Selling has always been at the heart of business growth—but how we sell, who sells, and what customers expect has changed dramatically. On this episode of On the Brink with Andi Simon, I spoke with Tsahala David, CEO of Great Revenue, a sales consulting firm that helps B2B software companies grow smarter and faster. With an extraordinary background—MIT MBA, tech founder, and sales leadership roles at IBM and Salesforce—Tsahala has seen sales from every angle. Her story and insights reveal not just how to grow revenue but how to thrive in a new era of sales transformation
From Startup Founder to Sales Leader
Tshala’s journey began in Israel, where she completed military service and studied psychology before shifting into computer science. After founding her own tech company in her twenties, she confronted an early challenge many entrepreneurs face: defining her role. At first reluctant to call herself “CEO,” she quickly realized that imposter syndrome had to be shed—because if you’re running the business, you are the CEO
That early startup experience gave her first-hand knowledge of the uphill battle founders face in selling products, building teams, and convincing investors. Seeking more tools, she went to MIT for her MBA, then built a 20-year career in sales at global giants like IBM and Salesforce, closing multi-million-dollar deals with clients like Wells Fargo and Cisco.
At Salesforce, she learned what she calls the “power of sparkle”—the way a company can attract talent, customers, and attention by combining strategy with personality and brand charisma. These lessons now fuel her work at Great Revenue, where she helps companies align their sales strategies with today’s market realities.
Common Mistakes in Startup Sales
One of Tsahala’s most valuable contributions is diagnosing the mistakes founders and sales leaders make at different growth stages.
- Early-stage startups often believe that signing a few reseller “partners” means they have a sales team. But, as Tshala warns, relying on partners who only earn commission when they sell means sales rarely happen. The real cost isn’t money—it’s lost time, and in startups, six months of delay can kill your competitive advantage
- Later-stage companies often get compensation plans wrong. She shared a case where salespeople were paid less for online orders than phone orders. Predictably, reps discouraged online buying and insisted clients call them—hurting profitability and wasting resources. The lesson? Follow the money. Salespeople respond to incentives, so design compensation plans with the outcomes you want
- Sales management is another weak spot. Too often, managers don’t require reps to prepare for pipeline meetings. Tshala recommends using simple forms that force reps to answer key questions—deal size, decision makers, last contact, close date. This not only helps managers track progress but also helps sellers spot gaps in their deals
The Role of AI in Sales
Naturally, our conversation turned to AI in sales. Tsahala sees tools like ChatGPT as game-changers for research and preparation. Instead of spending hours digging through reports, salespeople can instantly access a company’s strategy, leadership, and metrics.
But there’s a catch: weak sellers often use AI as a crutch, staying at a generic level. Strong sellers know to go deeper, asking sharper questions and tailoring insights to the customer’s specific needs. AI, Tshala argues, empowers strong sellers but won’t rescue weak ones
The future belongs to those who combine technology with human curiosity, empathy, and problem-solving.
Shifts in Buyer Behavior
Another theme we explored was the dramatic shift in how buyers engage with sellers. Older generations may remember sitting across the table until a contract was signed. But today’s buyers often don’t work in offices, don’t answer phones, and rely on digital channels to research solutions.
Events are no longer centralized; instead, buyers connect through fragmented online communities—from LinkedIn groups to Discord servers. That means marketing now owns much of the top of the funnel, while sales must focus on converting leads and building trust. Sellers today must immerse themselves in buyers’ digital worlds, positioning themselves not just as vendors but as collaborators in problem-solving
Key Takeaways for Sales Leaders
As we wrapped up our conversation, Tsahala emphasized that sales is a profession, not a side hustle. Everyone thinks they know how to sell—after all, we’ve all sold something, even if just a used car or lemonade stand. But true sales success requires expertise, structure, and strategy.
Here are her top three lessons for sales leaders and entrepreneurs:
- Don’t go it alone. Sales consulting isn’t optional—it’s an investment in avoiding costly mistakes.
- Design incentives wisely. Compensation plans drive behavior. Align them with your business goals.
- Embrace change. Buyer behavior, sales roles, and technology are evolving. Those who adapt will thrive
Why This Matters Now
We are living through a great transformation in sales. Marketing and sales are no longer siloed; collaboration is essential. AI accelerates preparation but cannot replace human insight. And customer expectations continue to evolve.
