About Us
I Cannot Change the World.
I CAN Change One Sales Team at a Time.
— Walter Crosby, Founder, Helix Sales Development
A decade ago, we were renovating our home. Multiple contractors. Multiple sales calls. One after another, salespeople coming through the front door to sell the work.
I would tell them — “I am ready to buy. Here is what I want. Tell me how you would do the work.”
Then they would pitch.
I would say it again — “I just told you I was ready to buy and what I want. Why do you feel compelled to keep pitching?”
They could not stop.
The training had told them to finish their presentation. The script had told them to pitch. Nobody had taught them to listen.
I sat in my own kitchen, on the buyer side of the table, watching salespeople sell themselves out of deals I was willing to give them.
Somebody trained them to do that.
A construction sales guru. A weekend seminar. The bestseller told them the deal gets closed by force of will and a hard ask. Five companies sent five reps into my house. Five reps walked out without the work when I wanted to buy. Not one of them ever knew why.
That was the moment.
Six percent of salespeople are elite. Fourteen percent are good. The rest run scripts that they were taught by people who were taught scripts.
The Enemy Has a Name
- It is the sales guru selling closing tricks to people who do not know how to qualify.
- It is the bestseller that calls manipulation “persuasion” and sells a million copies on the lie.
- It is the recruiter who places the same kind of rep over and over because the math works for the recruiter.
- It is the fractional VP who hands you a playbook and disappears.
- It is an industry conference speaker that teaches the same script to a thousand people and calls it development.
Some of them know it. Most of them do not. They are running the playbook that was run on them.
The Result
The result is a profession the buyer has learned to dread. And a CEO who has learned to expect that the next sales hire will fail.
I cannot change the world.
I CAN change one sales team at a time.
That is the mission.
Gerry Taught Me the Craft
Long before any of that, early in my career, I met Gerry Weinberg.
Gerry runs a Sandler training franchise — Gerry Weinberg & Associates. He taught me how to sell. Not the manipulation version. The discipline version. The version where you ask the tough questions, you listen to the answer, you tell the truth, and you walk away from the deal that is not real.
I had lunch with Gerry on Tuesday. He is still sharp. He is still teaching. The lessons have not changed in a quarter century. Neither has the craft.
He said something to me early on that I have carried into every conversation I have had with a buyer or a coachee since:
“You can say whatever you want to a prospect as long as you say it in a nurturing way.”
That one sentence gave me the foundation of how I work.
Open. Honest. Transparent. You can say the hard thing if you say it from a place of caring about the other person’s outcome. The prospect knows the difference between a manipulator and a professional. So does the candidate. So does the team you are coaching. So does the entrepreneur.
Gerry taught me the craft. I owe him.
Dave Taught Me the Science
A few years into my career, I met Dave Kurlan.
Dave is the founder of Objective Management Group and Kurlan and Associates. He has assessed over two million salespeople. He is one of the most rigorous minds in the profession.
He shaped me in two phases.
The first time, two decades ago, he taught me the difference between a sales process and a sales methodology. Most people use the words interchangeably. They are not the same. A methodology is the philosophy. A process is the operational map. You need both, and most companies have neither.
The second time, within the last decade, he taught me the science underneath sales hiring. Will to Sell. Sales DNA. Skill Gaps. Three layers, measurable, predictive. The science I had been guessing at for fifteen years was already built. Dave handed me the tools.
I am a student of Gerry Weinberg. I am a student of Dave Kurlan. Neither of them built what I built. They shaped the person who did.
That distinction matters to me.
The Hiring Crisis That Forced the Methodology
I was a sales director at a fire alarm manufacturer. Good company. Great product. Interesting people. Real opportunity.
And I could not hire a salesperson to save my life.
Five hires in a row. One stuck. Four failed.
The fifth one I watched fail in week three. Week three. I could see it happening and I could not stop it.
I did the math. Recruiting fees. Salary. Benefits. Training. Lost pipeline. Damaged customer relationships. The ramp time on the replacement.
$125,000. Gone. Every single time.
I started looking for patterns.
I called every sales manager I knew. The numbers were the same everywhere. One out of five was sticking. Sometimes two if the company got lucky. Nobody was talking about it.
I called Dave.
I had sales hiring backward.
He told me I was not alone. Then he showed me the assessment science.
The insight that hit me first was the one I have not stopped repeating. I qualified ruthlessly when I was selling. I never chased a deal that was not real. But when it came to hiring, I was doing the exact opposite. I was selling the candidate. Pitching the company. Convincing them to take the job.
I had sales hiring backward. The candidate should be selling me. I am the buyer. They need to earn the seat.
That insight became the foundation of how I work today.
The Leap
I did well at the fire alarm manufacturer. The sales numbers were there. The work was clean. The culture was not. Culture is important. I did not want to sacrifice personal happiness for success.
I left for a startup.
The startup could not build their product. Six months later, I gave notice the same day the CEO was fired. I sat in my driveway and did the math on the next move.
I realized that the next move, if I followed the path of least resistance, was to go back to the corporate world to work for someone I would not respect. Another sales seat. Another asshole.
I did not want to do that.
So I bet on myself instead.
I started Helix Sales Development in 2016. The goal was to help sales managers and salespeople. The only way I could see to do that was to help entrepreneurs run their sales operations more effectively.
That is how this began.
My Wife
I did not bet on myself alone.
My wife gave me the freedom and the support to be an entrepreneur. Most men do not have that at home. I do. I know what it is and I know what it costs her when the months are lean and the contracts have not closed yet. She has never once told me to go get a real job.
A lot of what I do today is because of her. Without her, none of this happens.
I will not pretend otherwise on a page that is supposed to tell the truth.
COVID
The first real test of Helix came in the spring of 2020.
I had clients in the middle of engagements. Construction CEOs. Distributors. Companies that were used to selling face-to-face, in front of the prospect, on the job site.
In two weeks, the world went virtual. My clients had to learn to sell through a camera. Their teams had to learn to run discovery on a phone. The training I had built for an in-person world had to be rebuilt for a remote one.
Three months of pivot work. No new contracts. Plenty of fear. Plenty of long nights at the kitchen table working out how to teach selling through a screen.
We came out the other side. The companies that did the work in 2020 are still my clients today.
The trial taught me something I had suspected but never tested. The Sales Operating System was not about the room. It was about the buyer. The buyer was still there. The room had just changed shape.
The Book and the Podcast
A few years into Helix I started a podcast called Sales and Cigars. The name is the joke and the truth at the same time. Two of my passions in one place. 230+ episodes later, the format has not changed.
The podcast has three jobs:
- Add value to the audience.
- Add value to the guest.
- Let me learn something and have some fun while I am at it.
If a single episode does not deliver on all three, I do not publish it.
In 2025, I wrote the book. “Inside Out: Why Strong EOS Companies Have Weak Sales Teams.” I wrote it for entrepreneurs. The people who carry the company on their shoulders. The people who deserve a sales seat that does not run on them.
The book, the podcast, the methodology, the work — all of it is the same mission expressed in different formats. Restore the craft. One conversation at a time.
Today
I cannot change the entire profession.
I can change one sales team at a time. That is what I have done for the last decade. That is what I will keep doing.
If you have read this far, you are the kind of CEO I built this for.
Let’s talk about finding you the right people.