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.

AI has made the build option look almost free. A few prompts, a weekend, and you have something that resembles a value calculator. What you don't have is a methodology, a maintained model, a governance trail, or a seller who trusts the number in front of the CFO.

In this episode of Value Coffee Talk, we dig into the build versus buy decision for value automation in the AI era. Vikas Mundada, a community favorite and value leader for Ping Identity, joins us to unpack why the hard part was never the math, why frameworks and structure determine whether AI produces credible value or confident noise, and what total cost of ownership really looks like once you account for maintenance, enablement, and trust.

What you'll take away:

• Why AI amplifies the quality of your value framework rather than replacing it

• Where homegrown tools quietly break: model drift, adoption, and no one left to own it

• The training and certification gap that stalls most AI rollouts

• How to compare TCO honestly, including the costs that never show up in the build estimate

• Where value automation management is heading, and what to stand up now

If your team is debating whether to build your own value engine, listen before you commit the sprint.

Sound bites

• "Frameworks make AI work better."

• "Get your team certified on AI tools."

• "Outcomes matter more than hypotheses."

In this episode of Value Coffee Talk, host Thomas Pisello speaks with Ken Powell about the remarkable growth journey of K1X and the evolving role of business value in today’s SaaS and AI-driven economy. The conversation explores how organizations can move beyond product-centric selling to focus on measurable outcomes, customer adoption, and long-term value creation in increasingly competitive and rapidly changing markets.

Ken shares insights on outcome-based buying, AI transformation, and the importance of embedding value into customer workflows to drive engagement, retention, and scalable revenue growth. The discussion also highlights leadership strategies for navigating change, accelerating adoption, and staying adaptable in an era where speed, curiosity, and customer impact are becoming critical competitive advantages.

• K1X’s growth journey and SaaS scaling strategies
• Embedding business value into customer workflows and sales
• Outcome-based buying and the shift toward measurable value
• Driving adoption and engagement in SaaS and AI environments
• Leadership, adaptability, and navigating rapid market change.

In this insightful interview, host Tom Pisello interviews sales transformation expert and author Art Fromm, to explore how modern buying decisions are increasingly shaped by risk perception, stakeholder alignment, and the growing complexity of enterprise sales.

The pair dive into how organizations can create more seamless, collaborative sales experiences that reduce friction, improve buyer confidence, and ultimately drive stronger quota attainment and customer success outcomes.

Topics include the impact of risk perception on decision-making, engineering influence within the buying process, the importance of cross-functional sales collaboration, and practical strategies revenue leaders can use to improve sales effectiveness in today’s challenging market.

• How risk perception shapes modern buying decisions
• Reducing friction through seamless, collaborative sales experiences
• The growing complexity of stakeholder alignment in enterprise sales
• Cross-functional collaboration between sales, engineering, and customer success
• Practical strategies to improve quota attainment and customer outcomes

In this episode of the Value Coffee Talk Podcast, Tom Pisello, the ROI Guy, speaks with Michael McDowell, the “Demo-tainer” and author of Demo-tainment, about how pre-sales and solution engineering are evolving in an AI-driven world.

The pair discuss why human connection still matters, how to avoid boring product demos, why outcomes should lead the conversation, and how sales engineers can expand from proving technical fit to proving business value.

• Why “Demo-tainment” helps make demos more engaging, memorable, and human
• How AI is changing pre-sales, and why SEs need to become more human, not less
• Why the best pre-sales professionals will use AI to amplify their impact, not resist it
• How to avoid the “harbor tour” and focus demos on what matters most to the buyer
• Why less is more in demos, because too many features dilute perceived value
• How outcome-first demos create stronger customer connection than feature-first walkthroughs
• Why the future of pre-sales combines technical expertise, business acumen, and presentation skill.

In this episode of the Value Coffee Talk Podcast, Tom Pisello, the ROI Guy, is joined by Gaurav Sharma, Product Leader for Value Tools and AI Systems at ServiceNow, to explore one of the most important shifts in go-to-market strategy: post-sales value realization.

The discussion focuses on how organizations can move beyond selling value to actually proving it, using embedded product telemetry, instrumentation, and data-driven insights.

Gaurav shares a practical framework for operationalizing value across teams, aligning product metrics to business outcomes, and enabling customer success to tell stronger, outcome-based stories.

• Why most companies are good at selling value but struggle to prove it post-sale
• How telemetry and instrumentation enable continuous tracking of realized outcomes
• Why value realization is a credibility problem, not just a tooling problem
• The importance of aligning product metrics to business outcomes and success metrics
• How benchmarking against peers strengthens value conversations and customer engagement
• Why storytelling is still required, even with dashboards and data
• How consistent value taxonomy aligns sales, marketing, and customer success