For CEOs, founders, and sales leaders, Tsahala David’s message is clear: if you want revenue growth, you must rethink your approach to sales. Invest in your people, design smart processes, and leverage technology thoughtfully.
Sales isn’t just about closing deals anymore—it’s about creating value, building trust, and collaborating with buyers in ways that meet them where they are.
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Andi Simon 00:00:02 Welcome to On the Brink with Andy Simon. Thank you for joining us today. Today I have brought to you a wonderful woman who’s going to help you do what we love you to do. Get off the brink. We want you to see, feel and think in new ways about something that you think is just the way we do things, selling. And so, Howard, David is here today because she has a wonderful program. Her company is called Great Revenue. And I’ll tell you a little bit about her. But she is a vintage speaker, among other things. She can do a great analysis of your current sales force, and she can help you coach them to really excel at something they can do. If only they listen carefully to what she has to say. Who is Sally? She’s the CEO of Great Revenue, a sales consulting firm that specializes in helping B2B software companies grow their revenues. She’s smiling at me. She’s also a beautiful woman. Her clients have achieved over 40% growth, generating millions of dollars in additional revenue by implementing her data driven, data driven strategies and leadership frameworks.
Andi Simon 00:01:11 As an entrepreneur, founded and led a software startup, raised venture capital, registered a patent, and built a global sales organization from the ground up. Over her 20-year career, she’s held executive sales positions at some of the world’s most innovative companies, including Salesforce and IBM. She has closed multi-million dollar deals with major clients such as Wells Fargo and Cisco. She has an MBA from MIT and is a former officer in the Israel Defense Forces. So hello. Thank you for joining me today. This is such fun to have you here. Thank you for having.
Tsahala David 00:01:47 Me, Andy. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Andi Simon 00:01:50 Tell us and tell the audience. Who are you? What is your journey been like? I can read a bio, but as I often say, there’s so much richness to a person’s life. And that story sets the stage for how, you know, great revenue comes together to help others do even better. How’s that happen?
Tsahala David 00:02:09 Well, my story is a bit different than the usual story, and I’m sure mothers are going to love it because the conclusion of it is your mom knows what’s right for you.
Andi Simon 00:02:20 So. Okay, tell us more, please.
Tsahala David 00:02:24 So I actually graduated from high school at 16. And in Israel there’s mandatory military service. And I was trying to think, okay, so I need to complete my degree. I will go into the military service. What should I study? My mom, being the computer science expert in the family, said you should go and study computer science because you’ll be very good at it. And I was like, no, I love psychology. I love listening to my friends. I’m going to be a psychologist. So that’s what I did. I went and had my degree in psychology, joined the military and worked at the psychology unit. Then I realized mom was right, I don’t like it. Do you need an analytical environment? Luckily, I had the opportunity to transition into computer science and embarked on a career in software development. Had a lot of fun learning how to develop software and felt very satisfied with creating actual things. And after a few years started my tech company, which you mentioned.
Tsahala David 00:03:23 It was a product that was a combination of a search engine combined with the document management system that was sold to large IT organization. So think about a bank. They have a thousand IT people. They have hundreds of software, hardware, middleware pieces that they need to manage. That tool that I created was supposed to help these folks. Now imagine me. I’m 20 something years old, and I’m at the crucial moment that I need to decide what goes on my business card. And of course, I’m feeling like I’m not a CEO. I’m going to write. I’m MVP engineering. Defining moments. When a mentor of mine said, but you are a CEO. And I said, no, no. CEOs are people that are older and they’re mature and they’ve run five companies. And he’s like, don’t you run your own company? Or are you not the one deciding for the finances and the strategy and the product and the partnerships and everything? The beautiful moment of understanding the imposter syndrome. And you need to shed that.
Andi Simon 00:04:28 Oh my goodness. I’m sorry. And I’m happy because you obviously decided, okay, I’m the CEO. I’m the CEO. Right?
