Adem Manderovic

Wait til @FidelCacheFlow and my podcast drops…. Monday. On The B2B Playbook. open.spotify.com/show/4l9OCD…

We removed the education that made salespeople commercially intelligent. Then we tried to replace it with technology. There was a time when people entering commercial roles often started in Customer Service or Customer Success. Before they were trusted to win new business, they had to understand how a business actually operated. They learned what passed Legal. What passed Credit. What could be delivered profitably. What made an account serviceable. What had to be communicated at handover. What the customer had been promised. What happened after the contract was signed. They spent time with customers. They learned the operational realities behind the sale. They understood the consequences of getting it wrong. And, in some organisations, they earned the opportunity to progress into Business Development after demonstrating that they could look after customers and understand the business from the inside out. It wasn't simply a career pathway. It was commercial education. They learned that winning a customer was only one part of creating a successful commercial relationship. The business also had to deliver what it sold, collect what it was owed, protect its margins, meet its obligations and give the customer a reason to stay. They understood that a sale could look brilliant on a spreadsheet and still be a terrible commercial decision. Then the industry changed. Sales Development became increasingly specialised. New starters were given targets, sequences, scripts, CRM systems and activity quotas. They were expected to generate meetings before necessarily understanding what happened after those meetings. Technology made it easier to reach buyers without ever meeting them. Automation made it easier to produce more activity without necessarily producing more understanding. And AI now makes it possible to generate answers, research and messaging at a speed that would have been difficult to imagine a decade ago. But there's a question we should be asking. What happens when we accelerate the execution of people who haven't yet developed the commercial context to know what they're executing? We can give someone an account list. We can give them a battlecard. We can give them an AI generated account summary. We can give them the perfect discovery questions. But if they don't understand the industry, the buyer, the product, the delivery model or the commercial consequences of the conversation, how do they know what matters when the buyer says something unexpected? They might follow the process. They might complete the fields. They might even book the meeting. But they may not understand the business they're trying to win. And this is why I keep coming back to first principles. The salesperson should be the account manager for the account they don't yet have. That doesn't mean pretending the prospect is already a customer. It means approaching the relationship with the commercial curiosity and responsibility required to understand the customer's world before asking them to buy. What are they using today? Why did they choose it? What works? What doesn't? What would they change? What are their contractual obligations? When might their circumstances change? What would make an alternative worth considering? And, critically, if they did become a customer, could our business actually deliver what they need? These questions aren't simply about qualifying an opportunity. They're about understanding the commercial relationship before trying to create it. We go back to the fundamentals, then architect them into a system. 1. Catalogue the Market™ Understand the customer, their current situation, their alternatives, their frustrations and their buying conditions through real conversations. 2. Timing Intelligence™ Recognise that a customer who cannot buy today may be commercially relevant in the future. Preserve that knowledge instead of discarding the relationship because it didn't produce an immediate meeting. 3. Close the Feedback Loop™ Ensure what Sales learns informs Marketing, Product, Customer Success, Finance and Leadership. The information gathered before the sale should help the organisation make better decisions after the sale. 4. Architecture Over Frameworks™ Connect the behaviours, information and operational disciplines so the organisation doesn't depend on individual memory or isolated pockets of excellence. And the architecture must extend beyond acquisition. A commercially sound sale requires more than a signed agreement. Legal requirements must be satisfied. Credit boundaries must be understood. Delivery capacity must be confirmed. The commercial terms must be viable. Customer Success must understand what was promised, who needs to be involved and how the relationship will be serviced. The handover must preserve the intelligence gathered throughout the process. Because the customer doesn't experience your departments as separate boxes on an organisational chart. They experience one business. If the circuit breaks between Sales and delivery, the customer experiences the break. If the circuit breaks between the market and Product, the business misses opportunities to improve. If the circuit breaks between a conversation and the next conversation, the organisation loses its memory. These are not isolated departmental problems. They are architectural problems. And this is where AI becomes particularly important. AI can accelerate research, capture conversations, analyse patterns and help people prepare. But it cannot compensate automatically for an organisation that hasn't established what good commercial judgement looks like. You can give someone better inputs. You can automate the process. You can generate more outputs. But if the person doesn't understand the commercial context, they may not know how to interpret the result, challenge the recommendation or recognise when the conversation needs to change direction. Technology should strengthen commercial understanding, not become a substitute for developing it. This is not an argument for returning to every old organisational structure. Some of those structures were inefficient. Not every successful salesperson needs to begin in Customer Success, and not every business can support that career pathway. The principle is more important than the historical arrangement. People responsible for winning business need to understand the business they're selling for. They need to understand the customer they're selling to. They need to understand the consequences of what they promise. And the organisation needs to preserve and distribute what they learn. That's commercial common sense. But common sense, left informal, depends on the individual. Architected common sense becomes a repeatable organisational capability. That's what we're building with Closed Circuit Selling™. Not another framework telling salespeople which question to ask next. A commercial operating architecture that connects market understanding, buyer timing, revenue decisions, customer delivery and organisational learning. Because the objective was never simply to become better at winning customers. It was to build a business that understands whom it should win, why they should buy, when they might be ready, whether the business can serve them, and what must happen after the sale to make the relationship successful. We don't need to abandon progress to recover the fundamentals. We need to use progress to make those fundamentals work better. Go back to first principles. Then build the architecture that ensures the business never loses sight of them. Closed Circuit Selling™. Commercial common sense, architected. Revenue Alignment Architecture™.

If George Coudounaris and I have helped you in any way through Chief Revenue School, or Closed Circuit Selling. Please vote!

