TheInquisitor Podcast

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TheInquisitor Podcast is a business podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 581 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts TheInquisitor Podcast, a business show with 581 episodes published.

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  Episode #584

  Your Account Managers Aren’t the Problem. Your System Is - Jenny Plant

  Sep 9, 202653 min

  Your Account Managers Aren’t the Problem. Your System Is. Most agencies are very good at winning new clients. Far fewer are equally deliberate about protecting, expanding and winning back the business they already have. That is a strange omission when the people closest to existing clients often have the strongest opportunity to understand what is changing inside those businesses. In this episode of TheInquisitor Podcast, Marcus Cauchi talks to Jenny Plant of Account Management Skills about why account managers are so often blamed for weak account growth when the real problem may sit much higher up the organisation. Jenny has spent more than 25 years working in agencies, as well as time on the client side in the airline and pharmaceutical sectors. She now works with agencies to make account management more commercially effective without turning account managers into stereotypical salespeople. And there is an important distinction. The answer is not simply to train account managers to “sell more”. It is to give them the clarity, capability, time, confidence and organisational conditions to become genuinely useful to their clients. Why this conversation matters Existing accounts are an obvious source of revenue, yet many agencies still manage them primarily around delivery. The account manager becomes the person who keeps projects moving, answers questions, attends status meetings and makes sure the client is happy. That can create a dangerous gap between being delivery reliable and being business relevant. Jenny argues that account growth depends on three things: 1. Commercial clarity Do account managers know which accounts are actually growable? Do they understand the agency's goals, their own role, the risks in the relationship and the rhythm in which accounts should be managed? 2. Capability Can they understand the client's business, ask useful questions, connect the agency's services to business outcomes and bring ideas into the conversation? 3. Cultural continuity Is account growth embedded into forecasting, coaching, planning, client meetings and the employee lifecycle? Jenny describes these as a three-legged stool. Training one leg while ignoring the other two is unlikely to produce sustainable change. Account management is sitting on a gold mine One of the most striking examples Jenny shares involves a US promotional merchandise agency serving the education sector. Its account managers had hybrid roles combining project management and growth. The growth wasn't happening. The agency separated the roles and gave existing team members the opportunity to focus specifically on growth. Within six months, the agency had increased revenue by 12% and client consultations by 50%. The important part was not simply the training. The account managers had gained the time, capacity and enablement to actually develop their clients. They were initially worried about becoming “salesy”. Once they understood that their job was to be consultative rather than transactional, the resistance disappeared. Did you hire them this way, or make them this way? This becomes one of the most important challenges in the conversation. Marcus asks whether founders should consider: “Did you hire them this way, or did you make them this way?” An account manager may be told to lead the client relationship, only for the founder or agency leadership to step in whenever something goes wrong. The client then learns that the account manager is not really in charge. The account manager loses authority. The founder remains trapped in the relationship. And everybody wonders why the account manager isn't becoming more commercially confident. Jenny argues that agency leaders need to orchestrate their involvement so that the account manager remains visibly in control. Delivery reliable is not the same as business relevant A client may be perfectly happy with the work and still begin to question the value of the relationship. Why? Because the agency isn't bringing anything beyond delivery. Jenny's 30/30/30/10 framework provides a useful way to think about strategic client meetings: 30%: What happened and what has been delivered? 30%: What happens next? 30%: What are we seeing in the market, with other clients and in the wider business environment? 10%: Agency news and corporate information. That third 30% is where the relationship can become genuinely valuable. It gives the client something they cannot get simply by reading a project report. Your client doesn't owe you their attention Jenny discusses research suggesting that a marketing director spends less than 7% of their working week managing all supplier relationships. Even if that figure varies by role or organisation, the principle is important. Your agency is competing for a tiny amount of attention. If the conversation consists entirely of status updates, delivery detail and requests for the next project, why would a senior client prioritise it? The agency has to earn the conversation by bringing something useful to it. Protect. Expand. Win back. Then win. Marcus challenges the conventional emphasis on new business. His proposed sequence is: Protect what you have. Expand where there is a genuine opportunity. Win back what you have lost. Then go and win new business. That changes the way an agency thinks about revenue. Instead of treating existing clients as an account-management problem and new business as the growth engine, the existing client base becomes something to actively understand, protect and develop. Multi-threading is risk management Another recurring theme is relationship concentration. If all the trust and knowledge sits with one person on the agency side and one person on the client side, the relationship is fragile. Jenny recommends building relationships with multiple stakeholders, including people above and alongside the day-to-day contact. Marcus takes this further by asking agencies to understand who owns the decision, change, risk, political influence, value after purchase and day-to-day implementation. The objective isn't to go around the account manager's contact. It is to understand the organisation well enough that the relationship isn't dependent on a single individual. Practical takeaways If you lead an agency, ask: Which existing accounts are genuinely growable? Does the account manager have time to grow them? Are account management and project management being confused? Does the team understand the client's business well enough to discuss outcomes? Are your meetings mainly downstream status updates? What external perspective are you bringing to clients? How many relationships do you have inside each important account? What happens when a major project finishes? When did you last interview your senior clients independently? Are you inadvertently undermining the people you expect to lead your client relationships? And perhaps start with Jenny's final recommendation to agency owners: “Pick up the phone and talk to your client.” Memorable ideas from the conversation “Account management is sitting on a gold mine.” “Protect, expand, win back, and finally win new business.” “Did you hire them this way or did you make them this way?” “If you have even 1% of their attention, you're probably doing quite well. So do not squander it.” “Delivery reliable” is not the same as being “business relevant”. About Jenny Plant Jenny Plant has spent more than 25 years working in agencies, alongside experience on the client side in the airline and pharmaceutical sectors. After leaving Publicis LifeBrands, she established Account Management Skills, where she works with account managers and client service teams to grow existing business without resorting to scripts or stereotypical sales techniques. Her work focuses on helping account managers become commercially aware advisers who understand their clients' businesses and can create more valuable conversations. Jenny also hosts the Creative Agency Account Manager Podcast, which has more than 150 episodes. Find Jenny Website: www.accountmanagementskills.com LinkedIn: Jenny Plant | LinkedIn Keep listening If you lead a sales, client service or account management team and want to challenge the assumptions behind how you sell and serve customers, subscribe to TheInquisitor Podcast and listen to more conversations with people questioning what conventional business practice gets wrong.

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  Episode #583

  AI won't fix your blind spots. But it will help you find them. with Dave Pender and Dan Simmons

  Aug 12, 20261h 1m

  Why This Conversation Matters Most conversations about AI in sales are really just conversations about speed. This one isn't. Marcus sits down with Dave Pender and Dan Simmons, co-founders of YourSalesEdge, to ask a harder question: is AI making salespeople think better, or just making their existing thinking louder? The answer, it turns out, depends entirely on how you use it. About the Guests Dave Pender has spent 27 years in sales and sales leadership, building business development, account management and key account teams across SaaS businesses globally. Dan Simmons has spent roughly 15 years working alongside Dave, with a similar background leading SaaS sales teams. What They Discuss The conversation opens with a genuine disagreement. Dave argues that sales has always been, and remains, a numbers game. Marcus pushes back hard, arguing it's more accurately an evidence game, and that volume without qualification just produces expensive noise. They find common ground: quality of conversation matters more than count, but only once a minimum bar of relevance is met. From there the conversation moves into how AI is actually being used, and misused, in sales. Dan is blunt about the obvious failures: AI-flavoured emails with the prompt still attached, people asking AI to think instead of asking it to help them think. Dave describes voice-dictating full context into AI rather than typing short prompts, and setting a permanent "critical friend" instruction so the tool never simply agrees with him. Marcus introduces the idea of a human-AI-human loop, building on something Dan describes: start with human intent, bring in AI to assist, run an evidence check, and return to human accountability before anything is acted on. It becomes the spine of the episode. They cover the danger of triangulating across multiple AI models and mistaking agreement for proof, given that most large models are trained on overlapping data and carry similar cultural assumptions. And they discuss the discipline of deliberately switching AI off, in Dan's case for days or weeks at a time, to protect the ability to think independently. Practical Takeaways Feed AI full context by talking to it, not typing at it. A voice memo produces richer, more usable output than a rushed prompt. Set a standing instruction telling AI to challenge you, not flatter you. Most tools default to agreement unless told otherwise. Use the human-AI-human loop. Start with a person, bring in AI to assist and stress-test, then return to human judgement before deciding anything. Ask AI what you missed, both before and after a call. That question does more work than asking it for answers. Triangulating across multiple AI tools is not the same as evidence. Most models share training data and similar biases. Run weekly red-teaming exercises with your team, one side attacking a call, one side defending it, to surface what a seller alone never would. Build in deliberate AI-free periods to keep independent thinking sharp. Memorable Quotes Marcus challenges the framing of sales as a volume exercise, arguing instead that it's about the quality of evidence gathered before a conversation ever happens. Dan is candid about the risk of overreliance, warning that people are using AI to do their thinking for them rather than to sharpen it. Dave admits that at this point, his AI tool knows more about his working life and thinking than the people closest to him do, a comment that says as much about the pace of adoption as it does about the tool itself. Resources Mentioned YourSalesEdge, Dave and Dan's company: yoursalesedge.co Dave Pender and Dan Simmons on LinkedIn YourSalesEdge on YouTube Guest Biographies Dave Pender has led business development, account management and key account teams in SaaS environments globally over a 27-year sales career. He is co-founder of YourSalesEdge and Blind Spots. Dan Simmons has spent around 15 years working alongside Dave in SaaS sales leadership. Based in London, he describes himself as endlessly curious, particularly about how AI can genuinely improve people's working lives rather than simply speed them up. Listen to More If this conversation challenged how you think about AI in your own sales process, explore more episodes of TheInquisitor Podcast, where Marcus Cauchi questions conventional thinking about selling, buying and leadership.

