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Business Insights & Strategies From Experts: Unveiling Simple Truths Behind Success.
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Monday Apr 20, 2026
Monday Apr 20, 2026
Most sales leaders invest in process, technology, and training. Almost none of them invest in the one lever that silently controls all three: the language their people use — out loud and in their own heads.
Andy Weins has spent 20+ years in the military as a mass resiliency trainer, built a business from scratch, and studied the neuroscience and psychology of how the words we choose wire our behaviour. In this episode, he and Marcus Cauchi go deep on the specific phrases that signal avoidance, underperformance, and self-sabotage, and the language patterns that drive ownership, execution, and results.
If you lead a sales team or run a company, this is not a soft conversation about mindfulness. It is a diagnostic tool. By the end, you will recognise the exact words your team uses when they are not going to close the deal, and you will know what to replace them with.
Why This Matters
Every sales team has what looks like a pipeline problem, a skills problem, or a market problem. Often it is a language problem in disguise.
When your salespeople say "I just wanted to follow up," they are signalling low value before they have even started. When they say "I should call that account," they are parking it indefinitely. When they say "we need more leads," they are frequently deflecting accountability for what they already have.
The language your team uses in CRM notes, forecast calls, and customer conversations is data. It tells you who is owning their number and who is performing learned helplessness. This episode gives you the framework to hear that signal clearly.
Key Themes and Takeaways
1. Blame, Excuse, and Denial: The Three Default Failure Modes
Andy opens with a concept drawn from Brené Brown's work on shame: when there is a gap between what we want and what we have, the brain defaults to one of three responses — blame, excuse, or denial — because they require the least cognitive effort.
In sales, this shows up as:
- Blame: "The prospect went dark." "Marketing isn't generating quality leads." "The economy is tough."
- Excuse: "I didn't have time to prep." "The deck wasn't ready."
- Denial: "I didn't really want that account anyway."
The correction Andy offers is deceptively simple: ask "Where is my DNA in this?" Even if you are 1% responsible for a poor outcome, claiming that 1% shifts you from passenger to driver. For sales leaders running deal reviews, that question, where is your DNA in this?, is worth installing as a standard.
2. "Just" and "But": The Two Words That Kill Credibility Before You've Started
Marcus flags two words that most people use dozens of times a day without realising their cost:
"Just" — minimises what follows. "I'm just calling to check in" communicates low value, low confidence, and low intent. Andy's framing: just justifies the nonsense that's about to happen. Train your team to remove it entirely from outreach language. Not "I just wanted to reach out" — "I'm calling because..."
"But" — cancels everything before it. "Great work on that proposal, but..." means the compliment is noise. Two conflicting ideas, only one of which is true: the one that comes after but. In coaching conversations with reps, this matters. In customer conversations, it is fatal.
These are not stylistic preferences. They are trust and credibility signals that prospects and internal stakeholders pick up subconsciously.
3. The Difference Between a Desire and an Expectation — and Why It Determines Whether You Hit Target
Andy draws a sharp distinction that has direct application to how sales leaders manage their teams and how salespeople manage their customers:
An expectation is what you want from someone else. It sets you up for resentment, conflict, and passivity — because other people are not here to meet your expectations.
A desire is what you want. It is owned. It creates agency, because the question that follows is what are you willing to do to get it?
In sales management, the difference sounds like this:
- Expectation: "My reps should be hitting 80% of quota by Q2."
- Desire: "I want a team hitting 80% by Q2. What am I prepared to do to coach, structure, and resource them to get there?"
The second version puts you back in the problem. That is where leverage lives.
4. "Need" vs "Want": Why Needs Create Victims and Wants Create Agency
Drawing on Dan Sullivan's 10x Is Easier Than 2x, Andy argues that needs are a trap. When you say "I need a six-figure salary" or "we need more pipeline," you are constructing a prison: a world where survival is contingent on something outside your control, which justifies inaction when that thing doesn't arrive.
Wants work differently. "I want more pipeline" immediately opens the question: what are you willing to do to generate it? The conflict becomes internal — which want is greater, your want for comfort or your want for results? — and internal conflict is where growth happens.
For founders: audit the language in your strategy meetings. Count how many times need is used as a reason not to act rather than a prompt to act. It is a reliable indicator of where learned helplessness has taken root.