Tsahala David 00:04:37 Exactly, exactly. So after being the CEO for six years, I realized being the impatient person than I am. This is not growing fast enough for me. I’m going to go to MIT. I’m going to learn the theory behind it, and I’m going to found the new Google. Right? That was the size of aspirations that I had. Because you’re young and you aspire for the moon and you’re optimistic. So I actually did go to MIT. I completed my MBA, but from there I ended up embarking on a career of 20 years in sales. I joined IBM, which was an amazing experience. It taught me everything that you need to know about real sales, professionalism, the best practices, the processes you get exposed to selling so many different products and services, and you work with so many different salespeople, the different types, right, that they’re there, the relationship sellers and the analytical sellers and the challenge.
Tsahala David 00:05:37 Every type of seller is out there. So working with IBM was a fascinating lesson in sales acumen. From there, I moved to Salesforce where I worked with their largest customers, as you mentioned, Wells Fargo and others. And at Salesforce, it was a fascinating time in the company’s life because when I joined, there were 35,000 people. By the time I left, there were 70,000 people and they joined the fortune 500 list of companies. So it was really at a time of tremendous growth in a very powerful, innovative company. The lesson that I learned from Marc Benioff specifically was the power of sparkle. That’s how I called it.
Andi Simon 00:06:21 The amazing.
Tsahala David 00:06:22 Ability of a company to attract talent and attract customers and attract attention and media and everything around it to create a, a power of attraction unto itself, almost like a superstar, like a celebrity power. And it’s a tech company, right? CRM doesn’t get less sexy than that, right? But with the power of his personality and his strategy, it was incredible the type of events that they would run, the fact that top customers would get a sparkly golden hoodie, right to say, you are our cherished customer.
Tsahala David 00:06:58 So lots of amazing lessons of how you can sell to customers in different ways, different strategies. And after being in sales for 20 years, I thought to myself, I really want to first of all, go back to living the fast-paced life of startups, and I want to help other companies avoid the mistakes that I’ve done, especially as a founder of a tech company, but also as a young seller in different stages of my career. And so I said, okay, I’m going to start a consulting company, and I’m going to work with tech companies and sales teams, and I’m going to help them upskill, whether by looking at their sales organization and figuring out what needs to change in order to really bring out the best in the sales teams and in their structure given the resources that they have. Right. So that was the most important combination to basically bring best practices from the biggest and best like IBM, but with the scrappiness and resourcefulness from the smallest startups that are fighting with what they have and leveraging every possible, advantage that they have.
Tsahala David 00:08:11 And that’s what I’ve been doing in the last couple of years, and it’s been a wild, fun ride.
Andi Simon 00:08:16 Well, you have to tell the listeners, I mean, I love your journey, and I like the fun ride because you clearly see joy in both the challenge and overcoming it. but you know, when you have taken all of this together, your newfound, I’ll call it Joy, is to help others do something that you have come along with a few minefields along the way, which is how to help others by a product or service that you want to sell them. We call it sales, but at the end of the day, you really want to serve their needs with something you have to offer in the right way. And you come. You talked about different kinds of salespeople, analytical ones. And you know what? What is it that you’re now showing people to do? And what are you learning in the field? Because those are different kinds of folks who are moving into both selling and buying.
Andi Simon 00:09:13 Your thoughts please.
Tsahala David 00:09:16 I’ll answer that by giving you a couple of stories from customers that I’ve worked with, which will illustrate the most common mistakes I see in the field. Most of it is based on where the company is in their journey, and what my recommendation is for the founders or the sales leaders, what they should be looking out for. So when a company starts, right, usually here’s the scenario that you have. It’s a technical founder, right. Somebody who’s an expert on the business side of whatever the product does. Right. So if it’s a security product, then the person is usually an engineer that understands cybersecurity, right? If it’s a finance product, it’s somebody that was related to the banking industry really understands calls and puts and. Options and whatnot. But they come from the business side. They usually for the most part don’t come from sales. So the most common mistakes that they make, because it’s a startup, it has very little resources. They start looking at, okay, how do I sell? How do I hire my first salesperson? They start asking around.
Tsahala David 00:10:22 They get a sticker shock when they hear how much salespeople are being paid, and they’re thinking, well, maybe I should go with partnerships. And they look for people that are going to work on a success-based kind of like a reseller. If you sell, you get paid. If you don’t sell, you don’t get paid. And because they’re not familiar with the behind-the-scenes motivation and how all of these salespeople and organizations operate. They feel like I have a sales team because I have four partners that said, they’re excited about selling my product, right? And I don’t have to spend anything, because I will only spend money when they sell my product, and they sit in their office and wait for the sale to come, and it doesn’t come.
