Why external sales expertise drives growth when internal momentum stalls.
The hidden paradox of sales success
“If you do what you did, you’ll get what you got.” This simple adage represents one of the most difficult truths facing sales organizations today. Success breeds confidence. Confidence breeds repetition. And repetition, when market conditions shift beneath your feet, breeds stagnation.
I’ve witnessed this pattern countless times throughout my sales career in B2B sales: high-performing teams that consistently hit targets suddenly find themselves running harder to stay in place. Pipeline velocity slows. Conversion rates decline. Deal cycles extend. Yet the response remains the same—work harder, make more calls, push existing strategies further.
The uncomfortable reality? The very approaches that delivered success five years ago may now be the primary obstacles to future growth.
The success virus: when winning strategies become limiting beliefs
Sales success creates a powerful psychological trap. When specific methodologies, processes, or behaviors consistently deliver results, they become embedded not just in company playbooks but in organizational identity. “This is how we sell” transforms from strategy to dogma.
Consider the typical trajectory: A sales organization develops an effective approach—perhaps relationship-based selling, extensive product demonstrations, or consultative discovery processes. These methods deliver consistent quota attainment. The team grows. The approach scales. Success validates the methodology.
Then market conditions shift. Subtly at first, then dramatically.
The fundamental shift in B2B buying behavior
Recent comprehensive research analyzing B2B purchasing patterns from 2019 to 2025 reveals a structural transformation in how organizations buy. These aren’t cyclical changes that will revert to historical norms—they represent permanent shifts in buyer behavior, expectations, and decision-making processes.
The data paints a stark picture:
Buyers now complete approximately 70% of their purchasing journey independently before engaging with any vendor. This “70% rule” has increased from 57% in 2018 to stabilizing around 70% by 2023, holding constant regardless of purchase value—from $10,000 transactions to deals exceeding $1 million.
When buyers do engage with vendors, they allocate only 17% of their total purchasing time to supplier interactions. In competitive situations with multiple vendors, this shrinks to just 5-6% per individual supplier. In a six-month enterprise sales cycle, that translates to approximately 1.5-1.8 days of access to any single vendor.
The implications are profound: The traditional sales paradigm—where sellers educate, guide, and influence throughout the buying journey—no longer aligns with how buyers actually make decisions.
Your buyers have fundamentally changed. They conduct extensive online research. They compare solutions independently. They consult peer reviews and third-party evaluation platforms. They arrive at first contact already 70% through their decision process, often with preliminary vendor shortlists already formed.
Research from Bain & Company reveals that 90% of buyers ultimately select a vendor from their initial consideration set—the “day one” shortlist formed before active evaluation begins. If your organization fails to achieve inclusion in this early-stage shortlist, subsequent sales excellence proves largely irrelevant to outcome probability.
The buyer of 2025 is not the buyer of 2019. What worked then—extensive presentations, multiple discovery meetings, relationship-building over time—no longer fits their tempo, expectations, or purchasing processes.
Why organizational change proves so difficult
Three psychological barriers make internal transformation extraordinarily challenging:
1. Success blindness
“We’ve always done it this way, and it’s worked.” This phrase should trigger immediate concern. Markets evolve. Buyers change. Competitors adapt. Technologies emerge. What delivered 40% win rates five years ago may now yield 21%—but when you’re embedded in daily execution, these gradual deterioration’s become invisible.
Success blindness manifests in multiple ways:
- Attributing declining performance to external factors (economy, competition, market conditions) rather than internal approaches
- Continuing to invest in activities that feel productive but deliver diminishing returns
- Defending existing methodologies with anecdotal successes while ignoring systematic trends
- Resisting data that challenges established practices
The challenge intensifies when past success was genuinely earned through skill and execution. Teams rightfully proud of their achievements struggle to accept that proven approaches may have expiration dates.
2. The comfort zone trap
Human beings are neurologically wired to prefer familiar patterns. New methodologies require energy, learning, temporary performance degradation, and psychological discomfort. The path of least resistance always leads back to established habits.
