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Two Tall Guys Talking Sales

Two Tall Guys Talking Sales

著者： Kevin Lawson and Sean O'Shaughnessey
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"Two Tall Guys Talking Sales," where Sean O'Shaughnessey and Kevin Lawson discuss a single sales topic. Kevin and Sean together have about 60 years of experience in professional selling. This podcast helps people in sales, sales leadership, and business leadership or company owners realize the maximum value of their company by improving their revenue generation capability. This podcast is designed to help those people enhance their companies' sales management practices, methodologies, processes, teams, and messaging. Sean O'Shaughnessey and Kevin Lawson are Fractional Vice Presidents of Sales. They operate their own companies separately but have partnered for this podcast to advise salespeople and SMB companies on successful strategies and methodologies. Kevin is the CEO of Lighthouse Sales Advisors. Lighthouse Sales Advisors is a sales leadership solution provider for small businesses. Lighthouse helps business owners navigate the potential pitfalls around sales growth, sales turnaround, or scaling up by leveraging sales acumen and decades of experience to build effective sales teams. https://www.lighthousesalesadvisors.com/ Sean is the CEO of New Sales Expert. He helps company owners realize the maximum value of their company by improving their revenue generation capability. He helps owners enhance their sales management, methodologies, processes, teams, and messaging.2024 マネジメント マネジメント・リーダーシップ 経済学
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  • Stop Losing Deals: Map the Buying Committee Before You Sell

    Stop Losing Deals: Map the Buying Committee Before You Sell
    2026/08/04
    Salespeople rarely lose complex deals because they forgot to follow up. They lose because they never developed a clear hypothesis about how the decision would be made, who would influence it, and what each stakeholder needed to believe. In this episode of Two Tall Guys Talking Sales, hosts Kevin Lawson and Sean O'Shaughnessey explain how a practical deal plan helps an AE move beyond the purchasing contact, understand the full buying committee, anticipate competitive threats, and coordinate the internal resources required to win. Using examples from sports, construction, manufacturing, and distribution, they show how disciplined planning improves sales execution, pipeline velocity, and long-term account growth. Key Topics Discussed Why Every Important Opportunity Needs a Deal Plan — 00:00 Kevin compares deal planning to the preparation elite athletes complete before taking the field. Great players do not simply understand their own position; they study their competition, anticipate likely reactions, and enter the game with a strategy. The same principle applies to B2B sales. A written deal plan increases the likelihood of closing the opportunity faster, executing more effectively, and avoiding preventable losses. Turning Assumptions into a Written Sales Hypothesis — 01:23 Sean explains that salespeople function as the quarterback of the opportunity. They must determine what they will do, how their teammates will contribute, and how the overall sales process should unfold. A sales hypothesis makes those assumptions visible: who will buy, what problem they are trying to solve, who benefits, and what conditions must exist for the deal to advance. If the hypothesis is not written down, it cannot be tested, improved, or consistently executed. Looking Beyond the Transactional Buyer — 02:32 A purchasing contact may control the transaction without receiving the greatest value from the product. Sean uses an HVAC compressor example to illustrate the broader stakeholder network: procurement, contractors, electricians, installers, building owners, maintenance teams, and eventual occupants may all influence the decision. Effective value selling requires messaging that addresses each stakeholder's priorities—not merely the requirements of the person issuing the purchase order. Understanding Decision Criteria and Stakeholder Influence — 05:05 Kevin expands the discussion through construction and engineered-specification sales. Manufacturers may need to influence architects, engineers, distributors, contractors, materials managers, and procurement teams long before an order is placed. Product specifications, installation requirements, availability, regional codes, service levels, and delivery capabilities can all become decision criteria. Strong business acumen allows a seller to connect those operational details to the buyer's desired outcome and measurable ROI. Mapping the Buying Committee and Informal Relationships — 08:32 Studying competitors is not enough. Salespeople must understand everyone "on the field," including the individuals who benefit from the solution, those who may resist it, and those who influence one another behind the scenes. Sean recommends creating a simple visual stakeholder map: write down the names, circle them, and connect the people who communicate, have worked together, attended school together, or maintain trusted relationships. Mapping the buying committee helps expose the informal decision network that a CRM contact list alone may not reveal. How Deal Plans Evolve into Account Plans — 10:45 A single stakeholder map supports one opportunity. Repeated deal plans reveal patterns across the account. Over time, the seller develops a record of who influenced previous decisions, why stakeholders supported or resisted the solution, and how internal relationships affected the outcome. That knowledge becomes the foundation of an account plan, giving sales management and Revenue management teams a stronger platform for expansion, retention, and more predictable revenue generation. Key Quotes Kevin Lawson — 00:57 "If you're not doing deal plans for your next deal, you're probably missing an opportunity to either close faster or more effectively, or you might even be increasing the chances that you're going to lose." Sean O'Shaughnessey — 01:44 "You are the quarterback of the team. Your job is to figure out what all of your teammates are going to help you do, but also what you're going to do." Kevin Lawson — 05:41 "It's just your opinion about who's going to buy, who it's going to benefit—which may be a different person—and then what are the other related people that could have influence over the deal?" Sean O'Shaughnessey — 09:15 "You need to understand everybody on the court, everybody on the pitch, everybody on the field." Sean O'Shaughnessey — 12:02 "Before long, your deal plans are becoming account plans." Additional Resources B2B Sales Lab The B2B Sales Lab is a ...
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    17 分
  • Sindre Haaland Coaches on Managing the Game, Not the Scoreboard: Building Predictable Sales Performance

