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Today’s show featured an interview with Tom Snyder of Funnel Clarity. Funnel Clarity is an IEPS Selling Essentials Marketplace partner. Read more about the Selling Essential Marketplace here.
Find Tom on LinkedIn.
TOM’S TIP: “Knowing what the right things to do are is not the same as being able to do them well. Excellence in sales, like any skill, takes relentless practice.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: Tom, you were the 2024 Institute for Effective Professional Selling Sales Speaker of the Year. You did a fabulous job. You’ve spoken on our big stage at least four or five times. You’ve keynoted our award event, not just when you won the Sales Speaker of the Year, but other times as well, our big award event every year.
Now, I’m excited to announce that you are part of the Institute for Effective Professional Selling Selling Essentials Marketplace. Basically, what we’ve done for our listeners is we’ve pretty much hand-selected best-of-breed sales service providers who are helping the B2B and B2G sales organizations sell more effectively. Tom, you’ve been doing this for a while with us. We’ve actually brought you in a number of times to companies that are looking to improve their sales performance, whatever it might have been. We’re going to be introducing you today to the audience, and we’re going to be getting a little bit deeper.
When we changed the name from the Institute for Excellence in Sales to the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, a couple key things there. Effectiveness, professional selling, and you and I have had many, many conversations over the years. We’re doing today’s interview in September of 2025. How are you doing? Give us a little bit of an introduction for people who may not know you. We’re going to get a little bit deeper than we typically do. You’re one of the true sales thought leaders that we’ve met. We’ve met a lot of people over the years, and every time we bring you in front of our stage, or you and I just have a conversation over lunch or whatever it might be, I always feel like I’m getting a lot smarter. Tell people who you are and give us a little bit of an intro to your company.
Tom Snyder: My name’s Tom Snyder, founder, managing partner of Funnel Clarity. Started my career about a thousand years ago, got out of graduate school, and in some way, finagled myself a job on the White House staff where I worked for almost 11 years. My standard line is, my first day on the job was awful, and it got worse every day after that. I finally swore off politics and became a serial entrepreneur. That experience led me to a frustration that I always felt there was something missing in this world of B2B sales.
I had sold one of my companies, decided to take a year off and search out the gurus, the scientists, the real scientists who’d studied the topic. That was depressing. For the first six months, it seemed like every out-of-work sales executive wrote a book, declared themselves a guru, but that’s not science. I ended up finding one by sheer happenstance, lived 30 miles from me, asked him if I could have coffee, we did. We had six coffees, five times he offered me a job. I said, “No, I’m not really looking for a job. I’m looking for science.” Finally, on the sixth time, I said, “Okay. I’ll come for 90 days.” I stayed 11 years, became CEO there, and fell in love with the world of the science of sales performance.
My company, Funnel Clarity, is founded on a couple of things. One, we don’t believe that there is any such thing as a sales guru. Number two, the only thing that can determine best practice is the application of real science. Things like statistical significance, large data sample, things like that. We commercialize what has been developed over the last I’d say at least 50 years or so as what are the conclusions of that continuing research. In 2003, I picked up part of that baton and have been doing in-depth research ever since. But our commercial enterprise, we train, we consult, and we help sales teams achieve far better performance than they are when we first meet them.
Fred Diamond: Again, we’re doing today’s interview in September of 2025. A lot’s changed over the last five to six years, and we’re going to get into where we are right now. You and I have had many conversations, and I feel fortunate to have spent quality time with you and your partner Jill Ulvestad as well, who’s a tremendous sales thought leader on her own. Just for people who are listening, we also do our Women in Sales Leadership programs, Jill was very instrumental in getting those going and for continuing with them as well.
Over the course of our conversations, I’ve heard you say that you were drawn to sales performance improvement, to the industry, because you felt that B2B sales seemed harder than it should be. I’m familiar with the depth of some of your research. Before I even met you, I actually read your book, which we could talk about if you’d like as well, and the breadth of the best practices that you train sales professionals to use. I’ve seen how that’s shifted over the years with Funnel Clarity and where you’re going. If you’re correct, that science has allowed the discovery of sales best practice, why do you see so many C-level executives and senior leaders felt that their sales organizations are still underperforming? There’s a lot there, and I actually even added some things as I was thinking about the question, but why don’t you get us started with that.
