Why do some sales teams win consistently while others seem to rely on timing, experience, and luck?

Jeff Bajorek, Owner at Parabola Consulting, joins Paul Fuller to explore why sales teams need to understand what actually drives their success.

Jeff explains how to identify the habits behind top performance, understand why your best customers choose you, and turn those insights into repeatable behaviors that help teams win more intentionally.

The conversation also covers why doing more is no longer enough, why principles matter more than constantly changing tactics, and how customer insight can help teams become more specific about what actually works.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction03:09 How Jeff got into sales
07:32 Why mentorship matters in sales23:07 Why sales teams need to know why they win
25:14 Making successful sales behaviors repeatable
28:30 Turning top-performer habits into a process
30:52 Why sales tactics come and go
37:09 Why your best customers can tell you why you win
38:18 How to win more sales on purpose

What happens when your sales approach works for you, but nobody else can replicate it?

Vic Ing, founder of Viking Sales Consultants, explores why scaling B2B sales requires moving beyond instinct and building a repeatable sales process. He shares how to identify which sales habits actually work, use your ideal customer profile to qualify more effectively, and stop holding onto opportunities that are not a good fit.

The conversation also explores why founders need to turn what they know intuitively into a sales process that gives others a better chance to succeed.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction
01:31 Vic Ing’s journey into sales
07:23 Learning sales through success and failure
08:19 How to reverse engineer what actually works in sales
18:19 Why every business needs an ideal customer profile
20:53 Why good qualification means saying no
25:10 Why a better sales system beats individual talent
28:17 Why founders struggle to scale sales
30:26 Turning founder instinct into a repeatable sales process

-

About Vic Ing:

Vic Ing is a business consultant, sales trainer, author, and founder of Viking Sales Consultants. For more than thirty years, he has built, led, and supported revenue-generating teams in a variety of sales, leadership, and business development roles, and through Viking Sales Consultants has helped entrepreneurs, business owners, and sales professionals improve business development, strengthen customer relationships, and create sustainable growth. He is the author of Selling Is Easy (If You Know the Rules) and has facilitated hundreds of workshops, coaching engagements, and strategic planning sessions throughout Northeast Ohio.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoring/

Link to book: https://a.co/d/03KMZqH8

In this episode, Dave Brock returns to The Art and Science of Complex Sales to explore what actually drives sales excellence.

Sales organizations invest heavily in processes, training, CRM, coaching, metrics, and AI. But those mechanisms alone do not explain why some salespeople consistently outperform others.

Drawing from his book The DNA of Sales Excellence, Dave explains why the missing piece is often the mindsets and behaviors that make those systems work.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why tools and training alone do not create top performers
• What Dave means by the DNA of sales excellence
• How mindsets and behaviors connect to sales mechanisms
• Why CRM adoption requires more than training and enforcement
• How curiosity changes the way salespeople use AI
• Why AI amplifies the quality of the thinking behind it
• How leaders can recruit and develop for the right behaviors

Listen in to learn how sales organizations can connect people, processes, and technology to create more consistent performance.

About Dave Brock:

What would you expect of an idealistic graduate of UC Berkeley? Dave is driven by the mission of helping each individual and organization achieve their dreams, exceeding what they ever believed possible.

A theoretical physicist joining a four-person startup, right out of college; Dave soon learned there is a lot more to business success than a great idea and hot product. After failing in that start up, he got his MBA, then went to the “dark side,” selling mainframe computers to large banks and investment companies in New York City.

Dave progressed to executive leadership roles in high technology giants, also, was on the founding team of two successful technology startups with current market cap exceeding $50 Billion. He led the successful turnarounds of several companies, before starting Partners In EXCELLENCE.

He’s a popular guest on numerous podcasts, webcasts, and as a speaker; known for his ruthless pragmatism.

Dave is the author of the bestselling Sales Manager Survival Guide and the upcoming Sales Executive Survival Guide. Additionally, he’s a prodigious and provocative blogger.

Personally, Dave is an avid road-biker, struggling triathlete, and sailor.

