Roughly half of sellers miss quota every year, and the industry keeps treating it as a rep problem. Lee Levitt argues it is a management problem, and it has been hiding in plain sight for decades.

In this episode of Value Coffee Talk, sales performance consultant Lee Levitt takes apart the assumptions behind quota setting, pipeline math, and the coaching that never actually happens.

His diagnosis is uncomfortable: most sales organizations hire for activity, measure for activity, then wonder why buyers do not see value. Lee's counter: a structure for turning a seller from a taker into a giver who earns the second meeting rather than begging for it.

The conversation goes deeper than technique. Lee makes the case that buying decisions are emotional before they are rational, that soft skills and emotional intelligence are the real differentiators in a market where AI has commoditized information, and that improv, not scripting, is what lets a seller stay present when a conversation turns. He also challenges leaders directly: you cannot coach authenticity into a team you manage by dashboard.

For CROs, enablement leaders, and value practitioners rebuilding how their teams sell, this episode is a candid look at why the fundamentals still fail and what to fix first.

Every vendor now leads with an AI story. Far fewer can prove what that AI actually delivered.

In this episode of Value Coffee Talk, Jim Richmond, veteran Chief Customer Officer at Smartling, joins us to unpack the widening gap between AI promises and proven outcomes, and what customer-facing leaders must do to close it.

Jim makes the case that buyers are no longer impressed by capability demos. They want to know which metric moved, by how much, and whether the result holds at renewal.

The conversation gets practical: how to quantify outcomes that were actually delivered rather than modeled, how to keep the customer at the center of the narrative instead of the product, and why curiosity beats defensiveness when a customer starts questioning your AI claims. Jim also challenges the reflex to answer pain with features, arguing that CS teams earn their seat by diagnosing the business problem first.

For CROs, Value Leaders, and Customer Success executives under pressure to defend AI investments, this is a working session on turning promises into proven value.

Ninety-seven percent of B2B buyers now use AI search as part of how they evaluate solutions. That single shift is quietly rewriting the economics of every service business built on selling expertise by the hour.

In this episode, Jon Erickson, a veteran Forrester analyst, joins us to unpack what AI actually changes for consultancies, agencies, and professional services firms, and what it does not.

The short version: AI compresses the cost of producing insight, but it raises the premium on trust. Clients can generate an answer in seconds. What they still cannot generate is confidence that the answer is right, defensible, and grounded in data they believe.

Jon and I get into the harder questions most firms are avoiding. If AI is a force multiplier, what happens to a business model priced on effort? Where does a consultancy add value once the analysis is commoditized? And why do the firms winning right now treat AI as a continuous experiment rather than a tooling decision?

If you lead a services business, or you sell into one, this conversation will give you a clearer read on where the durable value sits.