Fine Lines is a weekly newsletter at the intersection of commercial performance and human development - for founders and sales leaders of growth-stage B2B companies who have already tried the obvious fixes and are now asking better questions. Each Tuesday: one idea from real commercial experience and research, examined with enough rigour to be useful and enough honesty to sting slightly. The equation running underneath every edition: Capability × Ability = Performance. Most interventions address the Ability side. Fine Lines addresses the variable nobody is measuring. If you want frameworks and inspiration there are better newsletters. If you want your thinking challenged and, occasionally, your assumptions dismantled then you are in the right place.
Share
You Are The Sales Process.
Published about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Hi Reader
I was sitting in the corner of one of those flash, modern glass meeting rooms in a sports tech startup about two and a half years back, watching a deal I had no business being nervous about. It was before I did any of this properly, if you get my meaning. It was just a favour for a friend. He'd founded the company, closed the first seven deals himself with his charisma and product knowledge and a willingness to discount more than he probably should have, and now there was a new salesperson sitting across from a fresh prospect, running her first solo discovery call.
The prospect asked a hard one. It was something along the lines of implementation risk and how her tech stacked up against the incumbent. And I watched my friend, who'd promised himself he'd stay quiet, lean in from the side and answer it.
Granted, he nailed it. Mainly through pure intuition and the prospect nodded and made a note. And so the deal moved forward a notch.
Then it broke.
What happens when you're not there?
Not loudly. After the prospect left, the rep turned to him and asked the only question that actually mattered.
“So what do I ask the next time that comes up? And how do I answer it without you sitting beside me?”
And he went quiet. Then the silence was so painful he blurted out something like,
“you sort of feel it out…..You know yourself, lead with their pain…..Trust yourself, you'll get a sense of it as you go along.”
She nodded. Wrote it down. But it was hollow and the three of us knew it.
That's the fracture. Right there. It crossed his face before he'd even finished the sentence, because somewhere in the saying of it he understood that he didn't actually know. His entire commercial engine had been living inside his own head (and his own nervous system) for three years, and not one person had ever told him that building a sales function meant getting it out of there and into someone else.
Everyone wants to simplify this and call it a “hiring problem”.
Usual spiel…wrong hire, wrong time, not senior enough, we'll get someone who's done it before.
It is not a hiring problem.
My friend didn't have a sales process that he failed to follow.
No, he was the sales process.
And you cannot hire someone to replace a thing that only exists as a feeling in one person's gut.
It's actually worse than it sounds. Yes, his method worked. It just couldn't be repeated, which is another way of saying he never really had a method at all. He had himself. He'd built a company whose entire revenue depended on him having a good day, every day, forever.
And the maddening part is that not one of the mentors or accelerator faces or LinkedIn oracles he'd been nodding along to for two years had breathed a word about this.
Oh sure they'll all talk “product market fit” like it’s the good word from on high and until they go blue. Fundraising. The scaling playbook everyone recites. Blah, blah, blah.
But the really challenging bit, turning your personal sorcery into something boringly, repeatably teachable, on that they stay very quiet. Probably because most of them have never actually had to do it themselves.
It's the same move a brilliant player has to make to become a coach. The instinct, the doing it without thinking, the stuff that made you great, that is precisely what you now have to slow right down, take apart and explain to someone whose gut is wired nothing like yours. But, and I’ve seen this first-hand for years, most players never make that step. They become the head-coach on the sideline roaring "want it more" and spouting endlessly about “my philosophy”.
My friend was being asked to kill, for want of a better phrase, the version of himself that got him here; The rainmaker the indispensable one, even The Special One. And step into something far less glamorous, the person who builds the thing that runs without him.
The ones who make that turn stop getting their hit from being needed in every deal. They start getting it from watching the thing close without them in the room.
To quote an old friend who got it and made it, “I want neither grand title nor high office…I just want to be the biggest shareholder!”
In sport you'd never ask your centre forward to drop back and also play centre back in the same match. People would be calling for him to make the walk to the sideline for replacement. Yet in startup land the founder's first instinct most mornings is to pull on the big red cape and go be the hero in every deal at once.
And there’s potentially worse to come. If, say, he or she doesn't catch it on their home patch, i.e. home market, it doesn't go away. It waits. It waits until they make a move into Oslo or Madrid or the Middle East; places where your gut doesn't even survive contact with a buyer who's wired by a different culture, and now the bottleneck that was never fixed is quietly resurfaced and replicated in three countries at twice the cost.
So I won't ask whether your sales can scale or something anodyne like that. Let’s finish with something more fundamental - If you walked out of every deal tomorrow, how much of what makes them close walks out the door with you?
Retired U.S. Air Force Colonel | Leadership Speaker & Strategist | Creator of Master the Unseen™
DeDe Halfhill is a retired U.S. Air Force Colonel, keynote speaker, and leadership strategist who helps leaders Master the Unseen™—the hidden forces shaping their teams, decisions, and cultures. With 25+ years of high-stakes leadership experience, including two combat tours in Iraq and advisory roles to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, she understands what it takes to lead when uncertainty is high, stakes are real, and trust is non-negotiable.
DeDe equips leaders with the tools to recognize hidden leadership dynamics, step into hard moments, and sustain real impact. Because leadership isn’t just about strategy—it’s about recognizing what’s shaping the moment before it happens and having the courage to act on it. She has spoken to executives across industries, from Fortune 500 companies to military leaders, helping them see what others miss, lead with clarity in high-stakes moments, and build lasting leadership cultures rooted in trust and accountability.
Her work challenges conventional leadership wisdom, proving that the biggest threats to success aren’t always external—they’re often the unseen undercurrents, blind spots, and emotional forces leaders fail to address.
👉 Learn more at dedehalfhill.com
"Fine Lines" - For founders and commercial leaders of B2B growth-stage companies who'd rather be told the truth than told they're doing fine. We talk about the parts of building a commercial function nobody warns you about.
Fine Lines is a weekly newsletter at the intersection of commercial performance and human development - for founders and sales leaders of growth-stage B2B companies who have already tried the obvious fixes and are now asking better questions. Each Tuesday: one idea from real commercial experience and research, examined with enough rigour to be useful and enough honesty to sting slightly. The equation running underneath every edition: Capability × Ability = Performance. Most interventions address the Ability side. Fine Lines addresses the variable nobody is measuring. If you want frameworks and inspiration there are better newsletters. If you want your thinking challenged and, occasionally, your assumptions dismantled then you are in the right place.
Hi Reader There's an approach most founders & business leaders reach for when the pipeline goes quiet. More noise. More posts. More visibility. More brand awareness. More content. More voice. I've seen it so many times that I can pattern-recognise it before a founder or leader has finished describing what they're planning to do. And, yes, I've made it myself, more than once. Two weeks ago I wrote in my own reflection journal that it was time for “more people to know me”. I ruminated on that...
Hi Reader Most founders & business leaders I meet believe two things about their own performance. The first is that working harder produces more output. The second is that when the output starts to drop, the answer is to work harder still. Neither belief is examined and both are the operating assumptions underneath most daily and weekly calendars. Both are wrong. Not partially wrong. They’re wrong in a specific way that turns effort into an active force against performance rather than a...
Hi Reader A few weeks ago I told a sports-tech start-up founder something he didn't want to hear about how he was showing up in his sales meetings. It was something specific enough that he couldn't easily deflect it; I'd mulled it over for a fortnight before saying anything. He listened & nodded in the right places. Asked one or two clarifying questions and thanked me for my honesty. All good, I thought. Then he went into his next prospect meeting and did exactly the same thing. I know...