    Sindre Haaland Coaches on Managing the Game, Not the Scoreboard: Building Predictable Sales Performance
    2026/07/28
    Sales teams rarely fail because the quota was unclear. They fail because the daily behaviors required to reach it were never defined, measured, or reinforced. In this episode of Two Tall Guys Talking Sales, hosts Kevin Lawson and Sean O'Shaughnessey speak with Sindre Haaland, founder and CEO of SalesScreen, about why effective sales management requires leaders to manage the game, not merely watch the scoreboard. The conversation explores sales gamification, revenue architecture, CRM adoption, qualification discipline, and how AI can support more predictable B2B revenue generation without removing the human motivation that drives consistent execution. Key Topics Discussed Why sales leaders must manage the game, not the scoreboard — 01:19 Revenue targets tell salespeople where they are expected to finish, but they do not explain how to get there. Sindre argues that sales success begins by translating the quota into controllable, revenue-generating activities: calls, meetings, qualified opportunities, pipeline creation, and consistent execution throughout the quarter. Using gamification to change behavior—not merely celebrate outcomes — 02:19 Most sales contests reward closed business, but a salesperson cannot always control when a complex deal closes. Effective gamification focuses instead on meaningful behaviors that sellers can execute every day. Applied correctly, it can improve motivation, consistency, pipeline velocity, and performance among the middle of the sales team, not just recognize the top performers. Connecting activity metrics to conversion quality — 04:07 More activity is not automatically better activity. Measuring calls without examining results can produce meaningless behavior and distorted data. Sean, Kevin, and Sindre discuss the importance of combining activity targets with conversion rates, opportunity progression, and clear definitions of what good execution looks like. Building energy, recognition, and teamwork across the sales organization — 05:25 Sindre describes the moment SalesScreen demonstrated how software could create excitement throughout a sales floor when a deal closed. The larger lesson goes beyond celebration: real-time recognition helps managers reinforce productive behavior, improve engagement, and ensure individual accomplishments are not overlooked inside large sales organizations. Reverse-engineering the quota through revenue architecture — 08:15 Many sales teams know their targets but have never calculated how many calls, meetings, opportunities, and conversions are required to reach them. Without that basic revenue management discipline, prospecting becomes inconsistent, and the pipeline follows a predictable boom-and-bust cycle. Strong sales processes create continuity before pipeline weakness becomes a forecasting crisis. Gamifying qualification and opportunity progression in complex B2B sales — 09:25 In enterprise sales, closed deals may occur too infrequently to serve as useful daily performance signals. Teams can instead quantify progress through qualification frameworks such as MEDDPICC and SPICED, including CRM completeness, opportunity advancement, metric validation, and buying committee coverage. This creates better sales coaching data while reinforcing the behaviors that move complex deals forward. Key Quotes Sindre Haaland — 01:25 "Managers get one thing wrong: they're managing the scoreboard versus managing the game." Sindre Haaland — 04:07 "If you want to change behavior, you need to be in control of those behaviors." Sean O'Shaughnessey — 03:13 "The things you do at the beginning are going to affect the things that you do two, three, four, six, or ten months from now." Sindre Haaland — 08:27 "You need to understand how to get to goal and what real activity you need to put in, day in and day out, to get there." Kevin Lawson — 13:44 "Managing the game, not the scoreboard, is a key behavior." Additional Resources Sindre Haaland CEO and Founder at SalesScreen can be contacted on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/shaaland/ SalesScreen A sales performance management and gamification platform designed to quantify sales processes, reinforce productive activity, increase CRM engagement, and create more predictable sales performance. MEDDPICCC A qualification framework commonly used in enterprise sales and complex deals to evaluate metrics, the economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, paperwork process, goal identification, coaches, champions, and competition. SPICED A sales qualification and discovery framework that helps sellers understand a buyer's situation, pain, impact, critical event, and decision process. A Significant Actionable Item from this Podcast Choose one sales role and reverse-engineer its quarterly quota into a weekly activity model. Start with the revenue target, then calculate the required number of closed deals, qualified opportunities, first meetings, and prospecting activities based on actual conversion ...
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    17 分
  • Stop Asking Bad Discovery Questions: How Top B2B Sellers Earn Buyer Trust

