Mike Schultz's Blog

Most teams serve their accounts’ known needs well enough, but few set aside structured time to co-create new value for these clients. That’s where Value Labs come in. In a focused, facilitated session (internal, or with account stakeholders), your team clarifies a growth challenge, explores what will make or break success, generates bold ideas, and commits to an action plan with owners and dates. The results are stronger relationships, bigger deals, and faster expansion inside current accounts. 

If you’re like most CSOs I talk to, too much of your revenue is coming from too few places. Revenue concentration risk (depending too heavily on a small set of customers, products, or markets) is a serious issue.

Gartner’s Chief Sales Officer Quarterly (3Q25) highlights just how vulnerable many organizations are when a disproportionate share of growth comes from few sources. What looks like focus on paper often turns into concentration risk in real life.

Sales kickoffs (SKOs) are among the most visible—and expensive—enablement plays. Too often, they spike morale for a few days, and then they fizzle out. Sellers go back to their desks with new swag and revert to their old selling habits. The chance to change behavior, build skills, and improve sales results is missed.

To learn what the organizations with the most impactful SKOs do differently, we analyzed 221 responses across sales leadership, enablement, and selling roles to find out which SKO elements positively correlate with behavior change (for the full analysis, read our report The SKO Shakeup: Running an Impactful Sales Kickoff, RAIN Group Center for Sales Research).

Despite the promise of AI to simplify workflows and improve productivity, sellers faced increasing deal complexity in 2025. That meant longer sales cycles, more personalities involved in deals, and greater difficulty establishing and sustaining relationships with buyers.

Sales and enablement leaders are responsible for designing and implementing training that helps sellers thrive in a complex sales environment. But often, these initiatives don’t sufficiently equip sellers to succeed.

Gartner’s 2026 CSO Outlook highlights a central challenge for sales leaders: balancing growth and cost. Too often, the focus falls on cutting expenses when the real opportunity lies in improving win rates.

Every percentage point increase in win rate delivers outsized profit growth because most sales costs stay fixed. Even a five-point improvement can generate millions in additional revenue, without adding headcount, territories, or technology.

Sales training has reached an inflection point. The typical approach to tailoring and delivering sales training courses is failing to meet the needs of modern learners and organizations.

Companies are spending billions of dollars a year, yet 85% to 90% of sales training fails to deliver desired results.

If you’re heading into renewal conversations thinking the biggest hurdle is pricing, you’re not alone. But here’s what you need to know: price resistance is rarely the real issue.

What actually derails renewals is when buyers don’t fully recognize the value you’ve delivered or what’s still ahead. When they clearly see value outweighs cost, price objections fade.

Sales kickoffs (SKOs) that change behavior aren’t one-off events; they’re systems you plan, build, and reinforce.

Just like any other enablement initiative, SKOs exist in a larger ecosystem of training and development and need support to succeed.

The New Reality: One Deal, Many Deciders

Selling to one decision-maker is a thing of the past. Today’s deals are shaped by committees, each member with their own goals, priorities, and objections.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn.

As AI continues its breakneck evolution, it’s being hailed as the next great revolution in sales. Tools powered by large language models promise more automation, faster research, cleaner data, and sharper insights.

But let’s be clear: AI won’t save sellers who don’t know how to sell.