5. People Talk About Results to Justify Decisions They've Already Made
This is one of the episode's sharpest insights, and it maps directly onto how sales forecasts and pipeline reviews get distorted.
Andy's framing: the people who get funded on Dragons' Den are the ones who talk about the work — "we will take this influencer, they will post three times a week, that will reduce our customer acquisition cost by X" — not the ones who say "we'll increase sales and grow the business."
Watch for this in forecast calls. Reps who say "I'm going to close this at the end of the month" are describing a result. Reps who say "I have a confirmed call with economic buyer on Thursday, legal review is booked for the following week, and we've agreed the commercial terms" are describing work. The second rep knows what they're doing. The first is hoping.
Marcus extends this: the work is the reward. Not a soft point — a structural one. Fixating on the number makes you passive. Fixating on the three specific actions that produce the number makes you active. Build your pipeline reviews around activity and methodology, not outcomes, and the outcomes improve.
6. The Six Most Powerful Statements — A Framework for High-Performance Internal Dialogue
Andy's framework for replacing avoidance language with accountable language is built on six sentence-starters, used in sequence. For sales leaders, this is a coaching script and a self-assessment tool.
I am — Identity. Who are you as a seller, a leader, a professional? This sets the anchor. It also establishes boundaries: I am not going to take that approach is more powerful than I can't or I won't.
I can — Capability. Honest inventory of what is within reach. Not everything, but something. What can you actually do? In coaching conversations, this is where excuses go to die.
I feel — Emotional data. The body knows before the brain articulates. I feel uncomfortable with this account's timeline is information. Suppressing it is expensive. Andy's recommended construct: I feel [emotion] when [specific behaviour occurs]. Clean, ownable, actionable.
I know — Empirical grounding. Not assumption, not interpretation. What do you actually know versus what are you telling yourself? In sales, this is the difference between a forecast based on facts and one based on optimism.
I want — Stated desire. Now that you are grounded in reality, what do you actually want? This is where new thinking enters. It plants a direction.
I will — Commitment. A contract with yourself. Time-bound, specific, testable. This is where language stops being self-talk and becomes execution.
Run your 1:1s through this lens. What do you know about this deal? What do you want to happen? What will you do in the next 48 hours? That is a coaching conversation.
7. Should → Could → Can → Will: The Language Ladder That Turns Avoidance into Action
This is Andy's most immediately deployable tool for sales managers dealing with stalled activity, sandbagged pipeline, or reps who are busy without being productive.
Should — moralises and parks. "I should call that enterprise account" means it will not happen. It creates guilt without commitment. It is where people store things they have decided not to do.
Could — generates options. Crucially, Andy argues that you must start here with unlimited time, money, and resource. No constraints. Let the brain go wide. This is how you break out of small thinking. In team exercises, this is the brainstorm phase.
Can — grounds in reality. Take the expanded could list and ask: what can we actually do, given current constraints? You typically get more options than if you'd started with can directly — because could first opens more neural pathways.
Will — is the commitment. Specific. Time-bound. Testable. And Andy's observation from hundreds of workshops: the will is almost always a small, basic action that the person had been avoiding simply because they had never written it down.
For sales leaders: run this sequence on any stalled deal, underperforming territory, or strategic initiative that has been sitting in should for more than two weeks. It takes fifteen minutes and it moves things.
The Four Agreements Applied to Sales Leadership
Marcus frames the episode's second half around Don Miguel Ruiz's The Four Agreements and their antithesis — a framework that maps precisely onto how high-performing versus underperforming sales cultures operate:
| Agreement | What it looks like in a strong sales culture | What the antithesis looks like in a broken one |
|---|---|---|
| Be impeccable with your word | Forecasts you can trust; commitments that stick | CRM noise; happy-ears forecasting; overpromising |
| Don't take anything personally | Reps who hear objections as information | Reps who go quiet after one rejection |
| Don't make assumptions | Proper discovery; testing hypotheses with buyers | Pitching to an assumed need without qualification |
| Always do your best | Consistent activity; incremental improvement | Effort contingent on mood or certainty of outcome |
The antithesis that Marcus outlines is worth reading carefully as a diagnostic of cultural dysfunction: using language to protect yourself rather than communicate clearly; speaking to justify rather than clarify; making everything about yourself; filling information gaps with untested stories; and making effort conditional on comfort.