Tom Snyder: I love that question. There’s a lot to it. Let me give you the highlights first. For a very long time, when the people who really changed this industry first came to market, there was an unwritten expectation that if we put people in training and you teach them best practice, they will adopt those best practices, hone their mastery of them, and therefore achieve a level of excellence they otherwise couldn’t. It turned out that’s not true. If you look at the psychology of adult learning, no matter how high your intentions or how honestly interested you are, if there’s not a platform or some sort of culture of practice, reinforcement exploration, no matter how great the training is, it’s not going to do much for you. I always say, if you wanted to take a single piano lesson, you’re no pianist, and if you wanted to take a single golf lesson, you’re not going to love the game. It’s the same with this. You can go to training, have a fabulous experience, and 30 days later, you’re not using anything. One of those reasons was that.
The second reason is because perhaps beginning with salesforce.com, when Benioff first brought it to market, there was now an expectation that, “Oh, I get it. The answer is technology. We have to create not just a CRM adoption, but we got to build on top of that a stack of things, and then my salespeople will be better.” What people got better at was the efficiency of doing the wrong things. Plus, the CRM had many constituencies inside the corporation, and they start demanding all kinds of data from salespeople, and salespeople found no value in it, and whatnot. I think it isn’t so much that sales leaders have given up. It isn’t so much that salespeople aren’t good. It’s that the path to excellence is a path of learning and practice, just like any other interactive skill. I don’t care if it’s the game of chess or it’s acting on stage. I don’t care if it’s learning a language or it’s practicing the trumpet. It all takes practice.
Fred Diamond: That is a great answer, and I like your analogy that, hey, you’re not going to learn how to play the piano sitting at it with one lesson. Interestingly, the movie Groundhog Day, they said it took them like five years in the course of that movie to become great at piano. The same thing with any sport, with anything. A lot of times people think it took one class. One of the things that always irked me was when I would do an event or a post, or a Sales Game Changers Podcast, or a LinkedIn post, and people would say, “Thanks for the reminder.” Well, put it into play, man. That’s why we changed our name too. We changed our name to selling professionals to serve the people who really are professionals.
Tom Snyder: If you look at any of the people that are noted as being at the top of their profession, they practice relentlessly, whether it’s sports, the entertainment world, anything. It is about knowing what the right things to do are is not the same thing as being able to do them well. It takes that process.
Fred Diamond: I’m just curious, if a sales leader were to ask you for the one thing they should do first to see the fastest improvement in sales performance, what would that be and why?
Tom Snyder: Man, you’re asking good questions. I often get the question, where do we start? In fact, there are several different places, but if the question is the greatest progress in the least amount of time, I would start with sales process. Now, what does that mean? That means my sellers have a framework within which to work through opportunities. It reflects itself in their sales funnel structure, their sales pipeline structure. It reflects how they go about creating sales strategy. All of that is centered around a decision model of how professional buyers make decisions.
If you were to Google today, Fred, a customer decision journey, you would get thousands of examples. We’ve looked at several hundred, and they’re all missing two very essential pieces. What they all come down to is a workflow, “Did we have the discovery meeting.” I love that, the discovery meeting. Generally speaking, the only one discovering anything is the seller. Next, we do what? “Let’s do a demo or a presentation.” Then we send them a proposal, and then we expect them to sign. Now, sometimes they will, but what that leads to is the assumption that a discovery meeting, a demonstration, a proposal makes a sale. I do not refute the fact that if you are in a SaaS company, demonstrating your technology is an essential part of making a sale. But there is a specific time signaled to you by customer behavior when it’s appropriate to do it. The idea that we rush people into a demo, and therefore they will buy, is a broken promise. You’ve got it upside down. Of course, they’ve got to see it before they buy it, but just showing it to them too early leaves too much on the table.
If you design a sales process, I don’t care if you have a four-stage funnel or a seven-stage funnel, I don’t care if you have a strategy document or you leave it to the sellers themselves, a process that is based around how decision makers make decisions. What do they define as what they’re trying to fix, accomplish, or avoid? When they’ve done that, what do they define as a successful outcome? When they’ve done that, how will they decide what are the points of comparison they’re going to use? When they’ve done that, they still have concerns. How will you resolve those concerns? When they sign a contract, how are you sure you’re going to fulfill their value expectation? If you have a relationship with customers where there’s renewals or an expectation of more business, maybe spreading out in the footprint you have, there is even more essential to have a focus on how people make important decisions.
I would say, if you were going to start somewhere, just that, before you work on skills, before you work on strategy, before you work on negotiations or prospecting, start there. Give them a structure that they can work in.
