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TheInquisitor Podcast

TheInquisitor Podcast

Di: Marcus & Suzanne Cauchi Principled Selling
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Business Insights & Strategies From Experts: Unveiling Simple Truths Behind Success.

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Episodi
  • Your Account Managers Aren’t the Problem. Your System Is - Jenny Plant

    Your Account Managers Aren’t the Problem. Your System Is - Jenny Plant
    Sep 9 2026
    Your Account Managers Aren’t the Problem. Your System Is. Most agencies are very good at winning new clients. Far fewer are equally deliberate about protecting, expanding and winning back the business they already have. That is a strange omission when the people closest to existing clients often have the strongest opportunity to understand what is changing inside those businesses. In this episode of TheInquisitor Podcast, Marcus Cauchi talks to Jenny Plant of Account Management Skills about why account managers are so often blamed for weak account growth when the real problem may sit much higher up the organisation. Jenny has spent more than 25 years working in agencies, as well as time on the client side in the airline and pharmaceutical sectors. She now works with agencies to make account management more commercially effective without turning account managers into stereotypical salespeople. And there is an important distinction. The answer is not simply to train account managers to “sell more”. It is to give them the clarity, capability, time, confidence and organisational conditions to become genuinely useful to their clients. Why this conversation matters Existing accounts are an obvious source of revenue, yet many agencies still manage them primarily around delivery. The account manager becomes the person who keeps projects moving, answers questions, attends status meetings and makes sure the client is happy. That can create a dangerous gap between being delivery reliable and being business relevant. Jenny argues that account growth depends on three things: 1. Commercial clarity Do account managers know which accounts are actually growable? Do they understand the agency's goals, their own role, the risks in the relationship and the rhythm in which accounts should be managed? 2. Capability Can they understand the client's business, ask useful questions, connect the agency's services to business outcomes and bring ideas into the conversation? 3. Cultural continuity Is account growth embedded into forecasting, coaching, planning, client meetings and the employee lifecycle? Jenny describes these as a three-legged stool. Training one leg while ignoring the other two is unlikely to produce sustainable change. Account management is sitting on a gold mine One of the most striking examples Jenny shares involves a US promotional merchandise agency serving the education sector. Its account managers had hybrid roles combining project management and growth. The growth wasn't happening. The agency separated the roles and gave existing team members the opportunity to focus specifically on growth. Within six months, the agency had increased revenue by 12% and client consultations by 50%. The important part was not simply the training. The account managers had gained the time, capacity and enablement to actually develop their clients. They were initially worried about becoming “salesy”. Once they understood that their job was to be consultative rather than transactional, the resistance disappeared. Did you hire them this way, or make them this way? This becomes one of the most important challenges in the conversation. Marcus asks whether founders should consider: “Did you hire them this way, or did you make them this way?” An account manager may be told to lead the client relationship, only for the founder or agency leadership to step in whenever something goes wrong. The client then learns that the account manager is not really in charge. The account manager loses authority. The founder remains trapped in the relationship. And everybody wonders why the account manager isn't becoming more commercially confident. Jenny argues that agency leaders need to orchestrate their involvement so that the account manager remains visibly in control. Delivery reliable is not the same as business relevant A client may be perfectly happy with the work and still begin to question the value of the relationship. Why? Because the agency isn't bringing anything beyond delivery. Jenny's 30/30/30/10 framework provides a useful way to think about strategic client meetings: 30%: What happened and what has been delivered? 30%: What happens next? 30%: What are we seeing in the market, with other clients and in the wider business environment? 10%: Agency news and corporate information. That third 30% is where the relationship can become genuinely valuable. It gives the client something they cannot get simply by reading a project report. Your client doesn't owe you their attention Jenny discusses research suggesting that a marketing director spends less than 7% of their working week managing all supplier relationships. Even if that figure varies by role or organisation, the principle is important. Your agency is competing for a tiny amount of attention. If the conversation consists entirely of status updates, delivery detail and requests for the next project, why would a senior client prioritise it? The agency has to earn ...
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    53 min
  • AI won't fix your blind spots. But it will help you find them. with Dave Pender and Dan Simmons

