Josh writes about what he sees inside sales organizations — not frameworks, not theory. Real patterns, real mistakes, and real fixes.
Most sales teams treat their CRM as the source of truth. It's not — it's a record of what reps reported, filtered through their own optimism. The real pipeline lives in deal mechanics. Here's how to read it.
When revenue stalls, most companies reach for a sales fix: new hire, new process, new methodology. But five of the most common problems I've seen live one level up — in how the GTM motion is structured, not how it's executed.
Founders are usually exceptional at selling. The problem is that what they do is tacit — it lives in their heads, not in a system. When you hire a rep and point them at a pipeline, they're not inheriting a sales motion. They're starting from scratch.
MEDDIC, Challenger, SPIN — every company has a methodology. Most of them sit in a Notion doc and affect nothing. Methodology isn't the issue. The issue is how deals actually advance. That requires mechanics, not frameworks.
AI tools are being adopted fast across sales teams. The companies benefiting most aren't using AI to replace effort — they're using it on top of functioning processes. The companies struggling are discovering that AI just moves broken mechanics faster.
Every pipeline has a graveyard stage. For most B2B companies, it's somewhere in the middle — proposal sent, evaluation underway, deal going quiet. Most teams treat this as a follow-up problem. It's almost never that.
Forecast misses are usually blamed on rep sandbagging or late surprises. In my experience, the root cause is earlier and more structural — forecast inputs that were never connected to how deals actually behave. You can fix this.
The "outbound is dead" narrative keeps circulating. It's wrong — but it keeps getting repeated because most outbound programs are actually broken in predictable ways. Here's the pattern I see most often and how companies fix it.
Past the hype, AI tools in sales are most useful in three specific areas: qualification signal processing, follow-through automation, and deal coaching at scale. Here's what that looks like when the underlying system is actually built correctly.
The hardest conversation I have with founders is this one: the bottleneck isn't the sales team, the pipeline, or the product. It's how leadership is engaging with the revenue system. Here's how to recognize it — and what to do about it.
Most GTM diagnoses end with a presentation. The real problem is what happens between the diagnosis and the change. Josh breaks down why the follow-through gap kills more revenue than any strategy mistake — and what the fix actually requires.
Read the EssayJosh publishes new pieces on pipeline mechanics, GTM strategy, and revenue execution. No cadence promises. Just useful writing when it's ready.
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