Consider typical sales training investments. Organizations spend thousands on methodology training—MEDDICC, Challenger Sales, Value Selling. Attendees leave energized. Initial implementation shows promise. Then daily pressures reassert themselves. Old habits resurface. Within 90 days, most teams revert to pre-training behaviors.
The issue isn’t lack of will—it’s insufficient structural reinforcement. Without consistent coaching, accountability mechanisms, and environmental redesign, comfort zones inevitably reclaim territory.
This challenge compounds when dealing with successful salespeople. Why should top performers—those hitting quota through current methods—embrace disruptive change? The answer: because market shifts will eventually render their approaches obsolete, but comfort zones obscure this reality until performance already deteriorates.
3. Absence of external benchmarks
Without external reference points, teams genuinely cannot assess their own performance objectively. You know your numbers. You track your metrics. But how do those compare to industry benchmarks? Where do hidden opportunities exist? Which processes contain inefficiencies invisible from within?
Organizations typically benchmark against their own history: “We’re performing better than last quarter” or “worse than last year.” But without understanding market-wide trends, these internal comparisons provide false comfort or misplaced panic.
When win rates decline from 35% to 28%, is that concerning? Without knowing industry averages have fallen from 40% to 21%, you might conclude you’re outperforming—and miss the fact that competitors have adapted more effectively to new buyer behaviors.
The team dynamics multiplier: How individual approaches compound
The challenge extends beyond individual capability to team dynamics. As a sales manager, you bring your own methodology and management style. Each team member contributes their personal approach. These varied styles continuously influence one another—for better or worse.
The positive scenario: complementary strengths
A manager with structured qualification discipline (implementing MEDDICC rigorously) can orchestrate diverse talents effectively. One salesperson excels at relationship building and stakeholder mapping. Another demonstrates mastery of Challenger-style teaching and re-framing. A third brings analytical rigor to business case development.
Together, managed well, they form a complete capability set where each deal receives appropriate treatment based on its characteristics and stage.
The negative scenario: Reinforcing limitations
But consider the alternative: A manager coaches based exclusively on personal experience and instincts developed years ago. Each salesperson clings to their individual success formula without broader learning. No one challenges approaches because “everyone hits their targets”—at least for now.
In this scenario, individual limitations reinforce rather than offset one another. The relationship-builder never develops business acumen. The aggressive closer never learns to read buying signals. The technical expert never masters executive engagement. Isolated successes mask systematic weaknesses.
The critical question managers must ask: How do you maximally leverage each salesperson’s unique strengths while systematically developing their weaknesses? Most managers lack frameworks, time, or external perspective to answer this effectively.
The buying committee explosion adds exponential complexity
This team dynamics challenge now collides with a massive structural shift in B2B purchasing: buying committees have exploded from an average of 5 decision-makers a decade ago to 11+ participants today.
Research indicates that 41% of purchases now involve 6-10 people, 32% involve 11-15 people, and 21% involve 16 or more stakeholders. More significantly, 89% of B2B purchases now span two or more departments, transforming historically departmental decisions into enterprise-wide initiatives requiring cross-functional consensus.
The composition has evolved dramatically:
- Finance participation increased from 35% to 51% of major purchases
- C-suite involvement jumped from 58% to 75%
- Sales teams now participate in 55% of purchasing decisions
- Legal, IT, procurement, and end-users each bring distinct priorities and evaluation criteria
Here’s the challenge: 74% of these buying teams experience “unhealthy conflict” during the decision process. Research examining buying groups of 5-16 people across up to 4 organizational functions found that teams rarely achieve genuine consensus. Instead, they typically resolve conflicts through three sub-optimal paths:
- Conducting additional research (causing delays)
- Purchasing the least expensive solution (compromising on requirements)
- Tabling the discussion indefinitely (deal abandonment)
If your sales team hasn’t adapted methodologies to navigate this complexity—engaging multiple stakeholders simultaneously with tailored value propositions for each role—you’re losing deals to competitors who have.
