Noble Sales, AI Forecasting & Kluster

Tom Wallis at Kluster and I spent most of this conversation on something I don't think gets said enough: sales can be a genuinely noble profession, even though most people are afraid to get into it for exactly the reason I was afraid of it -- nobody wants to be the person calling during dinner trying to sell a credit card nobody needs.

I've been in sales over twenty years now, and the thing that's kept me there is that a good salesperson is solving a real problem for someone, not closing a single transaction. Your reputation is the actual asset. We talked about how that shows up at Motus, where I was running the team through the early days of the pandemic, watching in real time as companies pulled back spending and a seller's job shifted from a nice-to-have pitch to a hard, specific case for ROI.

Tom and I got into forecasting too, and I told him what I tell my own sellers: I don't want you to be the superhero with the cape. I just want you to be right. There's a version of sales culture that rewards under-committing so you can surprise everyone at quarter-end, and another version that rewards big egos overcommitting with no real plan to get there -- neither one is good. What I actually want is what I call the Goldilocks of forecasting: not too big, not too small, just accurate, quarter after quarter.

We also talked about tearing down the wall between sales and marketing -- what I call a Smarketing organization, one leader owning both -- because our data says it takes about seventeen touches to turn a contact into an opportunity, and arguing about whether that credit belongs to sales or marketing is a waste of everyone's time.