One other point, fabulous research done around, and we were peripherally involved, but it was really done by some people you know pretty well. They discovered, in looking at more than 1,300 sales funnels across 1,300 corporations, a single factor had the greatest contribution and correlation to productivity and morale. It was called task clarity. Too many organizations give sellers outcome clarity. They call it quota. They call it margin. They call it penetration. They call it product mix. No. Give them task clarity. How do I do it? If I had a sales structure and you gave me clarity on how to do it, not just what you expect me to do, everything falls in place.
Fred Diamond: We mainly talk, on the Sales Game Changers Podcast, to sales leaders. We’re doing a lot of work right now with the Institute for Effective Professional Selling with universities that have professional sales programs, either major, minor, or certificate. You and I have talked about this a couple of times. I’m just curious, if you were talking to a sales class at a university that has one of these programs and you had five minutes, what would be the one bit of advice that you would give to a college student who is in a professional sales program, who is going to go work at one of the companies that join IEPS or companies similar to that? If they said to you, like you’re on an elevator, “Give us one bit of advice, Mr. Snyder,” what would you tell the students that have the ability to be successful in sales? What will be your one thing that you would share with them?
Tom Snyder: I’m not sure it would take me five minutes. I’d say, first of all, one of the roots that was discovered in terms of effectiveness, excellent, high-performing salespeople, is understanding how to employ tactically the two primary rules discovered through research of professional persuasion. Customers will always put a higher value on what they conclude than they will on what they’re told. Customers will always put a higher value on what they ask for than what is freely offered. Every salesperson starts their career, if they’re untrained, around, “Let me tell you about the benefits. Let me tell you about all the good things. Let me tell you why you can’t live without us.” Violate rule one. Then they offer the demonstration, the proposal, the presentation, and everything else without ever being asked. If you can learn to employ those two rules, you’ll be in the noise level of performance in terms of top salespeople. There are ways to learn how to do that tactically, but even just inculcating those rules will make a huge difference.
Fred Diamond: Tom, you’ve been in the vanguard of research into sales best practices for, I don’t even want to say how long to make you feel earlier. Here it is. Given the explosion of AI, 16 minutes into the interview, and this is the first utterance of AI and the explosion of AI applications in sales, what is your thoughts? Is AI just another overhyped development, or is there a fundamental change taking place because of AI as it relates to B2B sales?
Tom Snyder: I think the answer is both. First of all, we have a continuing process of looking into both AI engines, the large language models application in sales, as well as the apps themselves. Remember what these models do. Whether it’s Gemini, Grok, ChatGPT, or whatever, the people who have built those things, build them to sweep up everything on the internet. Unless you’re very careful, you will become more efficient at doing the wrong thing. There’s no difference in that it amplified the mistakes made with CRMs. You’ll become so efficient at doing the wrong things.
The Washington Post about six months ago, convened a panel of 700 experts, and they were from different disciplines, I think it was 13 different disciplines. They had them create a set of questions that would be put through the eight most prominent AI applications. Then they judged the accuracy and quality of the information they got back based on their expertise. The highest grade given over the entire effort was to ChatGPT, and it got a D minus. All of the rest of them, the other seven, got a failing grade. Now, that’s not a problem for AI per se, because it learns every day. In those intervening months, I’m sure it’s gotten better and it will continue to get better. But if what you’re doing is using it to guide you as opposed to help you become more efficient, you are implementing something that will sabotage your sales more often than it will help them.
Now, having said that, there are some things and some uses of AI for sales that are terrific. It’s an unbelievable way to create effective outlines, to create the outline of emails, the outline of white papers, the outline of even presentations, doing videos doing. These are all very effective tools, but it’s the salesperson’s judgment, experience, skillset, and strategy that needs to guide it. It’ll be a long time, at least at the current rate, before AI replaces salespeople. That isn’t going to happen, not for complex sales anyway. It’s not going to.
I don’t want to sound like I’m negative about AI. I’m very positive about it. I think the clients we have that have implemented AI in their particular field, particularly in the STEM disciplines, have made enormous breakthroughs, incredible differences. But when you’re talking about an interactive skill, when you’re talking about you and me, I’m seller, you are the buyer, and you have colleagues that have a vote in the thing. We’re trying to make sure we’re creating an opportunity to make the best deal, hear me, the best deal for both of us, both for my company and you. That’s got many subtleties in it that AI currently, and for the experts who talked to me about it, the predictable future, it won’t be there yet. It won’t do it.
