In this episode of Value Coffee Talk, Scott Millson makes a deceptively simple argument: the highest performing sellers talk less. Not because silence is a technique to be deployed, but because expertise creates a reflex to answer before the customer has finished revealing the problem.
In this episode of Value Coffee Talk, Tom Pisello sits down with procurement expert Dean Edwards to explain what the function has actually become. The cost-squeeze caricature is a decade out of date. Modern procurement is measured on risk exposure, supplier resilience, and alignment to corporate objectives, which means the professional across the table is often solving a harder problem than the seller assumes.
In this episode of Value Coffee Talk, Sherri Sklar of AI Venture Catalyst makes the case that professional services firms are facing a business model problem, not a technology problem. Buyers have stopped paying for access to expertise they can approximate instantly. What they will still pay for, and pay well for, is a guaranteed outcome.
In this episode of Value Coffee Talk, Ted McKenna, co-author of The Jolt Effect, breaks down why the standard playbook makes indecision worse. When a seller senses hesitation, the instinct is to pile on more proof, more references, more ROI. Ted’s data shows that response often deepens the paralysis, because the buyer was never questioning whether the problem was real. They were questioning whether they could be blamed for the decision.
In this episode of Value Coffee Talk, sales performance consultant Lee Levitt takes apart the assumptions behind quota setting, pipeline math, and the coaching that never actually happens. His diagnosis is uncomfortable: most sales organizations hire for activity, measure for activity, then wonder why buyers do not see value.
In this episode of Value Coffee Talk, Jim Richmond, veteran Chief Customer Officer at Smartling, joins us to unpack the widening gap between AI promises and proven outcomes, and what customer-facing leaders must do to close it.
In this episode of Value Coffee Talk, we dig discuss the reshaping of consulting and services business models and risk-sharing in the AI era.
In this episode of Value Coffee Talk, we dig into the build versus buy decision for value automation in the AI era. Vikas Mundada, a community favorite and value leader for Ping Identity, joins us to unpack why the hard part was never the math, why frameworks and structure determine whether AI produces credible value or confident noise, and what total cost of ownership really looks like once you account for maintenance, enablement, and trust.
Two years of AI investment, and the bill is coming due. The spending is not slowing. The proof is not arriving. And a handful of the largest AI providers have just started doing something that should make every revenue leader sit up: they are offering to get paid only when the work actually gets done.
That is not a pricing experiment. It is a transfer of risk. And most go-to-market organizations are not instrumented to survive it.
Most revenue organizations spend real money quantifying value to win the deal, then abandon the model the day the contract is signed. Leverage the Shared Value Plan to help solve this Realized Value challenge.
With AI, you probably can build the value program yourself, which is why arguing the capability question is both wrong and unpersuasive. The questions that actually decide the outcome are whether it sits on a validated foundation, whether the six months you scoped becomes nine or twelve, and what the revenue you were going to earn in the meantime was worth.
At the 2026 Gartner CSO conference, nearly 8 in 10 sales leaders said their top concern was getting sellers to quantify value instead of pitching products, and the wider research explains why it has become existential: buyers now automate the logic with AI and reserve their scarce human attention for proof of value. The value gap and the growth gap have become the same gap, and closing it is no longer a training project but a structural mandate for every revenue leader.
