"Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value."

Albert Einstein

To all those CEOs and Presidents... If you want a high-performance sales team, allow our time together to become your coaching mantra.

There are way too many sales organizations obsessing over success metrics, quarterly revenue, quota attainment, and pipeline size. These are important, but they're lagging indicators. They tell you what happened, not why it happened or whether it’s sustainable.

When you coach (using the term loosely) your salespeople to focus only on success, you risk creating transactional behavior:

• Chasing low-margin deals to hit quota

• Over-promising to close business

• Focusing on friendly accounts instead of solving real problems for clients

When you proactively and with intention coach them with discipline to focus on becoming sales professionals of meaningful value, the ball game changes:

• They stop seeing themselves as vendors and start carrying themselves like trusted business advisors

• They look beyond closing a deal to improving a client’s business over the long term

• They build credibility with decision-makers and influencers at every level, not just their primary contact

In the Selling from the Heart framework, value isn’t just product knowledge, it’s the intersection of authentic relationships, meaningful value, and disciplined habits.

As a CEO, I encourage you to:

1. Coach for curiosity – Encouraging your team to ask questions that uncover the client’s real priorities, obstacles, and opportunities.

2. Model strategic thinking – In sales pipeline reviews, ask How does this improve the client’s P&L? instead of How soon will it close?

3. Reward value creation – Recognize, encourage and reward behaviors that create measurable impact for the client, not just sales.

4. Reinforce purpose – Remind them that real success is a byproduct of consistent meaningful value creation, not the other way around.
   

When your salespeople focus on becoming indispensable to their clients, success takes care of itself.

Please hear me out on this, you don’t pay salespeople to be popular. You compensate them to grow the business.

Too many leadership teams confuse likability with value. In this massively post-trust marketplace, a friendly rep who can’t turn access into outcomes is a risk. This means bleeding margins, eroding market position, and quietly training your clients to expect less.

Your salespeople must be more than a list of contacts. They must be a source of business advantage by delivering insight, quantifiable results, and meaningful value every time they engage.

We can all agree, relationships open doors. However, it’s insight, execution, and business acumen that will ultimately win the deal, expand the account, and protect your base.

If you’re not encouraging both, you’re not just leaving money on the table, you’re leaving the door open for your competitors to walk in and take it.

The Difference that Matters

Relationships open the door. They create the warmth, access, and goodwill that allow conversations to happen. Without them, opportunities dry up before they even begin.

Too many salespeople stop there, mistaking connection for contribution. Trust earned on a personal level is vital, but if it’s not paired with the ability to help a client navigate complexity and achieve outcomes, it remains surface-level.

Are your salespeople becoming the person everyone likes to see but no one turns to when the stakes are the highest.

Business insight is where relationships begin to transform into relevance. It’s not just knowing the clients, it’s knowing the business they're fighting to grow or protect. It’s being able to talk about their strategy, the hidden levers that affect their profit and risk, and the real economics behind their decisions.

When salespeople understand what matters most to their clients, they start becoming part of their internal company conversation, not just an external contact.

Business substance is the proof. This is where ideas become proposals with measurable outcomes. It’s the discipline of presenting solutions that stand up to scrutiny in the boardroom; expenses contained, revenue generated, risks mitigated.

It's this business substance that signals that salespeople are not just there to sell, they're there to make their business stronger in ways that can be quantified and defended.

Meaningful value lives in the client’s language, not your salespeople's language. It’s not enough to deliver something beneficial; it must be something they recognize as essential and can confidently take to their leadership team.

Trust alone is comforting but incomplete. Insight without trust is unreachable. The real power lies in holding both. A sales professional who is trusted and brings insight becomes indispensable, a guide who not only knows the path but is believed when they say, “Follow me.”

The question worth wrestling.... Inside your best accounts (however you define it), are your salespeople the trusted friend everyone welcomes, or the trusted confidant they rely on when it matters most?