Andi Simon 00:11:06 Why am I laughing? It almost sounds like a comedy act.
Tsahala David 00:11:11 Completely, completely. And I mean, my heart goes out to them because I’ve been in that place where you’re so afraid of spending money because you’re at the beginning of your journey, that you’re trying to do the same thing, but actually what you’re losing is much worse.
Tsahala David 00:11:25 You’re losing time. And for a startup, if you lost six months, right, that’s six months of salaries for all your engineers. It’s six months of your advantage in the market. It’s six months for your competitors to catch up with you. It is huge. So my one advice would be for founders. You have to get over that initial fear. Yes, you might make a mistake and hire the wrong person, right? But you’ll hire fast, you’ll fire even faster, and you will eventually land on the right person for your company. Don’t go for the free package, right? People will not sell your product for free. That’s just one advice. At a later stage in the company’s life. The most common mistake is the compensation package, right? So companies will have salespeople, but they will try and make the best deals so that the company doesn’t lose money. If the if the salesperson did not do the work that they expect to be done, and I think in many cases, companies under appreciate how motivated salespeople are to follow their compensation plan.
Tsahala David 00:12:35 And I’ll give you a very simple example of a customer I recently worked with. They had sales that happened on the web, and they have sales that happened on the phone right now. Salespeople were paid on both because their customers could either order directly online, or they could call them up in order on the phone. But the salespeople were paid half on the web because the customer did everything by themselves. The salesperson did not even participate in the sale. It made perfect sense for the CFO of the company, right? No work. Let’s pay. What happened? Of course, the salespeople called all their customers to say, always call me before you order. Don’t ever order online without me. The company lost money because then the salespeople are doing the work for sales they should not be involved in. Right? Because it’s too small and they’re giving extra discount to the customer as a way to entice the customer to come and speak to them when they buy, instead of just ordering online.
Andi Simon 00:13:37 Oh, I love it.
Andi Simon 00:13:39 Do you have any other stories? Because I think they are. Well, what did you do with them before we go to another client? How did you change them?
Tsahala David 00:13:47 So the recommendation in the in the last case was basically, first of all, you have to make the compensation the same because any other format just will, create that habit of sellers getting customers to get on the phone and complete the deal on the phone, because that’s how they get paid. Period. There’s no way to work around this.
Andi Simon 00:14:09 Just follow the money.
Tsahala David 00:14:11 Just follow the money. Exactly. Follow the money. So that was recommendation number one. With that comes a lot of accountabilities. Because if you, Mr. Seller, are being paid basically for a deal that you did not work for. Right. So we did save you a few hours in your day. You’re still being paid for those deals, but we freed up your time. Now we expect you to deliver something for us, right? And that could be deeper relationships, longer conversations with some key customers actually going in the field and meeting with customers, whatever the customer, whatever the company needs at that point.
Tsahala David 00:14:46 They have earned the right now to demand that of their salespeople, because basically now you’re being paid. We understand we’re not interfering with you being paid for a deal you did not create. Yeah, but we do expect you to deliver more, given that you have more time. So that’s just simplifying the answer for that case.
Andi Simon 00:15:06 Yeah. But it’s you would think that would be obvious before it became, a mess. and yet it wasn’t the logic of the CFO was, well, they’re doing a lot less work, so they get less pay. but humans are very clever and creative, and they found a way of making at least as much, if not more money without, without anybody ever thinking about what was necessary. Cool. Another case. Your stories are terrific. They illustrate exactly the pain and the possibilities.
Tsahala David 00:15:41 So another case, and this was actually going to the coaching of managers. So here’s a challenge that a lot of sales managers find very difficult to overcome. You get to your weekly meeting with your salespeople, you have maybe ten 15 minutes to get a status of their deals, right? A lot of sales managers come to that meeting, not expecting the sellers to prepare anything.
