Sales Leadership Episodes

Most companies believe revenue growth solves everything. Doug C. Brown has spent 33 years proving that the hidden profit in your business is usually a bigger opportunity than the next deal.
Doug is CEO of CEO Sales Strategies, and his premise is uncomfortable: the money you're chasing is already inside the company. You paid to acquire it. It's sitting in underpricing, in proposals nobody followed up on, in a fulfillment process that takes eight weeks when it should take one. It just never made it to the bank.
He walks host Lee Levitt through the diagnostic he uses to find it — 21 EBITDA drivers, each with five or six sub-points, applied in a fifteen-minute conversation. Then the results. A $2.4 million HVAC company that grew to $4.96 million while EBITDA moved from 13% to 28%, adding roughly a million in operating cash and $7 million in enterprise valuation. A $772,000 plumbing shop sitting on $226,000 in unclaimed EBITDA, found in two hours, with $40,000 of it recovered inside thre…

A new CEO once told three thousand employees they had no clue how to sell — they were a bunch of traders. Michael Skriver was in that room, and his verdict years later is that the guy was right.
But the line that stuck was what came next: you say you're customer-centric and you actually care about it, and I want to see that in your decisions, else it's just a slogan.
That's the test this episode runs. Michael Skriver started in finance and IT before moving into sales, and he's spent his career leading complex B2B organizations across Europe and Asia. He and Lee Levitt work through what customer centricity looks like when it's an operating decision rather than a value on a wall — letting the technical seller run discovery because everyone knows the person in the tie is dangerous, especially if the title is long. Executive sponsors who put their own credibility at stake instead of approving account plans from a desk. KPIs that measure when a shipment left your factory instead of wheth…

Your car goes where your eyes go." That's a high-performance driving lesson — and it's the perfect metaphor for what's gone wrong in B2B sales. We've been staring at the wrong thing.

I'm Lee Levitt — sales coach, podcast host, and author of The Second Meeting and Together We Win, both due out later this year. Today I'm sitting down with Tom Pisello, known across the industry as The ROI Guy. Tom's been a value-selling pioneer for over 30 years — from his days as the Godfather of TCO at Gartner to founding GeniusDrive.

Buyer confidence is at an all-time low. More information, bigger committees, better tools — and yet two-thirds of buyers regret their decisions shortly after the ink dries. Why?

Here's what to listen for: Aristotle's three buy buttons — pathos, logos, and ethos — and why trust now accounts for 50% of the decision. The shift from fear of missing out to fear of messing up. And why more information doesn't create more confidence.

If you've ever had your best ROI …