For over two decades, Tom Snyder has been asking a question most sales leaders skip: Why is B2B selling harder than it should be? As founder of Funnel Clarity and the 2024 Institute for Effective Professional Selling Sales Speaker of the Year, Tom approaches sales improvement the way a scientist approaches hypothesis testing. Through research, evidence, and ruthless elimination of what doesn't work.
In a recent conversation on the Sales Game Changers podcast with Fred Diamond, Founder of IEPS, Tom dismantled several myths about sales performance improvement and offered a framework grounded in how professional buyers actually make decisions.
The discussion cut through the noise of AI hype, sales guru mythology, and technology-as-savior thinking to focus on what research consistently shows: excellence in selling is a practice, not an event.
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When Fred asked where sales leaders should start to see the fastest improvement, Tom's answer was unequivocal: sales process. But not the workflow-driven version most organizations implement.
The typical sales funnel reflects seller activity; discovery meetings, demos, proposals, signatures. It's a checklist of things salespeople do to prospects. Tom argues this reverses cause and effect. What actually moves opportunities forward isn't your presentation; it's the decision gates your customer navigates.
According to Tom, effective sales processes center around how professional buyers make decisions: what they define as the problem they're trying to fix, accomplish, or avoid; what they consider a successful outcome; how they'll evaluate their options; what concerns remain; and how value expectations will be fulfilled.
This isn't semantic hairsplitting. When your pipeline stages correspond to customer decision milestones rather than seller tasks, forecasting accuracy improves dramatically.
The difference between "we sent a proposal" and "they've defined success criteria and requested our approach" is the difference between hope and evidence.
Tom referenced research involving more than 1,300 sales funnels across as many corporations. The single factor with the greatest correlation to both productivity and morale wasn't compensation structure, territory design, or product differentiation. It was something called task clarity.
Most organizations give sellers outcome clarity:
Few give task clarity; the how of execution. A well-designed sales process provides exactly that:
The result of missing task clarity shows up everywhere. Deals stall at undefined stages. Managers compensate for seller optimism or pessimism rather than coaching to evidence. Forecasts hover around 70% accuracy, a margin of error no other business function would tolerate.
For sales professionals early in their careers, Tom distilled decades of research into two principles:
First: Customers place higher value on what they conclude themselves, vs. what they're told.
Second: Customers place higher value on what they ask for, vs,. what's freely offered.
Most untrained sellers violate both. They lead with benefits, offer demonstrations without qualification, and propose solutions before buyers recognize they have a problem worth solving.
The predictable result: prospects who are informed but unconvinced, and sellers who mistake activity for progress.
Tom's guidance for universal sales programs was direct: learn to employ these rules tactically, and you'll perform in the top tier from day one. The mechanics can be taught, but the discipline (resisting the urge to pitch prematurely) requires practice.
Fred asked about Tom's take on AI in sales, which Tom noted is measured and grounded in ongoing research Funnel Clarity conducts on both LLMs and sales-specific applications.
Tom emphasized that AI excels at creating outlines for emails, white papers, presentations, and videos, and at accelerating research into industry issues or company-specific challenges. But the interactive skill of selling (navigating buying committee dynamics, facilitating decision gates, creating mutual value) remains firmly in human territory for the foreseeable future.
The distinction matters. Use AI to:
But Tom cautions sellers not to use it to guide strategy or replace judgment. He says LLM models sweep up everything on the internet, including decades of sales mythology and guru pronouncements unsupported by research. Bad input, bad output.
Fred pressed Tom on why sales forecasting remains chronically inaccurate despite enormous investment in technology and process. Tom's diagnosis was straightforward: when your funnel is built around seller activity rather than customer decision gates, you're encoding optimism and pessimism, not evidence.
The path to forecast accuracy above 97% (which Funnel Clarity clients consistently achieve when they follow the recommended best practices) requires evidence-based stage advancement. Not what sellers think or assume or believe, but what buyers have concluded, requested, and committed to next. Each stage transition should require specific proof points; artifacts of customer behavior, not seller hope.
Forecasting inaccuracy isn't the disease. It's the symptom of a misaligned process: missing task clarity, and pipelines full of wishes rather than real deals.
According to CSO Insights, 93% of companies close less than 25% of forecast. The problem isn't your CRM, your territory design, or your sales team's effort. It's that most organizations measure seller activity when they should be tracking customer decision progress.
The path to forecast accuracy starts with understanding where your customers actually are in their decision journey.
Download our eBook: Sales Forecasting Fixed: Take the Guesswork Out of Revenue Forecasts
Based on Tom and his team's work with hundreds of B2B sales teams, this guide reveals:
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