Tsahala David 00:16:06 A salesperson would come to the meeting. A sales manager sometimes will come to the meeting and just talk about whatever they want. Oh, I met this customer, and it was awesome. We went to this restaurant, and we planned our vacation with our wives. This is how great our relationship is. We’re so tight, I can text him. I need a lot of information that sounds sales related and gives you zero information about the deal that this person is supposed to bring in. Right. By then, the 15 minutes that the manager had to talk to their sales rep is gone. What did the manager learn about the deal? Nothing. How can he help the seller? Progress the deal. Support the seller better? No clue, because he didn’t learn anything significant about it. And sales managers in many cases are almost afraid to ask sellers to prepare for a meeting. Right. Because there’s this consensus that salespeople are intuitive and they go with relationships and emotions. And in the moment, there’s a tendency to not expect them to prepare.
Tsahala David 00:17:10 And so what I worked with this customer specifically was to say, here’s a format for you, right? Here’s a form. Each one of your salespeople, before they get on the call with you, needs to have this form filled. And the form has the basic questions how much is the deal? When do you expect it to close? When was the last time you met the customer? Who in the customer side did you meet? What is the role responsibility? Are they do they have authority to approve the deal? A few basic basics about the deal, right? But even that did not exist in the previous report. What? That creates just that template. It forces the seller to prepare. It makes the seller understand the gaps in their deals, because sometimes, genuinely, the seller gets carried away by things that sound great, like the great relationship they are developing, and the person is telling them about their marital problems. Right? And the seller feels like he’s amazing, right? But having a form that asks you so clearly, right.
Tsahala David 00:18:09 What do you know about the deal? How is that deal going to close? Helps the seller realize, oh my God, I have a huge gap. I’m basically at the first step of the race and I was thinking, I’m like 90% there. So now I need to work to close the gap.
Andi Simon 00:18:26 So it’s okay if you don’t mind about how you find AI and new technologies, influencing or changing or not at all the sales process itself. and I’m curious because I know what I’m using my chat for in preparation for a sales meeting. but I’m curious what you’re seeing and some wisdom that, our viewers or our listeners might find very valuable thoughts.
Tsahala David 00:18:54 But it’s amazing because GPT and all the AI technologies, what they do is they make a lot of the processes in research work that the salesperson needs to do. They speed it up tremendously, right. So if before that you would spend days figuring out what is the company’s revenue, who’s the leader, what’s their strategy, what did they say in their 10-K, statement about their goals and, key metrics, etc.
Tsahala David 00:19:22 Now you plug it into an AI tool, it spits out the whole thing and offers a strategy of how you’re going to run your first call.
Andi Simon 00:19:30 That’s right.
Tsahala David 00:19:32 So that part is incredible and very, very helpful, especially for young sellers that really have no clue where to start looking at the picture, right? Where I see sellers actually failing in spite of AI is either they don’t know how to ask the right question, and they get a very generic answer from the AI tools, which keeps them talking in a very generic level with the customer, which brings zero value to both sides. Right? Because if somebody came to you, Andy, and said, I can solve all your problems but then had nothing to say about understanding any of your problems, you’d be like, there’s no credibility in it. Right? But if somebody said, Andy, I could solve all your problems because I know that you have a dog that is not fully trained, that you’re trying to train, that it doesn’t bark at night.
Tsahala David 00:20:26 And I know that you have a noisy neighbor. Like they start spelling out all the details that are bugging you on your day to day that you would like to solve. Then you’re like, hey, I want to listen to this person because obviously they know what they’re talking about. And sellers take too much comfort in the fact that AI is doing the work for them, completely missing the fact that the picture is still very blurry and they need to take it four levels down. So there’s going to be an adjustment period. Hopefully sellers will get better in how they use the tools and how they ask the questions because the answers are there. It’s just asking the right questions and getting there. So the total impact of it, it speeds up a lot of the research. Yeah, it empowers the strong sellers. Right. It will not help weak sellers. That’s the part that I find amazing. Now that I see different sellers working with the different tools, sellers that don’t have this mindset of how do I progress the deal, what do I need to ask the customer, right? How do I need to position my product? They will not benefit from AI.
Andi Simon 00:21:33 So how do people choose to go into sales? As I’m listening to you? It must be hard for those hiring, but also the career path of people going into something they are. I don’t know. They see opportunity, but they really don’t have the skill set to succeed in. your thoughts about the profile of, particularly younger ones or, you know, how do they you found in a way you’re calling, and IBM gave you tools to most of them have a calling. They just need tools. Or are they just simply in the wrong place?
Tsahala David 00:22:10 That’s a great question. I will quote something that I read in the book, of a writer that said there is no mother that says, when my kid grows up, he’s going to be a salesperson.