If that describes your forecast calls, your deal reviews, or your 1:1s, this episode is the starting point for changing it.
Reflect, Realise, Regulate: Why Acknowledging a Problem Is Not Step One
Andy challenges the received wisdom that acknowledgement is the first step. His model: reflection comes first.
Reflect — how did I show up? What is frustrating me? What brings me clarity? This is the diagnostic phase.
Realise — who are the right people to involve? What behaviours am I responsible for? What choices do I actually have?
Regulate — pick accordingly. Act from awareness, not reaction.
This has direct application for sales leaders managing underperformers. Jumping to the problem — "your close rate is 12% and the team average is 28%" — before the rep has reflected produces defensiveness, not accountability. Create the conditions for reflection first. The numbers become a shared investigation rather than a verdict.
The Start/Stop/Continue Framework and Where Sales Organisations Leave Most Value
Marcus closes with a direct provocation: if you audit the dead work, the rework, and the pointless activity that most sales organisations inflict on themselves, you can recover 60–80% of your working week.
The stop list is the highest-leverage intervention. Not because stopping things is easy, but because it creates the cognitive and calendar capacity to do the things that actually matter. Ask your team: what are you doing right now that if you stopped tomorrow, no one — including your customers — would notice?
That conversation, done honestly, is worth more than most sales methodologies.
A Five-Minute Exercise for You and Your Team
- Name one should that has been sitting on your list for more than two months.
- Generate five coulds — with no constraints.
- Strip it to two or three cans — given actual resources and time.
- Write one I will with a day and a time attached.
- Identify the one word in your vocabulary you will remove this week to stop yourself wriggling out of it.
Do this in your next team meeting. Watch what surfaces.
About Andy Wines
Andy Wines is a fourth-generation entrepreneur, 20+ year US Army veteran, and mass resiliency trainer. He owns and operates a junk removal business and has built a speaking and consulting practice focused on the language of leadership and the psychology of performance. His first book, Words F**king Matter, identifies 13 phrases that are actively limiting performance. His second book, Stop Avoiding Your Numbers, is a guide to financial confidence for business owners.
Andy is available on LinkedIn — his phone number and email are public and he actively responds. You can also reach him at andyweins.com.
#sales leadership #sales team language #sales coaching #founder mindset #accountability in sales #B2B sales performance #sales productivity #sales culture #high performance sales teams #sales pipeline management #sales manager coaching #sales mindset
Chapter Markers
7 Truly Insightful Moments for Sales Leaders and Founders
| Timestamp | Chapter Title |
|---|---|
| 0:00 | Intro — Why the Words Your Team Uses Are Your Biggest Revenue Leak |
| 2:00 | Blame, Excuse, Denial: The Three Ways Salespeople Avoid Accountability |
| 3:29 | "Just" and "But": Two Words That Destroy Credibility Before the Call Has Started |
| 7:35 | Desires vs Expectations: Why Sales Leaders Who Set Expectations Fail Their Teams |
| 10:19 | Talking About Results vs Doing the Work — How to Spot Who Will and Won't Close |
| 20:27 | The Six Most Powerful Statements: A Framework for Accountable Sales Conversations |
| 41:43 | Should → Could → Can → Will: The Language Ladder That Kills Pipeline Avoidance |
| 45:00 | The Stop List — Recovering 60–80% of Your Team's Week by Removing the Right Things |
Friday Apr 17, 2026
Friday Apr 17, 2026
In this episode of The Inquisitor Podcast, Marcus Cauchi and Ryan Burman discuss procurement in B2B sales, buyer psychology, total cost of ownership, and how sales teams can build trust with procurement instead of fighting it.
The discussion reframes procurement as a risk management function rather than a price cutting function.
Ryan explains that successful sales teams focus less on persuasion and more on aligning with how procurement evaluates suppliers, especially around risk, reliability, and total cost of ownership.
This episode is relevant for sales leaders, account executives, and commercial teams working in complex B2B sales environments where procurement plays a key role in decision making.
Key Topics Covered
* Procurement in B2B sales and how it influences buying decisions
* Buyer psychology and how procurement evaluates supplier risk
* Total cost of ownership (TCO) vs ROI in procurement decisions
* Sales and procurement alignment in enterprise and mid-market deals
* How to build trust with procurement teams in B2B selling
* Why co-creation improves sales outcomes compared to traditional pitching
* Common sales mistakes when dealing with procurement teams
* How procurement manages risk, continuity, and supplier reliability Key
Takeaways
Procurement is focused on risk management
Procurement teams prioritise reducing operational and commercial risk, not just lowering costs.