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  Episode #582

  The Founder's Discipline: How Keith Gillispie Systemised a Business That Runs Without Him

  Jul 17, 202659 min

  There is no shortage of founders who have read Principles or Traction. Far fewer have built their business around what those books teach, week after week, when it is inconvenient to do so. In this episode, Marcus Cauchi speaks with Keith Gillispie, founder of REI Automated, about the discipline of turning ideas into working systems, and why that discipline is harder than the ideas themselves. Why this conversation matters Most conversations about business systems focus on tools. This one focuses on behaviour. Keith didn't just read about principles, operating systems and delegation frameworks. He applied them, tested them, and kept refining them long after the novelty wore off. For founders who are drowning in advice but starved of consistent execution, this episode offers something more useful than another framework: a working model of what it actually looks like to follow through. Major discussion points Discipline over information. Keith names two books that fundamentally shaped his business: Principles by Ray Dalio and Traction by Gino Wickman. What sets his account apart is not the reading list but what he did with it: he built explicit, testable principles into daily operations, and adopted Wickman's Entrepreneur Operating System (EOS) as the structural backbone of how his business runs. Writing and testing SOPs. Keith's method for creating a standard operating procedure is deliberately unglamorous. Do the task. Write down exactly what you did. Follow your own instructions the next time and notice everything you missed. Repeat this three to seven times until the gaps close, then record a video walking through the process. Only then does a task become fit to hand to another person, or to an AI agent. Where AI should not go. Keith runs a company that sells agentic AI voice agents for real estate sellers, so he has a commercial incentive to promote automation. He was candid about its limits. When he tested his own AI on a negotiation for his own property, reaching the point where the AI pressed him on price, he found the experience uncomfortable. His conclusion: AI handles information well, but emotional, high-stakes conversations still need a human. Hiring as a discipline, not an event. REI Automated filters candidates roughly one hundred to one. Keith uses the GWC framework from Traction (get it, want it, capacity for it) to decide not just who to hire, but who to keep, and applies a consistent SOP-based interview and onboarding process across every role. Cadence over intensity. Rather than reviewing performance monthly, Keith's team submits short daily and weekly reports, which are read and responded to using Claude, and quarterly goals ("rocks") drawn from EOS. He argues that weekly management gives a business fifty opportunities a year to course-correct, against twelve for a business run monthly. The absence test. Keith takes one week off every month with no calls, texts or Slack messages. During a recent house move that disrupted his usual routine for roughly a month, revenue held within a thousand dollars of the prior month. He was candid that the business currently sustains itself well in his absence, though he is less certain it grows without him. AI as a thought partner, not a shortcut. Keith's team members are expected to bring Claude fully into their process, including drafting their own SOPs when Keith does not have time to write one himself. He was clear this only works because the AI has deep context on the business and because his people bring genuine critical thinking to the exchange, rather than treating it as a way to avoid thinking. A moment of disagreement. Marcus challenged Keith's use of performance improvement plans, arguing that everyone should effectively be on one from day one, and that needing to formalise one is often a sign management has let something slide. Keith pushed back, drawing a distinction between personal development and performance accountability, and defended his position with a clear rationale. Practical takeaways Before automating or delegating any task, do it yourself first and write the SOP from direct experience. Follow your own SOP repeatedly until you have found and closed the gaps, then record it on video. Review your business weekly, not monthly. You get roughly four times as many chances to correct course. Keep team communication in shared channels rather than direct messages, so ideas get scrutinised by more than one person. Test whether your business can run without you before you assume it can. Use AI to draft and challenge your thinking, not simply to execute tasks you have not fully worked out yourself. Memorable quotes "Sometimes in order to be helpful, you have to say the hard thing." "When we're dealing with information, AI is fine. When we're dealing with emotion, that needs a human touch." "You always have to take away before you can add." Books and resources mentioned Principles by Ray Dalio Traction by Gino Wickman Essentialism by Greg McKeown The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey Guest biography Keith Gillispie is the founder and CEO of REI Automated, which provides education, software and coaching to real estate investors on building automated, systemised businesses. He spent eight years on active duty with the US Marine Corps, during which he began investing in real estate and developed the systems-first approach that now underpins his companies. Subscribe If this conversation was useful, subscribe to TheInquisitor Podcast for more conversations that challenge conventional thinking on selling, leadership and building businesses that last.

