Meet The Team
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.
I cannot change the world. I CAN change one sales team at a time.
That is the mission.
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.
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.
