Closed Circuit Selling : Architect Predictable Revenue in an Unpredictable Market

So many founders never get to the point of mastering revenue & sales. Mostly because their idea of sales is to cold pitch the first time the opportunity arises… (lol). The best people in the business are out here giving value first (and giving out their books for free 😎). They are relationship led from day one and sometimes don’t even realise this is actually an entire world of frameworks now (shoutout to all my fellow intuition led founders). But intuition only gets you so far. Being intentional about relationships and market timing/signals is one of the best things you could learn. Shoutout to Adem Manderovic who I met for coffee this week. One hell of a story. A true master mind 🔥 highly recommend! Tag someone who is great with people and should read this👇

📚 Never Stop Learning. Never Stop Growing. One thing I've learnt throughout my career is that the most successful people are never the ones who think they know it all. They're the ones who stay curious, ask questions, seek new perspectives, and continuously invest in their own development. Whether it's listening to a podcast, reading a book, attending a webinar, or learning from colleagues and mentors, every piece of knowledge adds another tool to your toolbox. As a Sales Development Executive at Kester James, continuous learning is a huge part of what we do. Every conversation teaches us something new about an industry, a business challenge, or the people we're speaking with. The more we learn, the better equipped we are to create meaningful conversations and connect our clients with genuine opportunities. This week I've been spending some time with Closed Circuit Selling™ (CCS), taking in new ideas and challenging my thinking around sales and revenue generation. The best investment you can make is often the one you make in yourself. Knowledge compounds over time. Read the book. Listen to the podcast. Ask the question. Take the course. You never know which lesson will be the one that changes everything. Are you reading a good book at the moment? What is it called? #Learning #ProfessionalDevelopment #SalesDevelopment #SDR #B2BSales #ContinuousImprovement #KesterJames #SalesGrowth #Leadership #BusinessDevelopment

Considering RevOps as a career, but unsure? 👇 This is my take 👇 Over the last 6 months, a few people DM'd me asking what's the day-to-day of a RevOps function. This depends on industry, size of company and existing teams: - A plumbing business of 50 people, won't have a data team. RevOps will own most conversion data, reporting and forecasting (in close alignment with Finance). A company this size may utilise Marketing agencies for lead gen, limiting the customer signals captured before leads land on the CRM. - A Saas of 500 people will have a Data team and the CRM may not be the SoT (Source of Truth) for conversions. RevOps will be working with Data to ensure consistency of figures and measurements across systems and the use of data warehousing. RevOps will help the in-house Marketing team in identifying intent-signals before prospects become leads to re-distribute budget and improve performance. So day-to-day may change. But – if you want to know what the qualities are key for RevOps, these are what I consider NON-NEGOTIABLES. 1.   You need to love Sales and Sales teams. If you don't, it’s not the right role. Full stop. 2.   You need to love Marketing, human behaviour and be eager to identify new opportunities. 3.   You need to get excited about processes and data. 4.   You need to be comfortable saying ‘No’ when teams ask for exceptions to processes that affect data integrity. (This will happen every-single-week). 5.   You need to be flexible and say ‘Yes’ to changing your own processes when they don't serve teams. 6.   Know that your opinion is not data. It's most likely a wrong assumption that needs to be tested. 7.   You need to stop asking ‘What’s the perfect solution?’ and instead ask ‘How will this fail?’ (Thanks, Grace Miller) Then be relentless about testing before-during-and-after rollout. 8. It’s ok to go fast, and break stuff. But don’t go fast and break your own stuff. (I see this often). 9. You need to get excited about dry things your 8-year old would yawn at. (Hello, ‘governance frameworks’ and ‘process maps’.) 10. You need to get excited about working with people vertically and horizontally. RevOps is a function that serves other teams… you need to enjoy this. 11. You need to be passionate about training, enablement and knowledge transfers. 12. Most importantly, you need to love serving customers. The biggest hack to this is working for a company with a product you love/respect. This will attract people you are happy to serve. RevOps is the most exciting mix of hard and soft skills I’ve found in Sales, CS and Marketing. That's what I love most. For those, considering this career - an easy first step is to do the HubSpot Academy RevOps Certification. It’s Free. It’s high quality. And it will answer lots of questions. Are you in RevOps? What would you add? Considering RevOps? What do you want to know?

I recently said publicly The race will be a provider to record, facilitate and update the guard rails of Closed Circuit Selling™ (CCS) to gather commercial account intelligence, to disperse across Marketing, Product, Sales, Customer Success & Leadership. And today’s discussions with Mark Taoube & George Coudounaris energised that exact thinking…. Stay tuned….

This is simply due to modern day activity theatre does not mean catalogued account intelligence with buying timelines. Pipeline is often hope disguised as certainty. But activity can be just as dangerous when it becomes volume disguised as progress. More calls. More meetings. More emails. More discovery. More opportunities. Yet somehow the outcome never changes. Why? Because neither metric answers the most important question: Are we learning anything about the market? This is where most forecasting models break down. The account isn’t catalogued. The buying environment isn’t catalogued. The stakeholder network isn’t catalogued. The timing event isn’t catalogued. The business case isn’t catalogued. The competitive position isn’t catalogued. So the organisation ends up forecasting against assumptions. What Closed Circuit Selling™ found across multiple industries is that most pipelines are built on what I call commercial fugazi. Deals exist in CRM. Stages exist in CRM. Activities exist in CRM. But the intelligence required to validate those opportunities often doesn’t exist anywhere. The organisation is measuring motion instead of understanding. The result? Pipeline bloat. Forecast inflation. False commit dates. Late-stage surprises. Quarter-end panic. Not because people are dishonest. Because the system lacks validated market intelligence. This is why Closed Circuit Selling™ starts somewhere completely different. Before pipeline. Before forecasting. Before activity metrics. Before opportunity stages. It starts with cataloguing. Cataloguing the market. Cataloguing the accounts. Cataloguing buying behaviour. Cataloguing timing events. Cataloguing stakeholder ecosystems. Cataloguing competitive intelligence. Cataloguing customer outcomes. Because once intelligence is captured and operationalised, everything else becomes more accurate. Marketing targets better accounts. Sales qualifies better opportunities. Customer Success identifies expansion earlier. Product sees market patterns sooner. Leadership forecasts with greater confidence. Suddenly pipeline is no longer built on optimism. It’s built on evidence. The future of forecasting won’t belong to organisations with more dashboards. It will belong to organisations with stronger commercial intelligence architecture. Because forecasting isn’t really a sales problem. It’s an organisational learning problem. And organisational learning is ultimately what Closed Circuit Selling™ was designed to solve. Not by managing pipeline. Not by managing activity. But by creating a closed circuit where market intelligence continuously flows through Marketing, Product, Sales, Customer Success, Leadership, and Strategy. The organisations that learn fastest will forecast best. Because they are no longer predicting the market. They’re listening to it. Closed Circuit Selling : Architect Predictable Revenue in an Unpredictable Market

A fantastic Sunday read. I've been meaning to post this for a while but Closed Circuit Selling : Architect Predictable Revenue in an Unpredictable Market from Adem Manderovic and George Coudounaris is a breath of fresh air. Being in Demand Gen and Ops for over 17 years I've seen a lot come and go in terms of strategies. What worked then, doesn't always work now. The expectation that more meetings, more lead(z) and ultimately more activity is a panacea has been proven false. So what's next? Well that's why you have to read the book ;) I can tell you that the fundamentals discussed in this book, such as cataloguing the market, can be applied as the foundation to a lot of the modern "plays" your timeline is flooded with. And that foundation is where the architecture really comes into play. Really enjoyed this one and think you will to.

