Commercial leadership & advisory
Better evidence. Better decisions. Better sales performance.
We diagnose what is holding your sales performance back and put it right, combining hands-on experience of leading sales teams with a rigorous, evidence-based approach to every recommendation we make. We work as fractional sales leaders, as coaches and mentors, and through Evidence Based Sales, our own proprietary sales framework.
Why evidence
Qualification looks inward. Evidence looks outward.
Complex purchases are decided by several people, each with their own concerns and their own research. Gartner puts a typical B2B buying group at six to ten people, and finds buyers spend only around 17% of their buying time with potential suppliers. Very little of a seller's persuasion reaches that room. What travels is evidence the customer has checked and agreed.
| Traditional sales process | Evidence Based Sales | |
|---|---|---|
| First question | “Is this deal worth our time?” | “What is this problem costing you, and who feels it?” |
| Pain | Asserted by the seller | Documented and costed, in the customer's words |
| Champions | People who sell for us internally | People who own a cost model they helped correct |
| Decision | Decision process mapped and guessed | Three judges set their own verdict criteria |
| Proof | A demo of what we think will impress | Experiments designed to each judge's brief |
| Close | Persuasion and objection handling | Return the evidence and ask for a verdict |
What we do
Three ways we work with sales teams
Fractional Sales Leadership
Experienced sales leadership for part of each month. We lead the sales function alongside your team: process, forecasting, pipeline discipline, hiring and the coaching of managers, until you are ready for a permanent leader or no longer need one.
Sales Coaching and Mentoring
One-to-one and team coaching for sales leaders and sellers, built around live deals. We review opportunities against clear exit checks, so coaching turns on what the evidence shows rather than how a deal feels.
Evidence Based Sales Training
A practical programme in our six-step framework, taught on your own opportunities. Sellers leave with a working evidence trail for a live deal; managers leave with a shared standard for inspecting the pipeline.
The Evidence Based Sales framework
Six steps from pain to verdict
The case is built in two halves, evidence of the problem and then evidence of the solution, with the customer's judges setting the bar in between. Every step ends with an exit check, and the deal does not move on until it is true.
- 01
Create evidence of the problem
Find connected pain across several people, record the consequences and cost them in pounds with a model anyone can check.
Exit checkConnected pain is documented and costed, and every number traces to a source.
- 02
Socialise the pain and cost
Put the cost of inaction in front of champions and invite challenge, so the numbers become theirs.
Exit checkChampions and impacted stakeholders have seen the cost and committed their support.
- 03
Discover the judges
Identify who approves the technology, the way of working and the spend.
Exit checkAll three judges are named, and each is confirmed as the person who really decides.
- 04
Interview the judges
Ask each judge what evidence would earn a verdict, how good it has to be and in what format.
Exit checkEach judge's criteria and evidence bar have been played back in writing.
- 05
Write up criteria, run experiments
Design each experiment to produce exactly the evidence a judge asked for, no more and no less.
Exit checkEvery experiment has run, with its result recorded against the judge's own measure.
- 06
Return the evidence as outlined
Present it in the judge's format, against the judge's measure, with any gaps stated plainly.
Exit checkA verdict from all three judges, recorded with any conditions.
Technical judge
Approves or denies the use of your solution within their organisation.
Operational judge
Approves the way of working and the processes that surround the solution.
Financial judge
Approves the spend and the business case.
What evidence looks like
A number the customer owns
In our worked example, a CRM platform selling to an online retailer found four connected problems that nobody had raised. Costed with the retailer's own figures, the first model came to £1.39m a year. Their finance team challenged one assumption and brought it down to £1.24m. That correction made the number theirs, and it held through every meeting that followed.
| Consequence | Calculation | Annual cost | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lower basket recovery in Asia-Pacific | 180,000 baskets × £72 × 4-pt gap | £518,400 | Trading manager; platform report |
| Unattributed messaging spend | £1.2m × 15% ineffective | £180,000 | Analytics; CRM manager |
| Discount leakage | £3.0m × 15% unnecessary | £450,000 | Finance ledger, revised from 20% |
| Agency message handling | 2 FTE × £45,000 | £90,000 | Agency contract |
| Annual cost of inaction | £1,238,400 | Agreed by Finance, week 6 | |
Illustrative example with fictional companies, from the Evidence Based Sales workbook.
Who you'll work with
Practitioners who have carried a number
Stuart Barker
Commercial leadership and sales methodology
Stuart is a commercial leader in enterprise technology, with senior roles at Emarsys and Movable Ink. His work spans revenue growth, sales leadership, partnerships, go-to-market strategy and international business development. He developed the Evidence Based Sales framework and works as a fractional go-to-market leader and adviser to growing technology companies.
Mick Gosset
Deal progression and sales operations
Mick founded Jointflows and led it as CEO, building a deal-management platform for the non-linear, multi-stakeholder sales cycles that rigid pipelines handle badly. Before that he was a SaaS sales leader, working his way from individual contributor to VP of Sales, and he has since worked with GetReece.ai. His thinking on buyer-validated evidence at every stage of a deal runs through our approach.
Start with a conversation
Tell us where deals are stalling or forecasts are slipping. We will tell you plainly whether we can help, and what we would want to see before agreeing that it worked.