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  Episode #581

  Almost everything modern sales teaches is backwards | Richard Spanier

  Jun 30, 20261h 2m

  Introduction Most sales conversations about underperformance start with the wrong question. Is the messaging wrong? Is the tech stack outdated? Is the lead generation broken? Richard Spanier, author of Trust: Sales 2030 — A Field Guide to Frictionless Buying, argues that almost every assumption modern sales operates on, quotas, champions, gated content, CRM accuracy, pipeline stages, gets the buyer's reality backwards. In this episode of TheInquisitor Podcast, Marcus Cauchi presses Richard on what a genuinely frictionless buying process looks like in practice, and why he believes the systems most sales leaders rely on are built to manage the illusion of control rather than the reality of how people buy. Why This Conversation Matters Sales has spent decades optimising the seller's side of the transaction: better scripts, better cadences, better personalisation at scale. Richard's argument is that none of this addresses the underlying problem, which is that buyers do their own research, reach their own conclusions, and resent being pushed through somebody else's process. If that's true, a huge amount of sales infrastructure, from quotas to lead scoring to discovery calls, is solving the wrong problem. This conversation matters because it asks sales leaders to consider a genuinely uncomfortable possibility: that activity-based management is not just inefficient, it is actively corrosive to the thing buyers say they want most from a seller, which is trust. Guest Introduction Richard Spanier has spent 45 years in and around sales, 30 of them selling directly in the telecommunications equipment industry and 15 consulting. He has just published Trust: Sales 2030 — A Field Guide to Frictionless Buying, which sets out his case for redesigning the buying experience around the buyer's own momentum rather than the seller's targets. Major Discussion Points Sales has a trust problem, not a tech problem. Richard traces his thinking back to a client who rejected the standard personalisation playbook outright, which started him investigating why buyers were resistant in the first place. His conclusion: trust is being lost in the basic dynamic of a seller pushing and a buyer resisting. Frictionless by design. Rather than a faster funnel, Richard proposes redesigning the buying environment itself, including landing pages that let buyers build their own picture of a solution using their own inputs, with no email gate and no follow-up surveillance. Compensation built around the team, not the individual. Richard's proposal: take the profit on a deal and split it equally among everyone who touched it, from CSR to AE to sales engineer to manager. Marcus pushes this further, arguing that 20-account pods with deep account research outperform sprawling 200-account territories. Risk, not pain, is the real decision driver. Both Marcus and Richard argue that most sales methodologies focus on the supply side (pain, budget, authority, need) while ignoring the functional, social and personal risk the buyer is carrying internally, long after the seller has left the room. CRM and pipeline data are largely fiction. Richard estimates CRM accuracy at around 20 to 25 percent. Marcus argues even that may be generous, pointing out that CRM exists primarily to give management an illusion of control rather than to help sellers sell. Referrals: systematise or not? A genuine disagreement. Richard is sceptical that referrals can be systematised, arguing they have to be earned rather than requested. Marcus pushes back, describing how multi-threading and mapping a customer's wider ecosystem can make referral generation deliberate rather than accidental. Recommending the competition. Both agree that being honest about when you are the wrong vendor, and pointing the buyer elsewhere, builds more long-term trust and referral value than trying to win every deal. Practical Takeaways Stop gating content behind forms. If something is genuinely useful to a buyer, give it to them without an email capture. Track what the buyer has done in the last fortnight, not what the seller has done. Buyer-initiated movement is the real signal. Build smaller, deeply researched account pods rather than broad, shallow territories. When you are not the right fit, say so and point to who is. It is more likely to generate referrals than trying to win regardless. Stop letting "champion" stand in for "decision maker." A champion who will not defend you in the room they cannot bring you into is not a champion. Memorable Quotes "I was gobsmacked... the solutions I saw for personalisation were clumsy." "Commission breath... what is more emblematic of distrust than that?" "Stop calling a friendly contact a champion." "It's like turning the Queen Elizabeth around in the Thames." "Don't embrace rejection. You learn from it. You don't embrace it. How crazy is that?" Books and Resources Mentioned Trust: Sales 2030 — A Field Guide to Frictionless Buying by Richard Spanier Managing Up by Marcus Cauchi (forthcoming) Reference to Aaron Ross's outbound sales work Reference to Dan Kennedy on the cost of poorly timed outreach Guest Biography Richard Spanier spent 45 years in sales and sales consulting, 30 years selling directly in the telecommunications equipment industry and 15 years consulting on go to market strategy. He is the author of Trust: Sales 2030 — A Field Guide to Frictionless Buying, which argues for a redesign of the buying process around trust, evidence and buyer-led movement rather than seller activity. Subscribe If this challenged how you think about pipeline, compensation or trust in selling, subscribe to TheInquisitor Podcast for more conversations that question the assumptions B2B sales has been built on. Useful links: Richard Spanier on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/spandev/ Richard's book, Trust: Sales 2030: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Trust-Sales-Field-Frictionless-Buying-ebook/dp/B0H4MNL1HR Marcus Cauchi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcuscauchi/ #B2BSales #SalesLeadership #Trust #SalesStrategy #RevenueGrowth #BuyerExperience #SalesTraining #CRO #FrictionlessBuying