Most Customer Success teams are measured on retention. But retention can “lie”. You can retain the wrong customers, renew accounts that were never a fit and grow revenue that was fragile from day one. Reading *Closed Circuit Selling* by Adem Manderovic and George Coudounaris trains you to rethink what efficiency looks like in ANY revenue driving role and connects them all together to work harmoniously. Most of you know I’ve recently taken over more responsibility to ensure our clients’ businesses flourish…and here’s how Adem and George’s book helps to make that less about post sale white gloving and more about being part of a cohesive revenue sustaining system. → Don’t just track health … track *why customers actually succeed or fail* Every onboarding, renewal, or churn tells a story. Patterns matter more than one-off wins. → Look for “false positives” Customers who closed… but shouldn’t have. That insight is more valuable than any upsell. → Turn customer reality into pre-sale truth. The friction, the objections, the gaps … those shouldn’t be hidden. They should shape how you sell/upsell and how you scale/grow your client’s business. → Treat expansion as a signal, not a target. ***If value isn’t already realized*** pushing growth just ***creates future churn*** 👆🏻Read that one again..HUGE for a CS and AM role. → Feed everything back upstream. (Sales), (Marketing), (CS) … if we’re not learning from the same source of truth, we’re just guessing into a high risk low reward void. And we certainly aren’t helping to support our client’s business. Something you CS folks can take with you for the start to the week.. Customer Success isn’t just about keeping customers. It’s about **protecting the system** from bad revenue and ((reinforcing what actually works)). HUGE shout-outs to Adem and George for putting language to something a lot of teams feel but struggle to operationalize or even put to words. If you haven’t picked up their masterclass Closed Circuit Selling : Architect Predictable Revenue in an Unpredictable Market You should.. —and you’re welcome. 💪🏻

I don’t align with many operators in market. Most are still optimising tactics inside broken systems. But when I spent time with Nickolas Sternberg-Heyze The xDR Coach , it hit a little different. Revenue growth is not a talent problem. It is an infrastructure failure. Nickolas calls it the “Variance Tax” the silent killer of revenue performance, where inconsistency across people, process, and execution erodes what should be predictable yield. I call it system leakage inside misaligned revenue circuits. Same truth. Different language. And unlike most, he’s built this from inside real operating environments, not theory. At Smartsheet, he scaled enterprise motion across APJ, driving an 87% YoY increase in ASP. At LegalVision, he re-architected the system cutting the sales cycle from 14 days to 7, while increasing attainment by 49%. That doesn’t happen from better reps. That happens from better systems. Here’s where most revenue leaders are still getting it wrong You’re Managing People Instead of Designing Systems If your top performers are carrying your number, you don’t have a high-performing team. You have a fragile system. Nickolas eliminates reliance on “hero sellers” by implementing clinical operating systems where execution is consistent, measurable, and transferable. You’re Scaling Activity Instead of Increasing Signal Fidelity More calls. More emails. More tools. None of it matters if your qualification, decisioning, and progression logic is flawed. This is where his MEDDPICC depth and AI-forensics thinking becomes critical, not as frameworks, but as signal validation layers inside the revenue architecture. You Don’t Have Alignment, You Have Handoffs Most organisations think alignment is communication. It’s not. Alignment is shared system logic across Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success where every stage feeds the next with clean, usable intelligence. Without that, friction compounds. Conversion drops. Forecasts lie. Nickolas is doing what very few in market are willing to do Moving teams from instinct → protocol From variance → control From effort → engineered yield Through “The xDR Coach: Revenue Foundations (Vol 1)”, he’s codifying this into a repeatable system for teams that are serious about predictable growth. And here’s the reality most won’t say out loud If your pipeline is inconsistent… If your ASP is volatile… If your cycle length depends on the rep… You don’t have a performance problem. You have an architecture problem. Category leaders don’t optimise sales. They design systems where revenue becomes inevitable. #B2B #XDR #ClosedCircuitSelling #RevenueAlignmentArchitecture