Blog: https://partnersinexcellenceblog.com/

The DNA of Sales Excellence: https://partnersinexcellenceblog.com/the-dna-of-sales-excellence/

In this episode, Morné Smit returns to The Art and Science of Complex Sales to explore why clarity is one of the most important responsibilities of a sales leader.

Together, Paul and Morné discuss why beliefs drive behavior, how leaders can shape the narrative inside their teams, and why more activity does not automatically lead to better performance.

They also explore how preparation changes as sales teams scale, how AI can help leaders make sense of market conditions, and why separating high-payoff activities from low-payoff work can create significant amounts of time and focus.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why clarity should come before activity
• How beliefs shape sales behavior
• Why leaders need to set the narrative
• How a model week creates greater consistency
• Why preparation becomes more important at scale
• How to identify high-payoff activities
• What salespeople should delegate, automate, or stop doing
• Why every repeatable activity should have a playbook

Listen in to learn how better clarity can create better decisions, better behaviors, and stronger sales performance.About Morné Smit:Morné Smit is the Founder and CEO of Emerse Sales, where he helps founders and leadership teams build predictable revenue engines, stronger sales cultures, and scalable sales systems. Over the past two decades, he has worked with organizations across 65+ industries on four continents, helping leaders create clarity, improve execution, and drive sustainable growth through practical sales leadership and accountability.

How can companies protect revenue when experienced employees retire or leave?

Nate Tutas joins The Art & Science of Complex Sales to explore how manufacturing and distribution companies can capture tribal knowledge before it walks out the door.

He discusses why valuable customer knowledge and practical experience rarely make it into CRM or SOPs, and how AI can help turn that knowledge into useful onboarding, coaching, and sales resources.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why retiring employees create hidden revenue risk
• What tribal knowledge includes
• Why CRM and SOPs cannot capture everything
• How AI can help organize and preserve knowledge
• Why knowledge capture should happen continuously

Listen in to learn how to protect decades of experience and turn it into something the wider organization can use.

About Nate Tutas:

Your best people carry the knowledge that actually runs your business, and most of it lives nowhere but their heads. When they retire or walk out, decades of hard-won judgment leave with them. AI has only raised the stakes, because the companies that keep and compound their knowledge now move at a speed the rest can't touch.

Nate Tutas teaches companies how to keep that edge and turn it into speed. His argument is blunt: most companies don't fail because they're underperforming, they fail because they can't turn the ship fast enough, and no company can turn when the knowledge behind every decision keeps leaking out the door. His fix is the Tribal Knowledge Vault: capture the know-how trapped in your best people's heads, turn it into a shared doctrine the whole team can run on, and push decisions down to the lowest capable level without losing control. That is how you build maneuverability into a business. The friction that grinds most companies to a halt comes off, the team moves as one, and you outmaneuver competitors again and again. He calls it Maneuver Intelligence , or what the Marines call High Speed, Low Drag.

Nate is a Marine with fifteen years of industry experience, trained under NLP co-creator Dr. Richard Bandler. He is trusted by Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi's Mastermind.com team to coach the business owners at their live events, and was hired by Russell Brunson's team to build and run onboarding for a new platform launch. He is the founder of DAI Success and he's on a mission to unlock the potential in the middle class.

In this episode, Nate Tutas joins The Art and Science of Complex Sales to explore how manufacturing and distribution companies can protect revenue when experienced employees retire or leave.

Together, they discuss why tribal knowledge rarely makes it into a CRM, how customer relationships and practical experience get lost during employee transitions, and how AI can help companies turn that knowledge into useful onboarding, coaching, and sales resources.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why retiring employees create hidden revenue risk
• What tribal knowledge includes
• Why CRMs and SOPs cannot capture everything
• How better interview questions uncover valuable insight
• How AI can organize knowledge into useful resources
• Why knowledge capture should happen continuously
• How tribal knowledge can improve onboarding and growth

Listen in to learn how to protect decades of experience before it walks out the door.

-

About Nate Tutas:

Your best people carry the knowledge that actually runs your business, and most of it lives nowhere but their heads. When they retire or walk out, decades of hard-won judgment leave with them. AI has only raised the stakes, because the companies that keep and compound their knowledge now move at a speed the rest can't touch.