The AI factor: A new layer of complexity
Artificial Intelligence introduces another dimension to the transformation challenge. I observe two extremes in market responses:
AI enthusiasts: automation without strategy
Some organizations embrace every new AI tool without strategic integration. They automate everything possible—outreach sequences, email personalization, content generation, meeting summaries—losing the human touch that makes B2B sales valuable in complex enterprise deals.
The risk: superficial, automated interactions that alienate buyers rather than engage them. When everyone uses the same AI-generated outreach, differentiation collapses. Buyers, already skeptical of sales interactions, become even more resistant.
AI skeptics: Ignoring technology while competitors advance
Other organizations resist AI adoption, clinging to beliefs that “sales is about people” and technology cannot replace human relationships. While technically true, this position misses the point entirely.
AI isn’t replacing salespeople—it’s multiplying their effectiveness when deployed strategically:
- Automating administrative work to free time for valuable customer interactions
- Providing deeper preparation through AI-driven research and insights
- Enabling more accurate forecasting through pattern recognition in pipeline data
- Supporting targeted coaching through analysis of successful versus struggling conversations
Research reveals that sales representatives who effectively partner with AI are 3.7 times more likely to meet quota than those who don’t. This doesn’t mean occasional AI usage—it requires fundamental integration into daily workflows for research, customer insights, content creation, and opportunity prioritization.
Yet 70% of sellers report feeling overwhelmed by the number of technologies their roles require, while 72% feel overwhelmed by skill demands. The average sales tech stack includes 13 different technologies, each requiring learning, integration, and maintenance.
The question becomes: Which AI tools deliver genuine value for your specific situation? How do you integrate them without overwhelming your team? Internal teams, already struggling with execution demands, rarely possess the perspective to answer these questions effectively.
The power of fresh eyes: Objectivity, insights, and proven methodologies
The Dutch phrase “vreemde ogen dwingen” translates literally as “strange eyes compel”—suggesting outside perspective forces confrontation with reality. I prefer to re-frame this: fresh eyes enrich rather than compel.
External perspective brings three essential elements often absent in internal improvement efforts:
1. Objectivity without emotional attachment
Someone from outside your organization carries no emotional investment in “how things have always been done.” They see patterns, inefficiencies, and opportunities that have become invisible to internal teams. They ask uncomfortable questions that internal stakeholders avoid:
- Why does your sales process include seven internal approval gates?
- Why do deals consistently stall at the same pipeline stage?
- Why does forecast accuracy deteriorate beyond 60 days?
- Why do certain salespeople consistently win while others struggle with identical resources?
External consultants can challenge sacred cows without career risk. They surface uncomfortable truths that internal advocates cannot safely raise. This objectivity proves invaluable when diagnosing performance issues—but only if leadership demonstrates genuine willingness to hear difficult truths.
2. Cross-pollinated insights from diverse contexts
As a sales professional with 25+ years across B2B technology sales—from scale-ups to enterprise organizations, across Cloud platforms, SaaS solutions, and complex infrastructure—I recognize patterns that organizations embedded in single contexts cannot see.
I’ve observed which approaches succeed across market segments. I’ve witnessed implementation failures and understand why methodologies that work theoretically often fail practically. I’ve seen how top-performing organizations structure teams, design processes, and develop capabilities differently than average performers.
This cross-pollinated insight doesn’t mean imposing cookie-cutter solutions. It means understanding which elements of proven approaches can be adapted to your unique context—and which should be rejected as incompatible with your market, culture, or business model.
The value isn’t in copying what others do. It’s in learning from their successes and failures to accelerate your own evolution while avoiding expensive dead ends.
3. Structured methodologies with proven efficacy
Frameworks like MEDDICC (qualification methodology) and Challenger Sales (engagement approach) weren’t invented arbitrarily. They emerged from analysis of thousands of successful deals, distilling patterns that consistently drive results in complex B2B environments.
But methodology implementation proves far more difficult than methodology selection. The gap between understanding a framework conceptually and executing it consistently across a team separates winners from losers.
