A recap of the Industrial Growth Institute podcast with Derek Baer
Every sales leader has a list of things they know are true but don't want to deal with: the underperformer everyone's tiptoeing around, the rep who won't touch the phone, the leads that fall into a black hole between marketing and sales. Derek Baer came back to the podcast for round two, and we spent the episode running straight at four of them — performance improvement plans, cold calling, the marketing/sales handoff, and whether prospecting should uncover deals or create them. It got blunt, it got a little combative, and we didn't agree on everything, which is exactly how these conversations should go.
TL;DR
- PIPs work when they start the moment a problem shows up, not a year after everyone already knew about it. One leading metric - new logo discovery meetings - tells you more, sooner, than watching revenue alone
- "Telephonobia" is real, and it's mostly a self-limiting belief, not a generational fact. One cold call to an ignored email lead turned a "maybe in November" into a same-day escalation to the buyer's co-founder
- The marketing/sales handoff should be defined in advance and treated as a live collaboration; e.g. chatbot leads go to sales, not marketing, and most reps ignore the intent data already sitting in their own tech stack
- Only about 3% of buyers are "in market" at any moment. Prospecting built to catch that 3% caps your opportunity. Prospecting built to help buyers realize they have a problem creates deals instead of just finding them
Do performance improvement plans actually work?
Derek's answer, if he had to pick one: yes - but mostly because the alternative is worse.
- Skip PIPs entirely and the team learns that performance isn't really enforced. A PIP done right isn't a formality before termination; it's getting ahead of a problem the moment it shows up
- Most companies wait too long. By the time the PIP happens, they've usually burned about a year of wasted opportunity and money
- Sales cycle length changes the timeline: a one-call close reveals a problem in about three weeks. A 12-month, complex, multi-stakeholder sale still gives you plenty of measurable signal well before the finish line including first meetings, discovery meetings, pipeline creation, opportunity qualification
- The hard case: a rep hitting 200% of quota with terrible underlying behavior. Ed's take - revenue is how you compensate people, but it isn't necessarily how you should evaluate them. Set a trip wire on a leading indicator (new logo discovery meetings, for instance) and let performance run its own way until that indicator slips
Why companies hesitate to use PIPs at all, especially in industrial and manufacturing businesses:
- No defined accountability metrics, so there's nothing concrete to document lack of performance against
- Leadership often doesn't know the sales process well enough to diagnose why it isn't working for someone, which is a required step in a real PIP
- A poor track record of sales hiring makes leaders reluctant to force the issue when replacing a mediocre rep feels like a coin flip, so mediocrity gets tolerated instead
If you can only hold people accountable to one metric, Ed's pick is new logo discovery meetings - it captures the prospecting and qualification work everything downstream depends on, and it's observable long before revenue shows up.
"Telephonobia" — why so many salespeople won't pick up the phone
- Derek's read: reps project their own discomfort onto the buyer. "I hate getting calls, so the prospect must too". That's a self-limiting belief, not a fact about the market
- Reality: on a work line, most people answer, because an unrecognized number might be more business
- The story: an email lead had gone quiet. A cold call got picked up in two rings. A 30-second check-in turned into a 20-minute conversation that surfaced the prospect had never actually calculated what share of her own database she was doing business with. That was a real "I've never thought about that" moment that email could never have produced
- The flip side: reps who spend weeks configuring email sequencing and AI outreach tools instead of picking up the phone, and a case where two months were lost to a broken email domain setup...and the punchline...only to go right back to email once it was fixed, instead of trying the phone in the meantime
The differentiation point is the real payoff here: when products and services all sound alike, how you sell is one of the few levers left. A genuinely curious phone conversation beats a features-and-benefits email every time — and it's rare enough now that it stands out on its own.
Where marketing ends and sales begins
- The handoff point should be defined in advance, and the two functions need to actually collaborate - not just hand off and disappear
- Chatbot conversations from prospects should route straight to sales. "Too busy for chatbots" gets the same answer as "too busy to add phone lines" would have gotten a company drowning in incoming calls a decade ago; you staff for demand, you don't turn it away
- First-party intent data including website visit alerts, page dwell time, multiple people from the same account browsing different pages, is some of the best sales-enablement information available, and most reps never open the dashboard to look at it
- The trade-show analogy: a prospect who comes back to your booth with two colleagues from different departments is an unmistakable buying signal in person. The same signal exists digitally. Most sales teams simply don't look for it
Compensation structure quietly decides who actually checks: reps paid on heavy commission treat a hot intent signal as urgent. Reps on a comfortable salary tend to treat it as someone else's job.
Creating deals vs. uncovering them
- Buyers are 70–80% through their journey before they engage a vendor, but the buying journey and the sales process are two different things. Imposing your sales process onto their buying journey, assuming it's the same thing, is a mistake
- The stats: roughly 70% of the companies on a buyer's shortlist were already known before research even began. The number one company on the shortlist wins the order about 80% of the time. The originally drafted spec changes only about 16% of the time
- Only about 3% of buyers are "in market" at any given moment. Prospecting designed only to catch people already looking for a solution caps your addressable opportunity to a sliver of the market
- The alternative: prospecting built around real ICP and buying-team clarity, sales enablement content, and consultative conversations that help a buyer recognize a problem they hadn't prioritized. That's how you land on the shortlist before an RFQ exists, instead of racing two other vendors to one
- Reality check on RFQs: most RFQ participation traces back to an existing relationship, not a cold introduction. A cold call rarely produces a same-day invitation to bid
For anyone who's made five cold calls and concluded it doesn't work: the 3% base rate means the math only pays off at volume. A handful of genuine conversations out of hundreds of calls is normal, not a sign the method is broken.
What this means for you
If you're managing a sales team: don't wait for revenue to tell you something's wrong. Track the leading indicator that predicts it, and start the accountability conversation the moment it slips rather than a year later.
If you're auditing your funnel: the tools that show you exactly who's engaged and how are probably already sitting in your CRM or marketing automation stack. The gap is usage, not technology.
This is the exact kind of behavior-versus-performance distinction Quality of Sales (QoS) is built to diagnose objectively, separating a real performance problem from a coaching, compensation, or process problem before it turns into a bad-hire narrative.
The full conversation with Derek is on the Industrial Growth Institute podcast.
FAQ
Do performance improvement plans actually work in sales?
Yes, when they start the moment a problem is noticed rather than after months of it being ignored. A PIP should be a collaborative roadmap; clear on what's expected, what's changing, and how the rep gets there, not a formality that everyone already knows precedes termination.
Why do so many salespeople avoid the phone?
Mostly a self-limiting belief rather than a real market shift: reps who personally dislike getting calls assume prospects feel the same way. In practice, business lines still get answered, and a phone conversation can surface information, and build differentiation, that an email never will.
Where should the line be between marketing and sales?
The handoff point should be defined in advance, commonly once a real conversation starts, and the two functions should actively collaborate rather than operate in silos. Inbound signals like chatbot conversations and website intent data should route to sales quickly, since they represent live buying interest.
Is cold calling still effective in B2B sales?
Yes - precisely because so few salespeople still do it well. With only about 3% of buyers "in market" at any moment, cold calling works at volume, not on any single call, and it remains one of the few ways to differentiate through how you sell rather than what you sell.
Should sales prospecting create deals or uncover existing ones?
Prospecting aimed only at uncovering deals already in motion competes for a small pool of already-in-market buyers. Prospecting that helps a buyer recognize a problem they hadn't prioritized creates the opportunity, differentiates you, and puts you on the shortlist before a formal RFQ, and its competition, ever exists.