AI won't fix your sales team. It will amplify whatever your sales team already knows. We're being told that AI will make everyone a better salesperson. It will research accounts. Write personalised emails. Generate discovery questions. Analyse calls. Handle objections. Build proposals. And accelerate almost every part of the sales process. But there's a fundamental problem with that assumption. AI can generate an answer without understanding whether it's the right answer for the commercial situation. And if the person using it doesn't know the difference, who catches the mistake? Think about it. If a salesperson doesn't understand the buyer's industry, how can they judge whether AI's account research is commercially relevant? If they don't understand discovery, how can they tell whether the questions AI generates will uncover a genuine buying problem? If they don't understand the product, how can they distinguish a compelling proposition from a promise the business cannot deliver? If they don't understand buying behaviour, how can they recognise when AI is pushing a conversation in the wrong direction? They can't reliably do those things without the underlying knowledge. They might produce more output. They might move faster. They might even sound more polished. But sounding knowledgeable and being commercially intelligent are two very different things. Zero multiplied by a thousand is still zero. And a thousand poorly directed activities don't suddenly become a winning sales strategy because AI made them easier to execute. The real danger isn't that AI can't produce good work. It's that it can produce convincing work that an inexperienced operator doesn't know how to evaluate. AI can reinforce the assumptions you give it. It can help you articulate an idea without proving that the idea is correct. It can optimise a message without establishing whether the message addresses what the buyer actually cares about. And it can help you execute a flawed process at a scale that would previously have been impossible. That's why I believe the next competitive divide in sales won't simply be between the people who use AI and the people who don't. It will be between those who use AI to amplify commercial judgement and those who use it as a substitute for developing it. This is where Closed Circuit Selling™ becomes even more relevant. Because the answer isn't just to teach salespeople how to write better prompts. It's to build a commercial system that gives them better information to work with in the first place. Catalogue the Market™ Understand what buyers actually say about their current providers, their problems, their alternatives and the conditions that would cause them to change. Not what we assume they think. Not what a generic AI prompt predicts they might say. What the market tells us through real conversations. Timing Intelligence™ Understand when a buyer is ready, what might trigger a change and when the next conversation should happen. AI can help identify patterns, but the commercial context determines what those patterns mean. Close the Feedback Loop™ Make sure intelligence from Sales reaches Marketing, Product, Customer Success and Leadership. The more relevant first-party intelligence the organisation captures, the better equipped its people and AI tools become to make informed decisions. Architecture Over Frameworks™ Connect the people, processes, information and technology into a system that learns. Because giving AI access to disconnected data doesn't automatically create a connected business. And automating a broken process doesn't repair the architecture underneath it. Here's what I want sales leaders to consider. Before asking how much more activity AI can generate, ask whether your team understands the market well enough to direct that activity. Before measuring how many emails AI can produce, ask whether your salespeople can recognise a meaningful buying signal. Before celebrating the time saved on research, ask whether the research is changing the quality of the conversation. And before automating the sales process, ask whether you've actually built a process worth automating. AI is an amplifier. Your commorgan ai in salesmercial architecture determines what you're amplifying. The organisations that understand their markets, develop their people and preserve intelligence across the business will be better positioned to use AI effectively. The ones that don't may simply become more efficient at doing the wrong things. The future isn't human intelligence versus artificial intelligence. It's human judgement, market intelligence and technology working together inside a system designed to produce better commercial decisions. That's the principle behind Closed Circuit Selling™. We don't just want salespeople to produce more. We want them to understand more. We don't just want AI to generate answers. We want the business to ask better questions, interpret the answers and act on what it learns. Because the objective was never to create the world's most efficient activity machine. It was to build a commercial system that understands the market well enough to make revenue more predictable. Closed Circuit Selling™. Commercial common sense, architected. Revenue Alignment Architecture™.

I was 19, listening to Limp Bizkit, and trying to figure out how to sell. I didn't know what a CRM was. I didn't know what RevOps meant. But I knew one thing...the old way of selling was broken. The market has quietly shifted from asking "What is Closed Circuit Selling?" to asking "How fast can we install it?" Over the last few months, something fundamental changed in how revenue leaders are looking at the pipeline. The conversation is no longer about methodologies. It’s not about SPIN, MEDDICC, or another AI sequencing tool. It’s about the math. It’s about architecture. When George Coudounaris and I started mapping this out, we knew the industry was structurally broken. But we also knew that telling people they were broken wasn't enough. We had to build the operational layer to fix it. Here is what that shift looks like in the real world right now When you move from chasing the 95% of the market that isn't ready to cataloguing the timing of the 95%, the math changes. We built the diagnostic to prove it. For a standard mid-market SaaS team, the 36-month projection moves from $516,000 to over $4,000,000. That is not a sales tactic. That is a capital efficiency mandate. Wait til you hear our show with Jake Rivera (@FidelCacheFlow , breakdown a very similar method and its findings to his community all exceeding quota. AI made outbound infinite. The market is drowning in it. The winners over the next five years will not be the teams with the biggest SDR floor. They will be the ones operating on Message Scale where reputation, timing, and intelligence align before the first call is ever made. Warm calls are not an accident. They are the result of architecture. Yesterday I wrote and article from discussions with Sam Shaper from almost three years ago… where he came to the same independent conclusions I did.. This week we also dropped the episode with Morgan J. Ingram who independently arrive at the exact same architectural principles without reading our book, it proves something. It proves this isn't just our framework. It’s the first principles of how revenue actually works when you connect the circuit. We have moved past the era of the solo consultant. The book is the blueprint. CRO School is the training ground. The Sales Floor is the done for you execution. Just wait to see whats included. We are no longer talking about the future of revenue. We are installing it. Closed Circuit Selling™: Architect Predictable Revenue in an Unpredictable Market. And who knows I may bring back the Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park tshirts for Fridays…