. Then test it before cutover, not after. Script a HEAD request against every old URL and assert that each one redirects exactly once and lands on a 200. Fix every 404 the script turns up before you touch DNS. DNS Cutover Without the Drama Domain connection is CNAME based: your www host points at HubSpot's edge, and TLS provisioning follows automatically once the domain validates. The sequencing matters more than the mechanics. Drop your DNS TTL to 300 seconds at least two days before the switch so propagation is fast and reversible. Connect and verify the domain in HubSpot while traffic still resolves to the old origin. Flip the record during a quiet window and keep the legacy environment running as a rollback target until the numbers look right. One thing to check early: apex domains need a DNS provider that supports CNAME flattening or ALIAS records. Confirm yours does before launch day, not during it. When You Shouldn't Migrate Yet Not every site is ready to move, and forcing the timeline creates the exact failures described above. If nobody can produce a content inventory, the audit comes first. If the team can't tell you which pages drive pipeline, fix measurement before moving anything. Say your current site has thousands of thin, auto-generated pages. Migrating them as-is just relocates the problem. Prune first. And if the redirect map can't be tested because nobody knows the full URL set, you're not ready to schedule cutover. The crawl solves that, which is why it comes first. So, When Is the Migration Actually Done? When the data says so, not when the new site loads. Resubmit your XML sitemaps in Search Console and watch the coverage report for a spike in 404s or soft 404s. Confirm the new URLs are getting indexed as the recrawl wave moves through. Keep an eye on Core Web Vitals in field data; HubSpot's CDN gives you a decent baseline, but JavaScript bloat inside your own modules is still yours to own. Expect some volatility in organic impressions for two to four weeks. That part is normal. A decline that persists past that window usually traces back to the redirect map or to content that didn't make the trip, and the crawl from step one is how you diagnose either. Run the project this way, with the theme in version control, the content typed, the transport scripted, and the redirects tested by machine rather than by hope, and launch day should be uneventful. If the cutover itself is exciting, something went wrong earlier.
Should You Still Invest in Google Ads as AI Changes Search?
It's a fair question. People are using ChatGPT or another LLM to research products. Google is answering more questions directly in search results. AI Overviews can summarize an answer without the person ever clicking a website. So, do businesses still need to invest in Google Ads? Yes. AI is absorbing the early research stage of the buyer journey, not the moment someone decides to act. Google Ads still capture that moment, the search that happens once a person already knows roughly what they want and is comparing specific options. That distinction, between researching and buying, is the whole answer. The rest is the “why” and the “how.” Researching Intent vs. Buying Intent: The Distinction That Matters Now Think about how you use search compared to a few years ago. I used to Google almost everything. Now, if I'm trying to understand a complicated topic, compare a few ideas, or figure out what I should even be asking, I'm probably starting with ChatGPT or Claude. I'm not alone. Some of the searches businesses used to rely on for traffic are shifting there too. Someone looking for a basic definition may never click through to a website. AI can answer that on its own. But researching and buying aren't the same thing. At some point, the person researching a problem has to find the company, product, or service they're actually going to use. Researching Intent The searcher is still learning, comparing categories, or figuring out what to even ask. Example: “what is account-based marketing.” Buying Intent The searcher already knows what they want and is comparing specific providers. Example: “ABM agency” or “best ABM agencies for SaaS.” Intent Type Example Search Where AI Shows Up Where Google Ads Shows Up Researching “what is account based marketing” Often fully answered by AI, no click needed Rarely converts, low commercial value Buying “best ABM agencies for SaaS” AI may shortlist options High-intent moment, Google Ads’ strongest zone AI can easily answer the first kind of search. It can't replace the second kind, because at that point the person is choosing between real options, and that's exactly where Google Ads have always been strongest. Google Ads Capture Demand. They Don't Create It. This is something I think gets lost in paid search conversations. Google Search Ads are really good at capturing existing demand. Someone has a problem. They know enough about that problem to search for a solution. Your ad shows up at that exact moment. But if nobody is searching for what you sell, adding more keywords and increasing the budget isn't going to magically create demand. I've seen businesses try to force Google Ads to work for products or services people don't know exist yet. The campaigns struggle, and eventually the conclusion is that “Google Ads don't work.” Sometimes that's not the problem. Sometimes the business is trying to capture demand that doesn't exist yet. That's where other channels matter. Paid social, video, content, events, and PR can introduce the problem or solution before someone ever opens Google. The job of Google Ads is to be there once that awareness turns into intent. Branded Search May Matter More, Not Less This is the part I keep coming back to. More research is moving into ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Gemini, etc. People may do less of their early research on traditional search engines. But what happens after the research? In my experience, this is often where branded search comes in. A buyer used to search ten different questions and visit ten different websites. Now they might ask an AI tool to help narrow down their options, then go to Google and search the names of the two or three companies they want to look at further. That makes a deliberate branded search strategy more