B2B Sales Needs a Reset. Here’s Where I’m Starting.

Everyone says they’re customer-centric

It’s the language of every B2B sales team, every leadership presentation, and every away day.

But looking more closely, we see that reality is often very different. Salespeople are still measured by revenue, and leaders focus on the pipeline.

Most salespeople treat the buying decision as the end goal. Customer outcomes are left to someone else if they’re discussed at all.

This culture runs deep

The dominant approach to B2B selling — focusing on persuasion, pipeline, and personal targets — has existed for over a hundred years. It’s so familiar and normalised that most people don’t even see it as a construct. It’s just “how selling works.”

And that’s precisely the problem.

The vocabulary of conventional selling — closing, overcoming objections, qualifying, hitting numbers — makes meaningful behaviour change harder. It frames the customer as something to win or convert, not someone to understand and help succeed.

Even salespeople who believe they’re moving toward outcome-based selling often carry the old selling model's language, assumptions, and habits — without realising it.

And it’s not just historical. These messages are everywhere today.

LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos, sales influencers, podcasts, and training snippets—the algorithms reward quick wins and confident tactics, not thoughtful change. So even the most well-intentioned learner is bombarded with messages that pull them back into the old mindset.

That’s why Sales Reset isn’t just a tactical shift. It requires a fundamental cultural transformation.

What is the scale of the required shift?

Even when leadership genuinely believes in outcome-based selling, the scale of change is often severely underestimated.

This isn’t just about better questions or a revised sales process. It requires a fundamental shift in the sales team's capability—one that most organisations have never seriously attempted.

I vividly remember a conversation with one of my mentors, Professor Malcolm McDonald of Cranfield University, stating, "We need MBA-level capability in every member of the sales team.”

That isn’t a throwaway line. If we expect salespeople to lead genuinely strategic conversations, they need to be able to:

• Understand complex customer environments – beyond the product, and into their operations, finances, and internal politics.

• Surface and define real business outcomes – not just respond to requirements, but challenge and clarify what success actually means.

• Align stakeholders across functions – both internally and on the customer side, often with competing interests.

• Translate insight into follow-through – helping their own organisation deliver on what was promised, after the deal is done

Most current sales cultures simply don’t support this level of thinking, communication, or ownership. The gap is real — and it’s deep.

Sales Team Leader’s Pivotal Role

If there’s one role with the power to shift this reality, it’s the frontline sales leader.

They are uniquely placed. Close enough to influence day-to-day behaviour. Senior enough to set priorities and shape culture. But here’s the problem: in most organisations, that potential is never realised.

Instead, sales managers are buried in admin, pipeline reviews, forecast updates, and firefighting. They become traffic controllers, not leaders.

Too many B2B sales leaders have to carry sales targets themselves, especially when there is turnover in their team.

To drive this magnitude of change I’m seeking with Sales Reset, sales team leader’s role must be redefined. They need to lead differently. And for that to happen, they need:

• Permission – from senior leadership to focus on developing people, not just chasing numbers

• Clarity – about what “good” looks like in outcome-focused selling

• Skills - they must be able to demonstrate best practices

• Support – to coach, model, and reinforce the behaviours that drive customer success

AI: A Game-Changer in Outcome-Centred Selling

Until recently, even the best sales leaders struggled to make this change stick — not because the vision was wrong, but because the tools weren’t there.

That’s now changed.

AI transcription and repurposing tools — sometimes called conversation intelligence or conversational intelligence — are game-changers. For the first time, salespeople no longer need to rely on memory, rushed notes, or word-for-word typing to capture what really matters.

This shift means:

• Conversations can be recorded and transcribed accurately, even capturing nuance and specific vocabulary.

• Follow-up emails and proposals can be built with authentic customer vocabulary, not guesswork.

• Coaching becomes evidence-based, with real examples of what was said, how it landed, and what was missed.

These tools don’t replace the need for deeper selling capability but they do remove one of the most significant barriers to building it.

Measurable Customer Success

Too often, even when outcomes are included in proposals, they’re vague at best — a nod to the right language rather than a clear, measurable commitment.

There’s a world of difference between saying “reduce onboarding time” and committing to “cut average onboarding from six weeks to four, measured by system access and usage milestones.”

Even better is when those outcomes are anchored by benchmarking.

When you have a clear before, you can track during and after, creating an audit trail of measurable customer success. Ideally, these benchmarks will be defined for each customer based on their value.

This definition and measurement of success don’t belong to operational delivery or customer success teams. It begins at the point of sale, when expectations should be negotiated carefully and where alignment can either start or break down.

Sales isn’t just responsible for the deal.

Sales is responsible for defining the measurable customer success required, and co-creating a credible proposal and plan that leads to reliable delivery of these outcomes.

My Newsletter Goals

This newsletter is part of my own continuing professional development.

I chose my career as an independent B2B sales trainer, coach, and advisor 40 years ago. It was a careful choice that combined my early experience of highly structured sales training with my desire to help other people benefit from what I had learned.

Here I am, with four decades of real-world experience changing B2B sales skills, processes, and behaviours. I’m trying to make sense of the profound shifts in B2B sales and the even deeper shifts that I am convinced are still required.

I sincerely hope that I can continue to help people sell better for many more years.

I’m not writing from theory. I’m working today with clients who are experiencing these changes right now. If you are part of a team where we’re already working together, some of what you’ve just read will feel very familiar.

This is also a quiet invitation—not to a sales conversation but to a continuing dialogue. I hope that you and I can help each other shape the future of selling. And achieve a competitive advantage today!

If you’re grappling with any of the themes I’ve discussed, or if you see things differently, I’d genuinely like to hear from you. Your stories, challenges, perspectives, and especially your disagreements, help sharpen my thinking.

In the companion post over at The Sales Reset Playbook, I’ve outlined a practical starting point: how frontline sales leaders can begin to shift their priorities — and what senior leadership needs to do to make that possible.

Companion post available

Each chapter of Peter Button’s Sales Reset Briefing is paired with a practical follow-up in The Sales Reset Playbook.

👉 Read Sales Reset Playbook – Chapter XX: Post Title Here