External expertise helps in several ways:
- Customizing generic frameworks to your specific context and constraints
- Identifying implementation pitfalls before they derail adoption
- Designing supporting processes that reinforce rather than conflict with new methodologies
- Coaching managers who must then coach teams—capability development at scale
- Creating accountability mechanisms that prevent regression to old habits
MEDDICC and Challenger Sales are both proven effective—but they’re also complex, requiring months of consistent practice to achieve fluency. External guidance accelerates this journey and increases probability of successful adoption.
From sales conversations to sales processes
A common misconception limits improvement efforts: believing that sales excellence lives exclusively in customer-facing conversations. While interaction quality matters enormously, systematic performance requires excellence in underlying processes:
Pipeline management – How predictable is your revenue actually? Can you forecast with confidence 60, 90, 120 days forward? Or does your pipeline remain a black box where deals mysteriously advance or stall with little pattern?
Lead qualification – Are your salespeople spending time on the right opportunities? Research shows that sales representatives now spend only 28% of their week actually selling—approximately 2 hours per day. If that precious time goes to poorly qualified prospects, you’re systematically undermining performance regardless of individual skill.
CRM discipline – Do you use data to make decisions or merely to report results after the fact? CRM systems should serve salespeople first—helping them manage accounts, track activities, and surface insights—not just satisfy management reporting requirements. When salespeople view CRM as administrative burden rather than personal tool, adoption suffers and data quality collapses.
On-boarding Effectiveness – How quickly can new salespeople become productive? Industry data suggests typical on-boarding extends 6-12 months. Best-in-class organizations cut this to 3-4 months through structured programs. The difference compounds dramatically across multiple hires.
Coaching structure – How consistent is your approach across the entire team? Do different managers coach using incompatible frameworks? Does coaching happen re-actively in response to problems, or proactively to develop capabilities?
An external specialist can optimize both customer-facing skills and underlying processes. Frequently, process improvements deliver greater impact than skill development—not because skills don’t matter, but because poor processes systematically undermine even exceptional talent.
When is it time for external Help? The critical self-assessment
The genuine risk isn’t in seeking external perspective—it’s in remaining static while markets evolve. If you do what you did, you’ll get what you got. And increasingly, what you’re getting is less than before:
- Win rates have plummeted from 40% in 2019 to 21% in 2024
- Sales cycles have extended 32-40% across all deal sizes
- Quota attainment dropped from 63% to just 30%
- 86% of B2B purchases now stall during the buying process
But here lies the most difficult question every sales leader must confront: Are you genuinely willing to look objectively at your own performance?
This requires uncomfortable honesty:
Are you deceiving yourself with “we’ll hit targets this year” while working progressively harder for equivalent results? Are you noticing that deals that previously closed in three months now extend to five? Are you celebrating that you’re “only” 15% behind plan while competitors pull further ahead?
The wisdom versus luck question
When you hit your target, is that wisdom or luck? Can you explain precisely why specific deals closed while others didn’t? Do you have genuine control over your pipeline, or are you secretly hoping that one major deal lands before quarter-end?
This distinction matters enormously. Luck-based success cannot be replicated systematically. Wisdom-based success can scale across teams and time periods. If honest self-assessment reveals more luck than you’re comfortable admitting, external help can transform randomness into repeatability.
The predictability imperative
Sales must be predictable—not just for revenue forecasting but for operational planning throughout the organization. When sales remains unpredictable:
- Operations teams cannot efficiently plan resource allocation
- Product/service delivery teams face feast-or-famine workloads
- Finance cannot manage working capital effectively
- Customer success teams struggle with on-boarding capacity
Unpredictable sales creates cascading inefficiency throughout the organization, generates missed delivery commitments, and ultimately produces dissatisfied customers even when deals close.
Predictability begins with process discipline in sales—another area where external expertise frequently delivers disproportionate value.
Warning signs that merit external perspective
Consider engaging external expertise when experiencing:
Persistent target misses without clear root cause – If multiple quarters of under performance occur but postmortems yield vague explanations (“market conditions,” “wrong territory assignments,” “bad timing”), you lack diagnostic clarity. External analysis often reveals patterns invisible internally.
Unexplained sales cycle extension – When cycles lengthen without apparent cause—especially if deal values remain constant—buying processes have shifted beneath you. External perspective helps identify whether the issue stems from qualification, stakeholder engagement, value articulation, or competitive positioning.
Declining conversion rates – If fewer opportunities convert to closed-won business despite consistent activity levels, something fundamental has changed in buyer behavior, competitive positioning, or value perception. Internal teams, lacking external benchmarks, often cannot diagnose root causes effectively.
High activity, low results – This pattern suggests fundamental misalignment between effort and value creation. Salespeople making hundreds of dials with minimal meetings. Extensive proposal efforts yielding low win rates. Lots of motion but insufficient progress. External analysis typically reveals either targeting issues, qualification failures, or value proposition weakness.
Market expansion without local expertise – For organizations entering new geographies (particularly international expansion), local market knowledge proves invaluable. Understanding regulatory requirements, business culture, buyer expectations, and competitive dynamics accelerates success and prevents expensive mistakes.
What external sales expertise delivers
My approach focuses on creating sustainable capability rather than temporary intervention:
Sales process optimization – From initial lead qualification through closed-won business, identifying inefficiencies, redesigning workflows, and implementing discipline that makes revenue predictable. This includes pipeline hygiene, stage criteria definition, and forecast methodology improvement.
Methodology implementation – Hands-on MEDDICC and Challenger Sales deployment, including team training, coaching manager enablement, process integration, and creating accountability mechanisms that prevent regression. Theory matters little without effective implementation.
Pipeline health checks – Data-driven analysis identifying where deals actually stall versus where they appear to stall, revealing hidden bottlenecks, and quantifying opportunity cost of process failures. These diagnostics frequently surface issues that qualitative assessment misses.
Team coaching – From individual contributor development through sales leadership capability building. This includes riding along on calls, reviewing recorded conversations, facilitating deal strategy sessions, and coaching managers on how to coach their teams effectively.
The objective isn’t merely improved short-term results—it’s building a sales organization that continues performing excellently after external engagement concludes. Sustainable transformation requires capability transfer, not dependency creation.
The verdict: Fresh eyes enrich rather than compel
The phrase “vreemde ogen dwingen” suggests compulsion—outside eyes forcing unwanted confrontation. I fundamentally disagree with this framing.
Fresh eyes enrich. They offer alternative perspectives, proven methodologies, and cross-pollinated insights that strengthen internal teams. Successful organizations don’t resist external input—they actively seek it as competitive advantage.
Continued success sometimes requires the courage to accept help. Not because you’re failing, but because you’re committed to continuous growth in markets that never stop evolving.
The organizations that thrive aren’t those with perfect initial strategies—they’re those that adapt fastest when market conditions shift. External perspective accelerates that adaptation, helping you see around corners before competitors do.
Are you ready for a fresh perspective on your sales organization?
Do you recognize one or more of these patterns?
- Your team hits targets, but growth has stagnated at a plateau
- Your team no longer consistently hits targets, and momentum proves difficult to rebuild
- High activity levels but little forecasting predictability
- New market trends or AI developments passing you by
- Instinctive sense that better performance is possible but unclear how to achieve it
Let’s have a conversation. No obligations, no standard sales pitch. Just an honest discussion about where your organization stands and what steps might make the difference between incremental improvement and breakthrough performance.
The most dangerous position isn’t admitting you need help—it’s pretending you don’t when markets are shifting beneath you.
About the author
Diederik Sarels van Rijn is a Sales Transformation Specialist with proven sales experience driving exceptional results across B2B technology sales. Specializing in interim sales leadership and sales process optimization, Diederik helps organizations achieve predictable revenue growth through structured methodologies including MEDDICC and Challenger Sales.
Keywords
sales transformation, B2B sales consulting, sales process optimization, MEDDICC methodology, Challenger Sales, interim sales management, sales performance improvement, revenue growth strategy, sales coaching, pipeline management, CRM optimization, sales methodology implementation, enterprise sales consulting, sales leadership development, predictable revenue, win rate improvement, sales cycle reduction, buying committee engagement, sales enablement, external sales perspective, sales consultant Netherlands, B2B sales expert Europe