    Stop Asking Bad Discovery Questions: How Top B2B Sellers Earn Buyer Trust
    2026/07/21
    Most sales discovery questions fail before the buyer even answers them. Questions such as "What keeps you up at night?" and "What challenges are you facing?" have been used so often that buyers respond almost automatically, giving sellers little useful insight. In this episode of Two Tall Guys Talking Sales, Kevin Lawson and Sean O'Shaughnessey challenge sales professionals to replace generic scripts with informed, business-specific questions that improve discovery, uncover operational consequences, and help buyers think differently about their problems. They also explain how artificial intelligence and Generative AI can help sellers prepare deeper question paths, navigate Complex Deals, and establish themselves as trusted advisors rather than interchangeable vendors. Key Topics Discussed Why generic discovery questions produce generic answers — 00:00 Kevin and Sean open by dismantling familiar questions such as "What are your goals?" and "What keeps you up at night?" Buyers have heard these questions hundreds of times. Strong discovery must demonstrate Business acumen, industry knowledge, and a genuine understanding of the customer's operating environment. Researching the customer's business before discovery — 01:51 Public information about industries, competitors, economic pressures, and business trends is readily available. Sellers should use frameworks such as PESTEL and the Business Model Canvas to understand what drives the prospect's economics, how the company creates value, and where a proposed solution might improve Revenue generation, ROI, or operational performance. Using operational questions to expose real business problems — 03:11 Kevin illustrates how questions about month-end close procedures, manual spreadsheets, reporting delays, and disconnected Sales processes can produce a meaningful conversation. The goal is not merely to identify which system a prospect uses. It is to uncover the consequences, workarounds, handoffs, and hidden costs that make change valuable. Using AI to create better discovery question paths — 05:58 Sean presents a practical method for using ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or another AI platform to develop branching discovery questions. Instead of asking an AI tool for one generic question list, sellers can ask it to anticipate several possible buyer answers and then generate the appropriate follow-up questions for each response. This turns AI prompts for B2B sales prospecting into preparation for a real business conversation rather than superficial personalization. Teaching the customer how to buy — 07:00 In Enterprise Sales, buyers often understand their current situation better than they understand the process of selecting and implementing a new solution. Sellers must guide the Buying Committee through workflow changes, implementation tradeoffs, user concerns, and expected outcomes. This is where Value selling becomes practical: the seller connects the solution to the customer's processes, risks, and desired business results. Improving questions through sales management and peer coaching — 10:03 Kevin explains how a VP of Sales or sales manager can improve discovery without simply criticizing the team's existing questions. Questions should be evaluated based on whether they advance the next step, increase deal value, improve Pipeline Velocity, or strengthen the seller's competitive position. Sales Enablement can also become more effective when AEs, SDRs, and sales leaders exchange successful questions and discuss the order in which they should be asked. Key Quotes Kevin Lawson — 00:00 "Buyers have heard these questions hundreds of times, and they answer them on autopilot." Sean O'Shaughnessey — 00:45 "Questions that show that you understand the business… force your customer or your prospect to have a clearer thought process." Sean O'Shaughnessey — 09:00 "You know more about selling your product than they know about buying your product. You have to lead them through the way." Kevin Lawson — 12:03 "Stop asking questions the buyer has already heard. Start asking the questions that get the buyer to say, 'I've never thought about that.'" Additional Resources PESTEL analysis: A framework for examining the political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal forces influencing an industry. Business Model Canvas: A tool for understanding how a company creates, delivers, and captures value. The Challenger Sale: A sales methodology centered on teaching customers something valuable, tailoring the conversation, and leading the buying process. Generative AI platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot can help sellers research industries, anticipate buyer responses, and develop stronger discovery questions. B2B Sales Lab: A community where sales professionals and sales leaders can develop their sales acumen, discuss active opportunities, and improve their approach to B2B sales. A Significant Actionable Item from ...
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    16 分
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