important, not less, as AI reshapes how people research. Someone might already know your brand from Claude, a podcast, LinkedIn, or a recommendation. Their Google search isn't necessarily the start of their journey. It might be one of the last steps. I push back on one common claim: “We rank number one organically for our brand, so we don't need to run branded ads.” Maybe. But I want to look at the actual search results first. Are competitors bidding on your name? Are third-party review sites showing up? Is a large AI Overview, shopping block, or local pack pushing your organic listing down the page? The search results page isn't ten blue links anymore, and owning more of it can matter, especially when the person searching already knows who you are. SEO, GEO, and Paid Search Aren't Separate Islands Marketing teams love putting channels into boxes. SEO owns organic search. Paid media owns Google Ads. Someone else is suddenly responsible for GEO. What GEO Actually Means GEO, or generative engine optimization, is about making it easy for AI systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Overviews to understand and surface your brand in generated answers. That's not how people actually research, though. A buyer might discover a company in ChatGPT. Then they see the brand again on LinkedIn. They Google the company name, click a paid ad, and leave. Three days later they come back through an organic search. They finally convert through direct traffic. Which channel gets credit? Wrong question. The better question is whether the company was visible throughout the process. Google Ads don't directly make a company more likely to get cited by an LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc) or show up in an AI-generated answer. But paid search still supports the bigger visibility picture. It helps capture demand created elsewhere. It gives you faster feedback on the words buyers actually use. And it shows you which problems and solutions drive action, not just traffic. That information should get shared across paid search, SEO, content, and GEO. The channels are different. The person researching doesn't care. When Google Ads Aren't the Answer I love Google Ads. I also don't think every business should run them. If there's little to no search volume for your product or service, search ads may not be the best place to start. Say your sales cycle is long and your conversion tracking stops at a form fill. You might end up optimizing for leads that never become customers. If your landing page doesn't clearly explain what you do, more traffic won't fix that. And if you can't connect marketing activity to actual business outcomes, spending more won't help. You'll just spend more without knowing what's working. Google Ads work best when there's existing intent to capture and the infrastructure to measure what happens after the click. Without those two things, the answer isn't always “spend more.” Sometimes the answer is to fix the foundation first. So, Should You Still Invest in Google Ads? Yes, but be more deliberate about why. Google doesn't own the entire research journey anymore. The value of Google Ads is that search still captures moments of intent. AI may help someone understand their problem and build a shortlist. But when that person searches for a solution, compares providers, or types a brand name into Google, there's a reason behind it, and that's the moment Google Ads can still be incredibly valuable. If you're not sure where your brand actually shows up right now, across paid, organic, and AI-generated answers, that's worth a real look before you touch the budget. See Where Your Brand Shows Up in Search Get a free look at your brand's visibility across paid search, organic results, and AI answers like ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews, before you decide where to shift budget. Frequently Asked Questions Is Google Ads still worth it if people are using AI to research? Yes, for the buying stage. ChatGPT and AI Overviews are absorbing early, informational research queries, but Google Ads capture the later moment when someone already knows what they want and is comparing specific options, which is where paid search has always performed best.. What is GEO in marketing? GEO stands for generative engine optimization. It's the practice of structuring content so AI systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews can understand it and surface it in generated answers, similar in spirit to SEO but built around how AI systems extract and cite information rather than how they rank pages. What is the difference between AEO and SEO? SEO, or search engine optimization, focuses on ranking web pages in traditional search results like Google's blue links. AEO, or answer engine optimization, focuses on getting content selected as the direct answer in featured snippets, voice search, and AI-generated responses. SEO is about visibility on a results page, while AEO is about being the answer itself, and both rely on similarly clear, well-structured, and specific content. Should branded search campaigns be cut if a company already ranks first organically? Not automatically. Ranking first organically doesn't account for competitor bidding on your brand name, review sites appearing above your listing, or AI Overviews and shopping blocks pushing your organic result further down the page. Check the actual search results page before dropping branded ad spend. Do Google Ads help a brand get cited by AI tools like ChatGPT? Not directly. Google Ads don't influence whether an AI system cites or surfaces a brand in a generated answer. What paid search does provide is faster data on the exact language buyers use and which offers drive action, information that can inform SEO and GEO efforts even though the channels themselves work independently. What's the difference between researching intent and buying intent in search? Researching intent is a searcher still learning about a topic or category, for example “what is account based marketing.” Buying intent is a searcher who already knows what they want and is comparing specific providers, for example “best ABM agencies for SaaS.” AI tools increasingly answer researching-intent queries directly, while buying-intent queries remain where Google Ads perform best.