    AI won't fix your blind spots. But it will help you find them. with Dave Pender and Dan Simmons
    Aug 12 2026
    Why This Conversation Matters Most conversations about AI in sales are really just conversations about speed. This one isn't. Marcus sits down with Dave Pender and Dan Simmons, co-founders of YourSalesEdge, to ask a harder question: is AI making salespeople think better, or just making their existing thinking louder? The answer, it turns out, depends entirely on how you use it. About the Guests Dave Pender has spent 27 years in sales and sales leadership, building business development, account management and key account teams across SaaS businesses globally. Dan Simmons has spent roughly 15 years working alongside Dave, with a similar background leading SaaS sales teams. What They Discuss The conversation opens with a genuine disagreement. Dave argues that sales has always been, and remains, a numbers game. Marcus pushes back hard, arguing it's more accurately an evidence game, and that volume without qualification just produces expensive noise. They find common ground: quality of conversation matters more than count, but only once a minimum bar of relevance is met. From there the conversation moves into how AI is actually being used, and misused, in sales. Dan is blunt about the obvious failures: AI-flavoured emails with the prompt still attached, people asking AI to think instead of asking it to help them think. Dave describes voice-dictating full context into AI rather than typing short prompts, and setting a permanent "critical friend" instruction so the tool never simply agrees with him. Marcus introduces the idea of a human-AI-human loop, building on something Dan describes: start with human intent, bring in AI to assist, run an evidence check, and return to human accountability before anything is acted on. It becomes the spine of the episode. They cover the danger of triangulating across multiple AI models and mistaking agreement for proof, given that most large models are trained on overlapping data and carry similar cultural assumptions. And they discuss the discipline of deliberately switching AI off, in Dan's case for days or weeks at a time, to protect the ability to think independently. Practical Takeaways Feed AI full context by talking to it, not typing at it. A voice memo produces richer, more usable output than a rushed prompt.Set a standing instruction telling AI to challenge you, not flatter you. Most tools default to agreement unless told otherwise.Use the human-AI-human loop. Start with a person, bring in AI to assist and stress-test, then return to human judgement before deciding anything.Ask AI what you missed, both before and after a call. That question does more work than asking it for answers.Triangulating across multiple AI tools is not the same as evidence. Most models share training data and similar biases.Run weekly red-teaming exercises with your team, one side attacking a call, one side defending it, to surface what a seller alone never would.Build in deliberate AI-free periods to keep independent thinking sharp. Memorable Quotes Marcus challenges the framing of sales as a volume exercise, arguing instead that it's about the quality of evidence gathered before a conversation ever happens. Dan is candid about the risk of overreliance, warning that people are using AI to do their thinking for them rather than to sharpen it. Dave admits that at this point, his AI tool knows more about his working life and thinking than the people closest to him do, a comment that says as much about the pace of adoption as it does about the tool itself. Resources Mentioned YourSalesEdge, Dave and Dan's company: yoursalesedge.coDave Pender and Dan Simmons on LinkedInYourSalesEdge on YouTube Guest Biographies Dave Pender has led business development, account management and key account teams in SaaS environments globally over a 27-year sales career. He is co-founder of YourSalesEdge and Blind Spots. Dan Simmons has spent around 15 years working alongside Dave in SaaS sales leadership. Based in London, he describes himself as endlessly curious, particularly about how AI can genuinely improve people's working lives rather than simply speed them up. Listen to More If this conversation challenged how you think about AI in your own sales process, explore more episodes of TheInquisitor Podcast, where Marcus Cauchi questions conventional thinking about selling, buying and leadership.
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    1 ora e 1 min
  • The Founder's Discipline: How Keith Gillispie Systemised a Business That Runs Without Him