Andi Simon 00:22:25 True. I am sure that is the case. Right.
Tsahala David 00:22:29 Exactly. And I think for most salespeople, they don’t grow up thinking I’m going to be the greatest salesperson in the world. Right. Most of the people kind of stumble into it and realize they’re doing it after they’ve been doing it for a while.
Tsahala David 00:22:44 Right. And that was exactly my situation. I had the startup company. I was the CEO of the company. And after years, I realized what I do most of the day is sell. I sell my vision to investors. I sell my product to the customers. I sell the company to employees because I want them to come. Even though I can’t pay them much, I’m constantly selling. So the transition for me into sales was very simple. Many people follow a similar transition. A very common track is for technical people that work with customers to basically look at the work that they do. Asking the questions, talking to the customers, supporting them in the middle of the night and on weekends. And then they look at the salary of the salesperson that is sitting in the room saying very little, and they’re thinking, I can do their job, and I should be paid much more. And so transitioned into sales.
Andi Simon 00:23:36 Well, maybe that is the right place for them. And it may be money motivated, but it is an interesting time.
Andi Simon 00:23:44 The times they are changing and during changing times the buyers have changed. Expectations have changed. I had one client in Texas, and they had, they manufactured steel products from McDonald’s and others, and, and their problem was that the sales force used to talk to the buyer and the buyers, they discovered, we discovered they had retired because they couldn’t get anyone to answer the telephone. Yep. So when I talked to the 30 somethings who had replaced the retirees, they said, well, we don’t use the telephone. And, and their website, it really isn’t very useful for anything to find out more about the product or to place a, you know, an inquiry. It was a brochure that they had put up and the owner was in shock. He said, well, that’s why I have people coming through the website, you know, and emailing me. I said, well, the world has changed, but you haven’t. And now is the time to really revisit the way people are buying and how they’re finding referrals for what would be the better solution and how to begin to rethink the tools that you have.
Andi Simon 00:24:55 What will I do with my sales team? They will be lead converters, but if you don’t have any leads coming in through the internet, they can’t convert anything and nobody’s going to answer their phone. And so I have a hunch many companies are watching the nature of the business change. Am I was this a one off or much more typical than others?
Tsahala David 00:25:16 You have hit one of the biggest challenges. We are living in the middle of this huge transition because this is where leaders of companies are of that generation, right? Their 50s and 60s, and they’re of the generation where you could still do what sales managers love to do at the end of the quarter. They say you go to that customer; you sit in their office until they sign the contract, right? And literally they meant you should get in the car, drive and get into the office. Think about it. Most of the people now don’t work from an office. You’re not good at somebody’s his driveway.
Andi Simon 00:25:53 Well, that is a very big, opportunity to find a different way to sell them.
Andi Simon 00:25:57 How interesting.
Tsahala David 00:25:59 Exactly. And that is just one of many, many examples. The other thing is exactly like you said. How do you become a lead magnet? Right. When basically all the traditional ways of getting to your audience have changed. It used to be that every industry had like 1 or 2 big events per year. And everybody the vendors, the buyers, everybody came to those two, three, four events. Right. It was very concentrated, a little bit like our TV, right? A few channels. That’s what you got. You’re going to enjoy what you eat. Now everything is fragmented, and you can reach your audience through thousands of different LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, Instagram books, groups, websites, discord channels, slack channels. It is endless. And that puts a much bigger pressure on sellers to actually really immerse themselves in the world of the buyer. Where do those buyers go in order to buy their stuff? Because the options now are so limitless in a way. And a lot of the emphasis moved if sales before that had like the seller funnel, you had the part of the work where you needed to send emails and convince people to get into your funnel.
Tsahala David 00:27:16 Right. And only then start the actual sales work. Now, the top of the funnel, for the most part, is completely outsourced to the marketing department. So either it’s all done by commercials on social media, or thought leadership on social media, or the SDGs or whatever the company calls them, the junior salespeople that are basically appointment centers, do just that. They just set appointments for the salespeople. So the combination of a salesperson that needs to know the whole stack of how do I get people to get into the funnel, but also how do I get them to close the deal that is changing? Into separate roles and into a much, much, much bigger emphasis on the marketing part of it.