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  Episode #580

  Graphic Sales: How to Build a Prospecting Playbook With Peter Cleary and Tom Stearns

  Jun 8, 202645 min

  What this episode is about Most salespeople are pointed at targets without being taught to think about them. That gap — between knowing who to call and understanding why it matters — is what Peter Cleary and Tom Stearns set out to close with their book Graphic Sales: How to Build a Prospecting Playbook. The book is unusual. It teaches through illustrated comic strips drawn from real sales disasters, using the Aesop's Fables principle: story first, lesson second. The goal isn't to lecture. It's to help salespeople recognise themselves, laugh at the madness, and do the work better. What Marcus, Peter, and Tom cover Ideal Customer Profile as a foundation — not a filter. The ICP chapter opens the book because everything else depends on it. ICP isn't just demographic targeting. It's understanding the four to six data attributes that signal your solution is genuinely right for a specific buyer — and then thinking critically about what those signals mean in context. Why AI won't solve poor prospecting judgement. Tom shares a cautionary story: he built an AI-assisted prospecting tool for a team, fed it the right signals, and watched conversion rates fall. The problem wasn't the data. It was that automating the research broke the reps' critical thinking. They stopped trusting the information because they hadn't processed it themselves. They started dialling without thinking. Conversion rates recovered only when the reps were given time to verify and reason about the signals themselves. Pre-call planning is a non-negotiable. Hundreds of touchpoints go into booking a meeting. Showing up without reviewing the notes, researching the company, and forming a hypothesis is a dereliction of the role — not just poor practice. The post-call debrief most organisations never do. Standardised post-call analysis is almost universally absent. Marcus describes his red-teaming process: everyone hears the call, debriefs individually, and lessons feed directly into the next pre-call plan. It's how losses become assets rather than embarrassments. Multi-threading vs single-contact selling. SDRs are frequently incentivised to book a meeting with one person and move on. The result is account executives walking into rooms they don't understand, recapping conversations the buyer has already had. Tom and Peter describe pod structures where SDRs and AEs share long-term account ownership — so the knowledge doesn't evaporate at handoff. Meeting buyers where they actually are. Marcus introduces a staged buying journey framework — from centre of dissatisfaction through passive and active looking, to deciding — and maps this against persona data. A buyer who started a new role four weeks ago is in a different conversation than one who looks like they're planning their next move. Timing, relevance, and personal value determine whether a rep gets championed internally. Honesty, pipeline integrity, and what managers actually owe their organisations. Tom shares a pipeline audit story where redefining stage criteria caused the pipeline to drop by two-thirds — and the leadership committee was relieved. Peter and Marcus discuss the cultural cost of managers who manage upwards rather than telling the truth to the people who need to act on it. Key quotes from the episode Marcus: "Haste is different from speed. Most people prospect with haste." Tom: "I don't even care about your product in the first week of onboarding. We're going to focus entirely on your buyer's world." Marcus: "Buyers don't hate being sold to. They hate being sold to badly. And more often than not, the problem isn't laziness or stupidity — it's lack of self-awareness." About the book Graphic Sales: How to Build a Prospecting Playbook by Peter Cleary and Tom Sterns. Available at all good bookstores. About The Inquisitor Podcast Hosted by Marcus Cauchi. Produced by Principled Selling. The show examines what commercial dysfunction actually looks like from the inside — and what honest, buyer-centred selling requires.

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