    The Founder's Discipline: How Keith Gillispie Systemised a Business That Runs Without Him
    Jul 17 2026
    There is no shortage of founders who have read Principles or Traction. Far fewer have built their business around what those books teach, week after week, when it is inconvenient to do so. In this episode, Marcus Cauchi speaks with Keith Gillispie, founder of REI Automated, about the discipline of turning ideas into working systems, and why that discipline is harder than the ideas themselves. Why this conversation matters Most conversations about business systems focus on tools. This one focuses on behaviour. Keith didn't just read about principles, operating systems and delegation frameworks. He applied them, tested them, and kept refining them long after the novelty wore off. For founders who are drowning in advice but starved of consistent execution, this episode offers something more useful than another framework: a working model of what it actually looks like to follow through. Major discussion points Discipline over information. Keith names two books that fundamentally shaped his business: Principles by Ray Dalio and Traction by Gino Wickman. What sets his account apart is not the reading list but what he did with it: he built explicit, testable principles into daily operations, and adopted Wickman's Entrepreneur Operating System (EOS) as the structural backbone of how his business runs. Writing and testing SOPs. Keith's method for creating a standard operating procedure is deliberately unglamorous. Do the task. Write down exactly what you did. Follow your own instructions the next time and notice everything you missed. Repeat this three to seven times until the gaps close, then record a video walking through the process. Only then does a task become fit to hand to another person, or to an AI agent. Where AI should not go. Keith runs a company that sells agentic AI voice agents for real estate sellers, so he has a commercial incentive to promote automation. He was candid about its limits. When he tested his own AI on a negotiation for his own property, reaching the point where the AI pressed him on price, he found the experience uncomfortable. His conclusion: AI handles information well, but emotional, high-stakes conversations still need a human. Hiring as a discipline, not an event. REI Automated filters candidates roughly one hundred to one. Keith uses the GWC framework from Traction (get it, want it, capacity for it) to decide not just who to hire, but who to keep, and applies a consistent SOP-based interview and onboarding process across every role. Cadence over intensity. Rather than reviewing performance monthly, Keith's team submits short daily and weekly reports, which are read and responded to using Claude, and quarterly goals ("rocks") drawn from EOS. He argues that weekly management gives a business fifty opportunities a year to course-correct, against twelve for a business run monthly. The absence test. Keith takes one week off every month with no calls, texts or Slack messages. During a recent house move that disrupted his usual routine for roughly a month, revenue held within a thousand dollars of the prior month. He was candid that the business currently sustains itself well in his absence, though he is less certain it grows without him. AI as a thought partner, not a shortcut. Keith's team members are expected to bring Claude fully into their process, including drafting their own SOPs when Keith does not have time to write one himself. He was clear this only works because the AI has deep context on the business and because his people bring genuine critical thinking to the exchange, rather than treating it as a way to avoid thinking. A moment of disagreement. Marcus challenged Keith's use of performance improvement plans, arguing that everyone should effectively be on one from day one, and that needing to formalise one is often a sign management has let something slide. Keith pushed back, drawing a distinction between personal development and performance accountability, and defended his position with a clear rationale. Practical takeaways Before automating or delegating any task, do it yourself first and write the SOP from direct experience.Follow your own SOP repeatedly until you have found and closed the gaps, then record it on video.Review your business weekly, not monthly. You get roughly four times as many chances to correct course.Keep team communication in shared channels rather than direct messages, so ideas get scrutinised by more than one person.Test whether your business can run without you before you assume it can.Use AI to draft and challenge your thinking, not simply to execute tasks you have not fully worked out yourself. Memorable quotes "Sometimes in order to be helpful, you have to say the hard thing." "When we're dealing with information, AI is fine. When we're dealing with emotion, that needs a human touch." "You always have to take away before you can add." Books and resources mentioned Principles by Ray DalioTraction by Gino WickmanEssentialism by Greg ...
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    59 min
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