Sales Expert

I’ve been VP of Business Development at SEIDOR. I ran the Northeast region as General Manager at Vision33. Today I’m Head of Sales for Quaint Business Solutions. I’m also a member of the Forbes Business Development Council. I say all that not to impress you — but so you know the advice comes from the chair you’re sitting in, not from a textbook.

Most SMB sales problems aren’t talent problems. They’re system problems. No defined pipeline stages. No follow-up cadence. No qualification criteria, so the forecast is fiction. Prospecting that happens when someone feels like it. I fix the system, and the system fixes the numbers.

Your forecast is fiction. Every month the number moves, every quarter ends with a scramble, and nobody can explain why the deals that were “90%” vanished. Fiction forecasts come from stages with no entry or exit criteria — deals sit in “proposal” because someone sent an email once. I rebuild the pipeline around buyer actions, not seller hope, so a stage actually means something and the forecast becomes a tool instead of a fairy tale.

Deals live in inboxes, not in the CRM. Your best rep knows everything — and tells the system nothing. When they’re on vacation, sick, or hired away, the pipeline goes with them. I install a process simple enough that reps actually follow it, and a CRM setup that reflects reality instead of whatever got typed in the night before the pipeline review.

Prospecting happens when someone feels like it. Feast or famine: a frantic burst of outreach when the pipeline runs dry, then nothing while everyone’s busy closing. I build the BDR playbook — ideal customer profile, list-building, outreach sequences, objection handling — so prospecting is a machine that runs every week, not a mood that strikes quarterly.

Your answer to every growth problem is hiring. More reps, same broken process, same unpredictable results — just more expensive. Adding headcount to a broken system scales the chaos. I fix the machine first: pipeline, qualification, follow-up discipline. Then, when you do hire, each new rep lands in a system that makes them productive in weeks instead of quarters.

You’re working deals that were never going to close. The most expensive activity in sales is months of effort on a “maybe” that was a “no” from the start. I install qualification early and make “no” a win — a fast no is worth ten slow maybes, and your closers get their time back for deals that can actually land.

Pipeline architecture. Stages that mean something — defined by buyer actions, not seller hope. Entry and exit criteria for every stage, so a deal in “proposal” actually means something and your forecast stops being astrology.

BDR playbooks. Prospecting is a process, not a personality trait. Ideal customer profile, list-building, outreach sequences across email/phone/social, objection handling, and the handoff to closers — documented so it works when your best rep is on vacation and when you hire rep number three.

Qualification discipline. The most expensive activity in sales is working deals that were never going to close. We install qualification early and make “no” a win — because a fast no is worth ten slow maybes.

Sales management rhythm. Weekly pipeline reviews that aren’t interrogations. Metrics that predict instead of just report: activity, conversion by stage, cycle length, average deal size. You’ll know what’s broken before the quarter ends, not after.

SMB owners and sales leaders whose revenue depends on a process nobody wrote down. You have reps — maybe great ones — but results swing wildly month to month, the forecast is a guess, and growth means hiring more people instead of making the machine better. If your best salesperson is also your only process, we should talk.

This is also for the owner who is the sales department and knows it can’t stay that way. You can’t scale yourself. The system I build is how the business starts selling without you in every deal — which is the difference between owning a business and owning a job with overhead.