Buyer decision making is driven by risk
Suppliers are evaluated on whether they reduce uncertainty or introduce it.
Total cost of ownership matters more than ROI
Procurement considers long-term costs including quality, supply chain stability, and maintenance.
Co-creation improves sales success Building solutions with procurement leads to stronger alignment and higher win rates.
Trust is the deciding factor Buyers prioritise predictability and reduced internal risk over lowest price.
Key Insight for Sales Teams
In B2B sales, every deal must satisfy three buyer needs:
* Functional, does the solution work
* Social, how it impacts internal stakeholders
* Emotional, whether it reduces personal and career risk
Ryan Burman is the founder of Pitch to Procure and creator of the First to Pitch methodology. He helps sales and procurement teams improve alignment, negotiation outcomes, and supplier relationships in complex B2B sales environments.
Key Quote “The first transaction is not the win. The first transaction is the test of trust. Pass that test and even if you don’t get a deal, you can get a customer for life.” Marcus Cauchi
Tuesday Mar 31, 2026
Tuesday Mar 31, 2026
What does it actually mean to be a trusted adviser and, how would you know if you were one? Most customer-facing professionals believe they're trusted. Their customers largely disagree. That gap is the problem Rowly Hirst has spent his career trying to solve.
Rowly is CEO of Relate.US and the creator of Sandy, a generative AI analyst that measures trust in real time using the Maister-Green-Galford Trust Equation: Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy ÷ Self-Orientation. In this conversation, Marcus and Rowly go deep on what trust actually looks like in practice, why the most popular sales frameworks quietly destroy it, and what it takes to become a genuine ally rather than an accomplice, or worse, an adversary.
If you spend your days in complex, high-stakes conversations, this episode is for you.
What We Cover
- Why trust is defined not by what someone says about you, but by what they do when they could stay vague, delay, or protect themselves, and choose not to
- The difference between an ally, an accomplice, and an adversary in a sales relationship, and the precise moment sellers cross the line
- Why the word "playbook" is the wrong mental model entirely, and what replaces it
- A masterclass in trust-building from an AT&T store in Boston: how a $50 sale became a case study in the Trust Equation in action
- The five operating principles that separate trusted advisers from everyone else
- How Challenger, BANT, MEDIC, SPIN, and Sandler all fail in the same way under pressure, and what that failure looks like in practice
- The 55 sub-factors Sandy measures across the four components of the Trust Equation
- Why gamifying your trust score actually works, and ends up benefiting the customer, not just the seller
- The 90/30 trust perception gap: why over 90% of sales reps believe they're trusted advisers while only 30% of their customers agree
- What Sandy has taught Rowly about his own blind spots, including a real example of how he lost an investor in a meeting and what he changed afterwards
- Why saying "I don't know" is a credibility asset, not a liability
- How measurement of trust has gone from a $600 human analysis taking a week to a six-cent automated result in under two minutes
- Gallup's estimate that improving meaningful feedback and trust-building could lift global employee engagement from 20% to 80% — an $8.5 trillion productivity uplift
Key Idea from This Episode
Trust isn't something you ask for or declare. It's something the other person gifts you, quietly, through their behaviour, especially when risk is on the table. It breaks down not when objections appear, but earlier: when pressure rises and we unconsciously shift from ally to accomplice. The fix isn't a better playbook. It's noticing yourself under pressure and choosing differently.
About Rowly Hirst
Rowly Hirst is CEO of Relate.us and has over 25 years of experience in consultative sales and account management in financial services. He began developing the thinking behind Relate.us in 2013 after a career taking CEOs and CFOs to meet investors, observing first-hand how poorly the industry measured what actually mattered in high-stakes relationships. Sandy, Relate.us's generative AI trust analyst, is built on the Maister-Green-Galford Trust Equation and measures trust objectively across 55 sub-factors, delivering results in near real-time at a fraction of the cost of traditional survey or human-review methods.
Connect with Rowly 🌐 relateUS.com 🔗 LinkedIn: Rowly Hirst
Connect with Marcus 🔗 LinkedIn: Marcus Cauchi 🌐 theinquisitorpodcast.com
Chapters
- 0:00 — Introduction & Rowly's background
- 2:34 — Defining trust as observable behaviour under uncertainty
- 4:07 — Ally vs accomplice vs adversary
- 5:28 — Why "playbook" is the wrong model
- 7:05 — The AT&T store story: trust in a 25-minute sale
- 9:45 — The five principles of a trusted adviser
- 12:46 — Where sellers cross the line from ally to accomplice
- 15:17 — What managers should stop coaching
- 17:17 — How Challenger, BANT, MEDIC, SPIN & Sandler erode trust
- 20:09 — What Sandy is and how it works
- 25:00 — The gamification effect
- 27:21 — The feedback people push back against most
- 31:00 — Self-awareness vs self-perception
- 32:31 — The 90/30 trust perception gap
- 33:47 — What would tank Marcus's trust score right now
- 37:50 — How Sandy's coaching evolves across meetings
- 38:07 — Inside the 55 sub-factors
- 40:27 — Vulnerability, credibility, and "I don't know"
- 44:23 — Why proposals fail when the buyer's voice isn't in them
- 45:34 — The cost of measuring trust: then vs now
- 47:23 — The $8.5 trillion productivity opportunity
- 48:24 — Rowly's advice to his 23-year-old self
If This Landed
Don't rush to agree or disagree. Spend the next few days paying attention. Notice when your curiosity drops. Notice when you try to rescue. And if you catch a moment where trust shifted, in either direction , we would genuinely like to hear what you saw.
Stay safe and happy selling.
Tuesday Mar 24, 2026
Tuesday Mar 24, 2026
The Honest Conversation Nobody Else Is Having
Every founder reads the analyst reports. Every sales leader nods along in the conference sessions. Partnerships are the future. Ecosystems are everything. Co-selling is the key to unlocking faster growth, bigger deals, and stickier customers.
And yet, ask those same founders and sales leaders whether they're actually banking on partner-sourced revenue to hit their number this quarter, and the answer is almost always the same: no.
Why? Because it's never been reliable. Because it's always been treated as a nice-to-have. Because nobody actually knows how to make it work.
That's the conversation this episode is built around. Alex Buckles has spent 20 years in enterprise sales, in the SAP ecosystem, the Adobe ecosystem, running and exiting two professional services companies, and figured out early in his career that if he wanted deal flow from partners, he had to earn it. That realisation eventually became Forecastable, a company whose only measure of success is pipeline production through co-sell motions.
What You'll Hear in This Episode
Why the instinct to hire a partnerships professional first is wrong
When a sub-150 person company decides to get serious about partnerships, the first move is almost always to bring in someone with a traditional partnerships background. Alex argues this is the wrong call, not because those people aren't valuable, but because what you actually need at that stage is proof of concept, not infrastructure. A junior AE or an SDR with the right playbook can prove repeatability faster and cheaper than six months of PRM setup and deal registration frameworks.
The co-sell door opener and why discovery calls don't cut it
The most powerful concept in this episode is what Alex calls the co-sell door opener: a high-value experience you invite the prospect into rather than a pitch you push at them. Think of it like a $5,000 event that the vendor covers, limited seats, relevant to a specific pain, designed to create genuine engagement rather than manufactured urgency. It doesn't feel like a sales motion because, done right, it isn't one.
The three types of value anyone ever sells
Fix something. Prevent something. Improve something. That's it. And when you're building co-sell plays, Alex argues the fix is almost always the most powerful place to start. If the prospect has a raging toothache, don't pitch them a one-year dental plan.
Why 60% of pipeline dies in no decision — and what's really behind it
Marcus and Alex dig into something most sales training doesn't touch: buyer safety. Not qualification. Not discovery. The deeper question of whether the person sitting across from you can actually afford, professionally, politically, emotionally, to make this decision. When you ignore that question, you end up with a pipeline full of deals that were never going anywhere, a constipated middle of funnel, and a close rate that would make any CFO reach for the antacids.
The second room problem
80 to 90 percent of the sale happens without you in it. The internal conversations, the allocation committees, the corridor conversations between stakeholders, none of that is visible to the vendor. Which means your champion has to carry your story, unedited and unaccompanied, into rooms you'll never see. The question isn't whether your deal is qualified on paper. It's whether every stakeholder in that buying committee would go to bat for you when you're not there.
What great partner enablement actually looks like
It's not onboarding decks and quarterly business reviews. It's getting in front of the frontline manager with a win story, asking for 15 minutes on their weekly team call, and showing up with something their reps can use in the field that week. Ghost-written outreach. Account development research. Win wires in shared Slack channels. Perpetual mindshare, that's what you're actually after.
Demos: mostly a waste of time
Alex's take on this is blunt. Once you've given a demo, the buyer has locked in their view of you. You've answered a bunch of curiosities, and they may ghost you. Save the demo for last. Use it to confirm the order, not to create one. If it won't change a stakeholder's decision, don't do it.
Three Takeaways You Can Use Tomorrow
1. Start with the interview, not the one-pager. Before you build any co-sell playbook, get the most trusted systems integrator in the room and ask them what makes them different. Real conversations produce better plays than merged marketing decks every time.
2. Know who owns the problem and who owns the outcome — they're almost never the same person. In most organisations, the partnership professional owns the problem but has no budget and limited authority. The sales leader owns the outcome but views partnerships as fluffy. Bridging those two people explicitly — not hoping it happens organically — is what gets deals done.
3. Ask yourself the second room question for every stakeholder. If this person were in a room with their boss right now and you weren't there, would they go to bat for you? If you can't answer yes with confidence, you've got more work to do.
About Alex Buckles
Alex is the CEO and co-founder of Forecastable, a professional services company that stands up partner programs and co-sell motions that produce measurable pipeline. With a background spanning enterprise sales, the SAP and Adobe ecosystems, and two exited professional services businesses — all built through co-selling — Alex brings a perspective on partnerships that is grounded entirely in what produces revenue, not what looks good on a slide.
🔗 Find Alex on LinkedIn or visit forecastable.com for published pricing and use cases.
About The Inquisitor Podcast
The Inquisitor is hosted by Marcus Cauchi and is built around one idea: honest, evidence-based conversations about what actually works in sales, go-to-market, and revenue leadership. No posturing. No vanity metrics. Just the real work.
If this episode was useful, share it with a founder or sales leader who's talking about partnerships but hasn't yet made them produce. That's who this was made for.
Monday Mar 16, 2026
Monday Mar 16, 2026
If you run a business with a sales team, this episode will make you uncomfortable. That's the point.
Marcus Cauchi and Andy Hough have a no-holds-barred conversation about why sales has become distrusted, what's causing it, and what founders and CEOs can actually do to fix it.
Andy has spent decades in the field, from Lloyds and Barclays to 16 years at EMC (now Dell), and has since sat through hundreds of hours of sales meetings as a researcher. He knows where the bodies are buried.
What we cover in this episode:
Why sales has shifted from a relationship-driven profession to a numbers and technology treadmill, and what that's costing you in customer trust, revenue quality, and staff retention.
How shareholder pressure flows down through leadership, management, and sellers, and arrives in front of your buyers as inauthenticity, shallow discovery, and unwanted pressure.
Why the best sales interactions are built on understanding how your customer makes money, protects margin, and carries risk, and why most sales teams have lost this entirely.
The 90-day productivity myth. Research puts it at 3.2 years for a salesperson to hit full stride. Most organisations churn people before they ever get there.
Why activity metrics destroy quality, and what the alternative actually looks like in practice.
The player-manager trap and why it almost always ends badly for the team, the manager, and ultimately the customer.
What sales coaching actually is, and why the gap between what managers think they're doing and what salespeople are experiencing is wider than most leaders realise.
Why seller psychological safety is as important as buyer trust, and how the wrong people keep getting promoted.
Why your CRM is aligned to your sales process and not your buyer's journey, and why that single misalignment is costing you deals you didn't even know you lost.
The case for sustainable sales: focusing on the 6-to-36 month pipeline where there's no competition, time to build real relationships, and room to become a trusted adviser rather than another vendor chasing a quarterly number.
The question this episode leaves every founder and CEO with:
Are the systems you've built designed to create trust with customers, or are they quietly destroying it in order to hit this quarter's number? And critically, does anyone in your organisation feel safe enough to tell you?
About Andy Hough
Andy Hough is co-founder of the Institute of Sales Professionals, a tireless advocate for sales as a profession, and a doctoral researcher studying the adaptability of salespeople and its impact on performance. He lectures at Cranfield University and is part of the Global Sales Science Institute. He has carried a target, led teams, and spent his career trying to return sales to what it was in its best form. A genuinely human, outcome-focused profession.
Connect with Andy on LinkedIn or visit the ISP at www.isp.uk.com
About Marcus Cauchi
Marcus Cauchi is the host of the Inquisitor Podcast and works with founders, CEOs, and sales leaders on decision safety, go-to-market alignment, and building sales organisations that create long-term customer value. He is currently completing a manuscript on the systemic compromises that accumulate inside sales cultures and the cost they carry.
Connect with Marcus on LinkedIn
If this episode resonated, share it with your CRO, your Head of Sales, or any founder who's wondering why pipeline feels harder than it used to. The answer is probably in this conversation.
Friday Feb 27, 2026
Friday Feb 27, 2026
In this episode of the Inquisitor Podcast, host Marcus Cauchi talks with LinkedIn expert Graeme Riley, a platform user since 2004 and business development consultant since 2012, to cut through the noise and get practical about what actually works on LinkedIn.
Graeme shares why most people are using LinkedIn wrong, how the platform's algorithm has evolved, and what separates the salespeople who consistently hit their targets from those who burn out in 18 months.
Topics covered include: building a LinkedIn strategy tied to revenue goals, curating your ideal client network, optimising your profile for today's audience, the right content mix for dwell time and reshares, the difference between free, premium and Sales Navigator accounts, and why most companies are wasting their investment in the platform.
Whether you're a solo entrepreneur or leading a sales team, this episode will challenge your assumptions and give you actionable steps to stop being a well-kept secret.
Find Graeme Riley on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamkeithriley/
Tuesday Jan 27, 2026
Tuesday Jan 27, 2026
Stop leaving money on the table.
In this episode, sales historian and author Todd Caponi reveals why traditional negotiation tactics are destroying trust, eroding margins, and creating unsustainable business models.
Todd shares the revolutionary Four Levers framework that helped him close a $7.5M deal when the customer demanded 35% off - and they ended up with only 15% discount while paying upfront for three years.
What You'll Learn:
🟣Why building trust until the close, then "starting to lie" about pricing is killing your deals
🟣Negotiation Without the Games: Todd Caponi's Four Levers Framework
🟣The 115-year-old concept of "sound basis pricing" that buyers have been demanding since 1910
🟣How the 4x pipeline rule forces reps to waste time on garbage opportunities
🟣Why BANT qualification is outdated and what to do instead
🟣The Four Levers: Volume, Timing of Cash, Length of Commitment, and Timing of Deal
🟣How to stop discounting unilaterally andEducating buyers to squeeze harder
🟣Real data: 20-30% reduction in discounting, 7-8 figure profitability improvements
🟣Why every unasked-for concession (even net 45 vs net 30) signals everything is negotiable
Perfect for: Founders, sales leaders, and top performers who want to increase deal values, improve forecast accuracy, and build sustainable pricing models.
About Todd Caponi
Author of "The Transparency Sale", "The Transparent Sales Leader" and "Four Levers Negotiating," Todd is a longtime sales leader, self confessed transparency nerd, and the only sales history expert who collects artifacts from the 1800s-1900s.
His approach has been working for 17+ years across multiple organizations.
Get Todd's Book: "Four Levers Negotiating" - https://amzn.to/4jPmjG9
Connect with Todd:
🎙️ The Sales History Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-sales-history-podcast/id1571354113
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddcaponi/
💡 Found this valuable?
Like, comment, and share with your sales team.
📊 What's your biggest negotiation challenge?
Drop it in the comments.
#SalesNegotiation #B2BSales #SalesLeadership #Pricing #RevenueGrowth
Saturday Jan 17, 2026
Saturday Jan 17, 2026
Most B2B deals don’t end in “no”.
They die quietly. No decision. No movement. No momentum.
In this episode, Marcus Cauchi speaks with Karl Schmidt,one of the leaders of the research teams that helped 100s of companies take advantage of the insights from The Challenger Sale.
Buyers now do most of their thinking before they ever speak to a salesperson. Buying committees have doubled. Information is everywhere. Confidence is not.
This conversation explores why traditional sales approaches struggle in this reality, and why the best sellers are no longer pushing solutions. They’re helping buyers make sense of risk, complexity, and internal politics. You’ll hear:
• Why decision confidence matters more than solution confidence
• The fears that quietly kill deals
• How sellers unintentionally strip buyers of agency
• Why “no decision” is the real competitor
• What framemaking looks like in real sales conversations
If you’re a founder, CEO, sales leader, or an aspiring top performer, this episode will change how you think about discovery, deal reviews, and what it really means to help a customer buy. This is not about tactics. It’s about leadership in the buying process.
Monday Jan 12, 2026
Monday Jan 12, 2026
Are you settling for "good enough" while your sales organisation invests in an 85% loser rate?
In this episode, Marcus Cauchi sits down with David Brock, author of "Is Good Enough Good Enough? Mindsets and Behaviors for Sales Excellence," to challenge the traditional "metrics madness" that keeps founders and sales leaders trapped in cycles of mindless activity.
Dave shares his pragmatic, scientific approach to performance, revealing how top performers achieve their goals by being "intelligently lazy" and cutting out the "dead work" that consumes the average workday.
They explore the "Three-Pile Strategy" for auditing tasks, the high cost of customer churn, and why personal accountability is the ultimate differentiator between top performers and those who make excuses.
A major highlight of this conversation is David’s contrarian take on AI. Having used Claude AI as a "thought partner" and "debate partner" to co-author his book, David explains why AI is a "profound amplifier" that makes deep thinkers better but makes "lazy idiots" fail at scale.
Learn how to use discovery-based prompting to internalise strategic ownership and why curiosity remains the foundational behaviour for the next generation of leaders.
Key Topics Covered:
• The Trap of Activity vs. Outcomes: Why being "busy" is often a mask for underperformance.
• The Three-Pile Audit: Examine tasks and reclaiming 40% of your team's capacity. • Retention vs. Acquisition: Why the obsession with new logos is a recipe for wasted effort.
• AI as a Debate Partner: Moving beyond automation to elevate your strategic thinking.
• The Sacred Habit: Why scheduling 20 minutes of reflection daily is non-negotiable for excellence
Contact David Brock on linkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davebrock/
Email: dabrock@excellenc.com
Website: http://partnersinexcellenceblog.com/
Read the book: https://amzn.to/4brvQku
Contact Marcus https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcuscauchi/
Saturday Jan 10, 2026
Saturday Jan 10, 2026
Why do so many sales teams stumble despite talented hires?
In this episode, Peter Wheeler, serial entrepreneur and expert in scaling revenue velocity for early-stage organisations, explores the decline of apprenticeship in modern sales and the impact it has on team performance and long-term growth.
We examine why the traditional player-manager model often fails, how role siloing prevents junior staff from learning the ropes, and why leadership needs to move beyond administrative tasks to actively coach and support teams in the field.
Peter highlights the systemic dysfunctions caused by shareholder primacy and short-term thinking, including the hidden costs of high sales turnover, conflicting departmental metrics, and the erosion of trust and integrity in organisations. He explains why senior executives, not just salespeople, must engage with customers to understand real-world challenges and make informed strategic decisions.
We also discuss practical solutions to restore apprenticeship and learning in sales, including aligning teams around customer outcomes, leveraging AI as a personal coaching tool, and fostering a culture of trust, integrity, and long-term thinking.
Listeners will gain insights into how to build high-performing teams, reduce churn, and develop sustainable business growth, even in times of uncertainty or economic turmoil.
Whether you’re a founder, sales leader, or executive looking to improve team performance, this episode offers actionable advice, fresh perspectives, and strategies to thrive in a sales environment that too often sacrifices learning for short-term results.
Key Takeaways:
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The hidden costs of high sales turnover and short-termism
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How role siloing and player-manager models stunt growth and learning
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Why senior leaders must be actively engaged with customers
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Strategies for aligning departments and prioritising customer outcomes
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Leveraging AI for coaching, personal effectiveness, and customer-centric entrepreneurship
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Thriving through market uncertainty by focusing on what you can control
Contact Peter on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterledgrowth/
Contact Marcus https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcuscauchi/
or email team@principledselling.com
The Framemaking Sale by Karl Schmidt and Brent Adamson: https://amzn.to/4jHYYpU
The Challenger Sale https://amzn.to/4qv7w63
Noise by Daniel Kahneman https://amzn.to/4pzcGwr
More resources at theframemakingsale.com