The Musings

Notes on technology, leadership, and decision-making inside complex organizations. I write about the choices that actually matter — not just the tools or the trends, but the judgment calls that determine whether something ships or stalls.

  • What Clinical Sales Taught Me About Trust

    Looking back: April 2026 I’ve been thinking lately about what medical technology sales taught me earlier in my career. Almost every framework I use today for understanding trust-based selling traces back, in some form, to patterns…

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  • Case Studies That Aren’t Case Studies

    Most case studies are bad. Not badly written — badly conceived. They’re structured to showcase the vendor, not to illustrate a situation the reader recognizes and can learn from. The result is a document that the…

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  • Marketing Attribution Is a Lie You Tell Yourself

    Every marketing organization has an attribution model. Most of them are fiction, and the more confident the marketing team is about their attribution math, the more fictional it probably is. This is not a cynical take…

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  • Handling the ‘Send Me a Proposal’ Trap

    “Send me a proposal.” Those four words kill more deals than any competitor ever will. They sound like progress — the customer is asking for something specific, something formal, something that looks like a buying step.…

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  • The Art of the Follow-Up

    Most deals die in silence. Not in rejection — in silence. The customer stops responding, the rep stops reaching out, and the deal slides quietly off the forecast. This is the most common deal-death pattern in…

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  • The First Meeting Close

    The last five minutes of a first meeting decide whether you get a second meeting. Most sellers fumble this transition — they run out of time, they get polite-ended, or they take the customer’s vague “we’ll…

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  • The Conference Playbook

    Most people attend conferences wrong. They travel, take notes, collect badges, and come home with nothing concrete. The people who actually produce revenue from conferences are running a deliberate pre-during-post playbook — and they treat conferences…

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  • Reputation Is a Lagging Indicator

    Reputation is the last thing to arrive and the last thing to leave. The behaviors that build it precede it by years; the behaviors that destroy it precede the damage by years too. This lag is…

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  • The Long Game vs. the Quarter Game

    Every senior revenue operator eventually has to choose, deal by deal, between the long game and the quarter game. The choice is rarely framed that starkly — usually it shows up as “push this deal now”…

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  • The First Board Deck on Revenue

    Most first-time CEOs present revenue to their boards badly. Not because they’re hiding anything — because they haven’t been taught which numbers tell the real story and which numbers obscure it. The result is a board…

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