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7 B2B Sales Strategies to Grow That Your Team Can Implement This Week
Why the Basics Beat Every B2B Sales Tactic You’re Trying Most B2B business leaders aren’t struggling to grow sales because they lack ambition. It’s not even a lack of effort. Usually, success comes down to executing the fundamentals consistently and with a system. Not the flashy stuff but rather the boring, repeatable, human stuff that compounds over time. After working with over a thousand businesses and helping drive more than a billion dollars in top-line revenue growth, we’ve seen a consistent pattern. The best businesses are doing the basics better than everyone else, and they’ve built teams that do the same. What Are the Most Effective Strategies to Grow B2B Sales? To grow sales, you need to combine consistent fundamentals with intentional execution. This means structured onboarding, regular sales training, a referral-driven approach to existing clients, and a personal storytelling strategy. Businesses that implement even one or two of these systematically with clear targets and measurement see improvements in revenue and retention. Why Is Sales Growth So Hard for B2B Businesses? Sales growth is hard because in B2B many industries are commoditized and salespeople are skilled at interviewing without necessarily performing well. Growth levers like referrals, cross-sells, and client retention require intentional systems that many companies never formalize. The good news is that the fixes are straightforward, repeatable, and often don’t require a large budget. Here are seven places you can start: 1. Fix the Two Root Causes of Sales Turnover High turnover is a systems problem as much as it is a people problem. Two factors account for most sales attrition: a poor onboarding experience and insufficient training. A repeatable onboarding process reduces early churn and a formal sales training program produces measurable performance gains. Choose a training program that uses a data-driven, outcomes-based approach to measure both knowledge and application. 2. Know the Top Five Mistakes Every Salesperson Makes Even top producers repeat critical errors daily: talking too much and listening too little, failing to set clear meeting objectives, asking the wrong questions, not differentiating themselves from the competition, and failing to ask for the business. That last one is the most costly and common. Asking for the business shouldn’t only happen at the end of a sales cycle. It should happen at every stage of every conversation, whether that means asking for the next meeting, the next decision, or the next introduction. 3. Ask the One Question Prospects Never See Coming Try this in your next prospect meeting: “Tell me something about yourself that I wouldn’t know without talking to you directly.” It breaks the script, forces genuine reflection, and creates a memorable moment. The goal isn’t the answer itself. It’s the emotion the question produces: the prospect feels heard, engaged, and genuinely seen, which is the foundation of trust. This works because it sidesteps everything a prospect has already rehearsed. It requires them to think, not recite. And a prospect who thinks during your meeting is someone who remembers you afterward. 4. Structure Your Organization to Actually Scale To scale sales effectively, you need the right people in the right roles, documented processes, and technology that provides visibility. Hunters and account managers are fundamentally different profiles. Misaligning them is one of the most common and expensive mistakes in sales org design. Ask yourself: Are your hunters actually hunting, or are they managing accounts? Do you have a repeatable process your team follows consistently? Does your technology give you leading indicators, or just lagging reports? When people, process, and tools are aligned, forecasting becomes more reliable, onboarding becomes faster, and growth becomes repeatable. 5. Mine Your Existing Book of Business Your existing client base is your highest-leverage growth channel. Most referral-driven industries dramatically underuse it. Here’s how to activate it intentionally: Market mapping: Identify which clients don’t yet have products or services you offer, then create a plan to cross-sell or upsell. Warm introductions: Before a renewal meeting, pull two or three names from a client’s LinkedIn connections. Go in with a specific ask, not a vague one. Customer appreciation events: Publicly recognize your best clients. It solidifies relationships and shows prospects what it looks like to be in your corner. Measurable referral targets: Set a goal, whether that’s one referral per month or one per quarter. Track it and adjust based on what’s working. The clients you already have are doing business with you because they trust you. Make it easy and intentional for them to introduce you to people. 6. Write the Letter Your Clients Are Waiting For A personal letter from the owner or CEO to their client base is one of the most powerful and underused tools in B2B sales. This is not a company newsletter or a marketing blast but rather a direct message. Clients want to know what you’re learning, how your business is evolving, and that you’re investing in being better for them. What to include in a letter to clients: An insight or strategy you picked up at a recent industry event A challenge your business is working through and how you’re addressing it An investment you’re making in people, technology, or process A genuine ask for feedback or engagement It takes about an hour to write. The differentiation it creates in a commoditized market is outsized. People buy from people, and a letter like this is one of the most human things you can send. 7. Go Back for the Business You Lost Many clients who leave a business eventually regret that decision. It’s a significant recoverable opportunity that organizations often never pursue. Set up a re-engagement process quarterly or semi-annually and assign it to a newer team member who needs confidence-building activity. Former clients already know your firm. You don’t need to re-introduce yourself. Why wining back clients matters beyond revenue: They validate your business in a way no new client can Their story – why they left and why they came back – is your most compelling social proof They tend to be more loyal the second time around There is no more powerful proof point than a client who returned. Build a process to create more of those stories. What Growth-Minded Business Leaders Do Differently The businesses that grow consistently aren’t necessarily selling a more differentiated service. They’re executing on fundamentals that most leaders acknowledge but few formalize: They onboard with intention and train with consistency They ask questions that create emotional connection They structure their teams around strengths They mine their existing relationships before chasing new ones They tell a personal, emotional story in meetings, in letters, and online They treat lost clients as recoverable business, not closed chapters Pick one strategy from this list and implement it this week. Set a target, measure the result, and then build from there.