The billable hour is not under pressure from a competitor. It is under pressure from a buyer who now has an analyst on their phone.

In this episode of Value Coffee Talk, Sherri Sklar of AI Venture Catalyst makes the case that professional services firms are facing a business model problem, not a technology problem. Buyers have stopped paying for access to expertise they can approximate instantly. What they will still pay for, and pay well for, is a guaranteed outcome. That shift breaks the economics of selling time and forces a hard question: what does a firm actually own that cannot be replicated by a general purpose model?

Sherri's answer is proprietary knowledge, and her argument is that most firms are sitting on it without monetizing it. The path forward is productization: turning judgment, methodology, and accumulated pattern recognition into something that scales without a consultant in the room. She walks through what that looks like in practice, from firms that have successfully packaged their IP into recurring revenue to the ones that stalled by building technology before clarifying the outcome they were selling.

The conversation is candid about the difficulty. Choosing where to build versus buy, developing AI capability without an engineering culture, and pricing an outcome instead of an engagement are all real obstacles. Sherri's position is that none of them justify waiting, because the buyer expectation has already moved.

For consultancy leaders, agency owners, and services executives weighing how to defend margin, this is a practical look at converting expertise into an asset.

Sound bites

• "Why should I spend X on analyst subscriptions when I have an analyst on my phone?"
• "You can't sit still in this economy; you must adapt."
• "Your proprietary knowledge is your most valuable asset."

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction to AI in Professional Services
• 02:44 Challenges Faced by Professional Services Firms
• 05:39 The Shift in Buyer Behavior
• 08:44 The Need for Outcome-Based Business Models
• 11:25 Productization of Services and AI Integration
• 14:11 Navigating the Technology Landscape
• 17:13 Real-World Examples of Successful Productization
• 19:52 Overcoming Challenges in AI Development
• 22:48 Strategic Advice for Service Firms
• 25:40 Conclusion and Call to Action

Most lost deals are not lost to a competitor. They are lost to nothing at all, the buyer who agrees with everything, nods through the business case, and then goes quiet. Ted McKenna's research puts a number on it: a large share of pipeline dies not from preference for the status quo, but from fear of making the wrong choice.

In this episode of Value Coffee Talk, Ted McKenna, co-author of The Jolt Effect, breaks down why the standard playbook makes indecision worse. When a seller senses hesitation, the instinct is to pile on more proof, more references, more ROI. Ted's data shows that response often deepens the paralysis, because the buyer was never questioning whether the problem was real. They were questioning whether they could be blamed for the decision.

The conversation gets specific about what high performers do instead. They separate fear of the status quo from fear of failure and treat them as different problems. They build trust in the change itself, not just in the seller. And they use long-term capability planning to right-size expectations, giving the buyer a defensible path rather than a maximalist promise.

Ted closes with a caution the market needs right now. As vendors lean harder into AI narratives and outcome commitments, overpromising has become the fastest way to manufacture the exact indecision sellers are trying to overcome. Trust broken at implementation costs far more than a deal that closes slowly.

For CROs, enablement leaders, and value practitioners staring at flat win rates and aging pipeline, this is a clear-eyed look at where the real friction sits.

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.