Andi Simon 00:28:02 This is such a cool conversation. I am reluctant to, to stop it, but I’m looking at our time. It’s about time for us to really summarize some of the key wisdoms for our audience. So they leave with one or 2 or 3 things that are takeaways or do’s or think abouts. and then you know how to reach you for coaching or assessment.
Andi Simon 00:28:30 Give me 2 or 3 things you don’t want them to forget. They often remember the ending better than the beginning and you’re selling them. So how do you close before you have to close? You know, give them some ideas about things they should not forget.
Tsahala David 00:28:44 I’ll tell you that with another story. A customer told me once. He said, here’s why the job of a sales consultant is so difficult if somebody told you need to build a nuclear reactor, right? Nobody in a room of ten people would be like, I think I can do that, right? But if somebody said, build me a bicycle shed. Ten out of ten people will be like, I think I can do that, right? Sales consulting belongs to the second category. Everybody sold something at some point in their life, even if it was lemonade or their old car. Right. So people feel like I think I know something about it, and I can do it by myself. I don’t really. Its own profession.
Tsahala David 00:29:24 Have the faith in what I’m telling you right now. There are so many things happening behind the scenes that if you have not been a salesperson, a sales leader, a part of a sales organization, you will never know why things happen, the way they happen and you’re going to drown so much of the company’s money. You’re going to put the company at risk. If you don’t have an expert by your side translating to you, what you’re seeing is happening in your sales organization and why the results are the way they are. So my one recommendation is find that expert. It could be a friend, a mentor, a past salesperson, a sales consultant such as myself. Don’t go into it feeling I know something about it. I can probably do it myself. Got it.
Andi Simon 00:30:10 Well, bumbling along, but so if they would like to reach you for either a, an analysis of the gaps in their organization or some coaching, you know, where can they reach you? And I know we’re going to put it up on our blog where we post these podcasts, but perhaps you can tell them.
Tsahala David 00:30:29 yeah, absolutely. they can find me on LinkedIn, with my full name. David. they can reach through the website. We have a contact us form through the website, which is great revenue. Com or they can email me directly at Sala at great revenue. Com.
Andi Simon 00:30:49 I love it. This has been a most interesting conversation because on the one hand, and I say this honestly, as I listen to you at the beginning of the conversation, it sounded to me like sales that I knew. And as we migrated into the changes that are taking place, it almost was a transition into the sales that are now and what we see coming into the future. And it is not going to look anything like what was. But think about everything from lead generation and influencer and referrals. You have no idea how many folks find me through Google search and how much content I make sure I keep putting up. Much more comes through search than comes from social and I, you know, you have to balance them all because you have a presence in lots of places today.
Andi Simon 00:31:43 but your other point is that marketing became the lead generator, and sales became the converter to Two relationships that carry the relationships forward as people are buying and using your products. But it is a really different world that’s coming. I think to some degree, collaboration is a word that’s going to be much more important than selling, you know, because to some degree, the buyer and the seller are now collaborating on solutions that can come through a variety of places, and you want them to come through your solution. So it’s a very cool time. So let me wrap up as an anthropologist who helps companies change. I want to thank all of you for coming to our podcast. Remember that my job is to help you see, feel and think in new ways. My books, all of which are on Amazon under Andy Simon. They are there to help you see, feel and think of new ways. But more importantly, I like working with organizations that are stuck or stalled or are beginning to face this new world and aren’t quite sure what comes next and how to transform it.
Andi Simon 00:32:49 We use blue ocean strategy and culture change methodologies, but by and large it’s a mindset. And as I work with clients, that mindset is a very exciting or very scary because the times they are changing. Now, how do we begin to see the new world and visualize it in a way that we can act today and achieve the results we’re looking for? Selling is going through a great transformation. So Holly, David has been with us today to help you understand it and to begin to understand how she could help you change. But all of us are here for a purpose, and our significance is helping you do things that may seem maybe out of your skill set at a time when you’re going to need some new skills. Thank you for coming today. Remember, my tagline is take your observations. Turn them into innovations. Build that business likes to listen and make sure that you do it in a way that gives you long term both profits and pleasure. And passion isn’t so bad. Bye everybody. Have a great day today.
Andi Simon 00:33:47 Bye now.
Tsahala David 00:33:49 Bye.