I bet I have some of you thinking right now, huh?

Why Relationship-Only Selling is Fragile (and Expensive)

When business insight is missing, relationship only deals don’t just stall, they quietly die.

Relationship only:

1. Creates single-threaded dependency - Meaning one friendly contact leaves or changes jobs and your access evaporates. Without multiple trusted connections inside an account, position becomes concerning. Relationships that haven’t produced measurable business outcomes are the most fragile kind.

2. Invites commoditization - Meaning friendly salespeople often default to price competition when they can’t articulate strategic meaningful value. Price is a race to the bottom, and the bottom is crowded.

3. Fails in a post-trust world - Meaning buyers are increasingly skeptical. Relationships open the door, but trust built on authenticity, meaningful value, and inspirational experience is what keeps it open.

I ask you to think about your sales teams' current pipeline, how many opportunities are built on true business impact and how many are riding solely on rapport? Would you know?

The Upside of Salespeople Who Bring Insight and Substance

Contrast the fragility of relationship-only selling with the momentum created when salespeople are coached, equipped, and measured to deliver insight and meaningful va

• Wins happen faster as their clients see clear business impact and can confidently justify the investment. Instead of waiting for when budgets free up, the deal is anchored to strategic priorities that demand action now.

• Win rates increase and no-decision outcomes drop because salespeople build consensus across all stakeholders, tailoring business cases for each decision-maker’s goals. They don’t rely on one champion; they create multiple advocates.

• Trust compounds over time when salespeople consistently blend authentic relationships, meaningful value, and inspirational experience, turning one-time wins into a sustained revenue engine.

Relationships open the door; insight and substance turn that door into a long-term, high-margin revenue stream.

If your competitors have relationships as well, what will make your sales team's presence in the account indispensable?

Reflection Time for the C-Suite

Before you read further, pause and deeply think about these questions. The honesty of your answers may be the most valuable leadership exercise you do at this very moment in time:

• When was the last time you asked your salespeople to connect their work directly to a client’s P&L? Did they respond with a crisp, quantified example or a vague story about great rapport?

• If market forces required you to reduce your sales headcount by 10%, who would remain? Would your decision be based on proven, repeatable revenue impact or on personalities and perceived relationships?

• If your top five accounts were audited tomorrow, could you prove your team’s contribution to those clients’ strategic objectives or would you be hoping the relationships are strong enough to pass the test?

If hesitation crept into your answers, and I sense it might, you may be looking at an invisible performance gap, one that won’t appear on your CRM dashboard until it’s too late.

In a post-trust buying environment, this is not a gap that time or goodwill will close. It requires an intentional, immediate plan to shift your sales culture from relationship maintenance to relationship monetization through insight and business substance.

Are you leading a sales force that your clients enjoy working with or one they depend on for their own success?

Leadership Moves

Here's some ideas you can do to elevate your salespeople:

1. Have the Sales Team Redefine Value Through the Client’s Lens

• Coach your team to stop leading with products or features and start with client outcomes.

• Have them shift the conversation from transactional to transformational. Encourage them to ask, What outcomes matter most to each one of the decision makers and influencers and build solutions around that.

• This ties to the Trust Formula by demonstrating meaningful value by aligning with what clients truly care about.

2. Equip the Sales Team with Business Acumen and Insight

• Invest in coaching that goes beyond product knowledge to industry trends, financial and business smarts, along with client-specific insights.

• Position your salespeople as trusted advisors who can offer strategic, actionable advice that goes beyond obvious solutions.

• This ties to the Trust Formula by building meaningful value by ensuring your salespeople bring relevant, high-value ideas into every conversation.

3. Foster Collaborative Value Creation

• Encourage your salespeople to co-create solutions with clients rather than presenting pre-packaged answers. Use sales tools such as value worksheets or quarterly business reviews to uncover and document shared goals.

• This allows clients to feel ownership in the solution, deepening commitment and trust.