On the other hand, if you want to do things like uncover how to get people’s attention on a cold call, if you want to uncover the issues that are burning in a particular industry or current in a particular company, it’s much faster. It’s much more helpful. But all that does is provide you a quicker access to the right information. It hones what you need to do in discovery. It hones what you need to do in qualification. It hones how you should structure things, but you have to do it as an interactive skill.
My position is let’s realize that because my industry, sales performance improvement, has no barrier to entry, anybody anywhere can hang out a shingle and say, “I’m a sales guru. Let me teach your salespeople.” The internet is larded with cute little models, I don’t care if it’s MEDDIC, MEDDIC Pro, SNAP Selling, SPIN Selling, Miller Heiman Conceptual, I don’t care what it is, all of whom say, “Just use this and everyone will be brilliant.” That’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. As a result, the internet is larded with myths about professional selling. Think about that cascade. When the engines, large language models, sweep up everything off the internet, and then they begin going through the algorithms, bad stuff in, bad stuff out, garbage in, garbage out. Now you’re getting guidance that at least for a fair amount of years in the future from the experts I talk to, you need to be using as an efficiency tool, not an effectiveness tool.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great answer. Before I ask you for your final action step, I have to ask you a question about forecasting. It’s one of the cores of sales leadership. We don’t really talk about it as much on the Sales Game Changers Podcast as we probably should, but it comes up not infrequently. As a matter of fact, it came up on a couple of LinkedIn posts today. I hear from B2B, and we also, at the IEPS, deal with a lot of B2G, business to government, organizations. I hear them lamenting that their sales forecasts are just inaccurate, chronically, historically, whatever it might be, disruptively. This is despite the tech stack designed to give sales managers and leaders clear information about what will close by when. You talked before about the tech stack and everything, and when Salesforce was launched and that was going to solve all the problems, throwing technology at it, but it’s still an intractable problem. Why is this a seemingly intractable problem?
Tom Snyder: There are two major reasons why that problem is intractable. One I have mentioned earlier, but I really need to drive this one home. If the sales funnel or process, sales pipeline, whatever you call it, is built around seller activity, they’re missing the most important point. Because what drives something through a funnel, through a pipeline is the decision gates the customers go through. It’s not your activity. Now, you as a decision coach should be helping them facilitate those decision gates. Therefore, you should be able to recognize very early where something doesn’t belong in your funnel. But we don’t do that. We basically encode and capture the optimism or pessimism of the seller.
Then the managers go through this thing of, “Well, that guy’s pretty optimistic. I’m going to down that. She’s always pessimistic. I’m going to raise that up.” Then their bosses do the same, and we arrive at something that might be 70% accurate. No other part of business would ever let you get away with that degree of inaccuracy, and we accept that as the law of gravity. It doesn’t have to be. If we have a process built around the decision gates of customers, if we have a funnel built such a way that in order to go from this stage to the next stage, certain evidence has to be in place. Not what you suppose, not what you think, not what you assume, not what you believe, but evidence. What is the evidence that says this should be carried to the next stage? All of that evidence is about what you can extract, recognize, influence, and help your customers conclude.
It doesn’t have to be a broken process, but forecasting that doesn’t come every quarter and every month, frankly, within plus or minus 3% of accuracy is the symptom of a series of problems. It really isn’t the problem. It’s the symptom. The symptom can only be treated like a doctor. We got to get to the root of the problem.
Fred Diamond: Tom, great insights. We’ll do more of these. As I’ve mentioned in the beginning, you are truly one of the thought leaders in professional selling, and you bring it every single time. Give us an action step. For people listening to the show, we’ve already given them about a dozen things to do, give the audience one thing that they should do right now after listening to the show or reading the transcript to take their sales career or their sales leadership performance to the next level.
Tom Snyder: I’m going to give you two because they’re quick. Number one, don’t chase the deals you want. Chase the deals that most want you. There’s a way of discovering that through evidence. Number two, ask yourself about every deal in the funnel. What is the evidence that this opportunity exists? Unless you can identify something that the decision makers can tell you specifically they want to fix, accomplish, or avoid, and they can tell you why they want to do it right now, you don’t have evidence of an opportunity. Most funnels are larded with wishes, dreams, hopes, aspirations, nothing. The smallest of the proportion is real deals. I’ll leave you with that.
Fred Diamond: Very powerful stuff. Once again, I want to thank Tom Snyder for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo