Matt Gaskin: Lean Principles for High Performance Selling

Lean Selling: How to Make Buying Effortless & Ethical

🔍 What if selling wasn’t about ‘closing’ but about making it effortless for customers to buy?

This episode dismantles outdated, wasteful, and buyer-hostile sales tactics, replacing them with Lean principles, built on respect, trust, and ruthless efficiency. Matt Gaskin joins Marcus Cauchi to challenge sales dogma, expose hidden inefficiencies, and lay out a high-performance, humane approach to selling.

🔥 Sales teams waste 60–80% of their time on the wrong work. Want to fix that?

🚀 What You’ll Learn

1️⃣ The Brutal Truth About Sales Waste

❌ Chasing bad-fit leads that will never buy.
❌ Lying to customers, overpromising, hiding flaws, forcing urgency.
❌ Measuring the wrong things, activity instead of meaningful progress.

💡 Lean sales isn’t about doing more. It’s about removing everything that doesn’t serve the buyer.

2️⃣ The Buyer’s Brain is Wired for Threat Detection

Every sales process either builds trust or triggers alarms.
Objections = proof buyers don’t feel safe yet.
The question isn’t "How do we close more?" but "How do we make it safe to buy?"

3️⃣ Selling is the Art of Elimination

🛠️ Sales is like sculpting: chip away everything that doesn’t belong.
🔍 What’s slowing down decisions? What’s making buying harder? Remove it.

4️⃣ Lean = Power to the Frontline

Salespeople should own their process like engineers own Lean manufacturing.
Leadership’s job: remove roadblocks, not create more.
Sales, finance, marketing, and operations must work as one system.

5️⃣ Failure is a Superpower (If You Use It Right)

✅ Track mistakes. Learn weekly. Improve constantly.
✅ Eliminate what’s not working instead of ‘trying harder’.
✅ Most sales teams repeat bad habits instead of evolving. Be different.

6️⃣ What Happens When You Apply Lean to Sales?

🚀 Better qualification = less wasted effort
🚀 Smarter targeting = more trust, faster deals
🚀 Process built for buyers = salespeople who love their job

💡 The best sales teams don’t ‘sell’, they create clarity, eliminate doubt, and let customers step forward.

🛠️ 5 Things to Do Right Now

✅ Audit your sales process. Where are you creating friction?
✅ Start a Failure Log. Track bad outcomes, tweak, and improve weekly.
✅ Kill bad-fit leads early. Prioritise buying intent over quantity.
✅ Get outside the sales bubble. Spend time with customers and frontline teams.
✅ Ask this question daily: “What conditions make it easy for customers to say YES?”