Nate Tutas teaches companies how to keep that edge and turn it into speed. His argument is blunt: most companies don't fail because they're underperforming, they fail because they can't turn the ship fast enough, and no company can turn when the knowledge behind every decision keeps leaking out the door. His fix is the Tribal Knowledge Vault: capture the know-how trapped in your best people's heads, turn it into a shared doctrine the whole team can run on, and push decisions down to the lowest capable level without losing control. That is how you build maneuverability into a business. The friction that grinds most companies to a halt comes off, the team moves as one, and you outmaneuver competitors again and again. He calls it Maneuver Intelligence , or what the Marines call High Speed, Low Drag.

Nate is a Marine with fifteen years of industry experience, trained under NLP co-creator Dr. Richard Bandler. He is trusted by Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi's Mastermind.com team to coach the business owners at their live events, and was hired by Russell Brunson's team to build and run onboarding for a new platform launch. He is the founder of DAI Success and he's on a mission to unlock the potential in the middle class.

In this episode, Matt Sucha joins The Art and Science of Complex Sales to explore why better sales results come from understanding how people actually make decisions.

Together, they discuss why buyers are shaped by barriers, framing, and context, why motivation is often misunderstood, and how small shifts in communication can create major changes in customer behavior. Matt also introduces the SURF framework as a practical way to make sales conversations more deliberate.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why customers buy solutions, not topics
• How framing changes buying decisions
• Why motivation is often misunderstood in sales
• What defaults and anchoring reveal about buyer behavior
• How the SURF framework works
• Why deliberate communication leads to better results

Listen in to learn how behavioral science can help sales teams communicate with more clarity, more purpose, and more impact.

In this episode, Brent Long and Nick Massaro join The Art and Science of Complex Sales to explore why cold calling still works and what it takes to build trust faster in modern prospecting.

Together, they discuss how prospecting has changed, why cold calling is harder but more valuable than ever, and how honesty, timing, and the right questions can turn a cold call into the start of a real relationship.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why prospecting tools do not replace prospecting skill
• How cold calling fits into a low-trust market
• What Brent means by the three truths of a cold call
• Why the goal is not always to set the meeting
• How good prospecting leads to better follow-up conversations
• Why voice-to-voice still matters more than ever

Listen in to learn how to build more trust and better momentum in your prospecting conversations.

How do limiting beliefs shape sales performance without people even realizing it?

Membrain’s CRO, Paul Fuller, explores how unconscious beliefs about self, others, and the world can influence behavior, confidence, trust, and sales performance.

Drawing on a personal coaching story and insights from George Brontén’s work, Paul explains why limiting beliefs can become self-fulfilling and how sales leaders can help their teams challenge them.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How limiting beliefs affect sales performance
• Why beliefs about self can hold sellers back
• How assumptions about others affect trust and outreach
• Why beliefs about the world shape sales behavior
• How limiting beliefs become self-fulfilling
• How leaders can coach teams through them

Listen to learn how challenging limiting beliefs can lead to stronger confidence, better conversations, and better sales performance.

00:00 Introduction02:25 How limiting beliefs can shape performance08:06 What limiting beliefs really are12:54 The three types of limiting beliefs15:17 How beliefs about self hold salespeople back19:51 How beliefs about others affect trust and outreach24:07 How beliefs about the world shape sales behavior27:30 How to challenge and overcome limiting beliefs

In this episode, Maggie Zwierko, Practice Partner at SalesStar North Carolina, joins The Art and Science of Complex Sales to explore how life sciences companies can unlock hidden growth.

Together, they discuss why many organizations think they have a sales process when they really have a sales method, why some of the most important customer conversations happen outside the formal sales team, and how better structure can improve both business performance and patient outcomes.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why life sciences needs stronger engagement systems

• How hidden growth lives beyond the sales force
• Why process matters more than individual heroics
• How field-based experts influence growth and care
• What role to goal, role to role, and role to soul means
• Why better internal alignment can improve patient outcomes

Listen in to learn how life sciences teams can create more growth by making their best practices repeatable.