• This ties to the Trust Formula through co-creation by transforming your salespeople into partners, enhancing meaningful value and deepening authentic relationships.

When executives and leaders implement, they empower their teams to bring more than friendship, they bring foresight, insight, and results. That’s how your salespeople move from being liked to being trusted advisors who create meaningful value.

Your 90 Day Plan

Before you can drive change, you need an honest and unvarnished view of reality.

Your priority is visibility.

The First 30 Days — Diagnose

• Top-20 account list - Ask sales leadership for a list on their 20 most strategic accounts. Each one should include key stakeholders, current state of the relationship, documented business outcomes delivered so far, and risks (renewal, competitor activity, or any kind of loss). This gives you clarity on where your revenue is most at risk and where expansion opportunities lie.

• Then personally review 10 active opportunities across different salespeople. Asking, Is there a clear, quantified business case? If it’s not obvious on paper, it won’t be obvious to the client’s either.

As you do this, your role is to shine light on gaps without blame. You’re diagnosing, not prescribing yet. Ask questions like: How does this deal improve the client’s P&L? or Which executives inside this account see measurable outcomes from working with us?

The Next 60 Days — Reset

Once you’ve surfaced the truth, the reset phase is about aligning expectations, metrics, and behaviors.

• Redefine what good looks like. Replace vague measures like strong relationships with quantifiable expectations, stakeholder mapping completeness, percentage of opportunities with ROI models, and documented adoption plans. Begin applying these metrics in reviews with your leadership and sales team.

• Launch bi-monthly coaching sessions where the sales team presents live opportunities. Encourage cross-functional participation from your finance team, so your salespeople learn to defend their case in a boardroom style environment.

This is where you set the tone. Your presence at early deal coaching sessions signals that business insight and value articulation are no longer optional. Celebrate those who show up with substance, and challenge those who don’t with tough but supportive questions.

At the 90 Day Mark — Embed

The final phase is about making insight-driven selling the cultural norm.

• Reward and promote value creators. Acknowledge the salespeople who consistently connect solutions to measurable client outcomes. Recognition must be tied not just to revenue but to repeatable, insight-driven wins.

• Quarterly client vision reviews to establish a rhythm where you review the tangible value delivered to top accounts. This shifts the focus from just what was sold to what impact the sale team created.

Embedding this requires discipline. Keep asking, How are we making our clients measurably better? By reinforcing this question in quarterly reviews, you hardwire value creation into your company’s DNA.

This 90-day plan isn’t about micromanagement. It’s about creating clarity and accountability, so your team moves beyond relationships and into delivering true business impact.

When you insist on insight, substance, and measurable outcomes, you don’t just grow revenue, you build a culture of trusted salespeople who are indispensable to your clients.

Final Reflection, Where Will You Place Your Bet?

As CEO, your most precious resource is not capital, nor time, it’s your focus. Where you choose to direct that focus defines whether your company drifts in comfort or accelerates toward durable growth.

You can focus on cultivating charming relationships that make for warm, fuzzy updates. Or you can insist on something harder, that every salesperson becomes a sales professional of measurable client improvement.

The latter is not easy, it requires discipline. It requires a recalibration of hiring profiles, a redesign of compensation plans, a commitment to rigorous coaching, and a shift in the daily questions you ask as a leader.

This means moving beyond personality-driven sales toward value-driven impact, where relationships are the bridge, not the destination.

Durable growth and defensible margins will never be built on smiles alone. They’re earned when salespeople prove they can map to a client’s P&L, quantify impact, build buying consensus, and drive adoption.

Celebrate warmth when it serves the business case but push back when warmth is all that’s being offered.

In this post-trust world, where empty suits are quickly exposed, the leaders who win are those who marry heart with hard outcomes, those being authentic relationships and measurable results.

I will leave you all with this question... Will you bet on the illusion of comfort, or will you bet on the courage of discipline?

Originally. published on Larry Levine's LinkedIn.