“Venkat, we want to double our million-dollar deals.”

That was the brief at the start of Year 2 with one of our Fortune 50 clients. 9 months later, we hadn’t doubled them. We had almost tripled them.

In this edition, let me take you behind the scenes of how that happened, because the path we took surprised even the people inside the room.

Setting the stage

Year 1 of our engagement had been about leadership: executive coaching for their senior leaders and building a strong foundation for what came next.

Year 2 was about seeing that foundation show up in the numbers. They wanted something tangible, something measurable.

The instinctive playbook for a goal like this is familiar to every sales leader.

How do we push our people harder?

How do we get customers to give us more business?

Set a bigger number and let the pressure create the result.

If you ask your people to jump to the moon, maybe they’ll land somewhere in between. In reality, under that kind of pressure, most salespeople lose their motivation for the jump before they even start.

So we went the other way and slowed everything down.

When a Fortune 50 organization asks you to double a number, “let’s slow down” is the last answer anyone expects to hear.

Here’s what slowing down actually looked like.

1. Sales Managers as the Fulcrum for Change

The sales managers were traditional in their approach: “I tell you what to do, and you do it.”

On the surface, it looked like discipline. Underneath, it was creating pressure without performance. People were stretched, anxious and running on empty, heading towards burnout.

So we asked every manager to make a shift most leaders find uncomfortable. We asked them to stop giving answers.

→ From telling to coaching.
→ From giving orders to asking questions.
→ From directing the team to helping each person discover and commit to their own latent potential.

Coaching is the art of asking the right questions.

It gave managers the space to slow down, appreciate their people better, elevate their potential and cultivate a high-performance mindset.

Then something nobody expected happened.

When the managers slowed down, the team sped up, and the trajectory of commitment and results shifted across every salesperson.

2. The Quality of Focus

There is a saying: a person who defends everything, defends nothing.

They had 100 opportunities sitting in the pipeline. Most sales leaders would have said, work all of them harder. We said, kill most of them.

We helped the team qualify rigorously, find the deals truly worth winning, bring everything they had to those, and walk away from the rest.

Activity is not a proxy for progress.

The moment they stopped chasing everything:

→ The quality of every customer conversation elevated.
→ The quality of interactions within the team rose with it.
→ Deal sizes grew, and win rates followed.

3. Relentless Customer Obsession

Every meeting shifted from “here’s what we do” to “here’s what you need.”

It’s all about the customer and their greatness.

The conversation centered on their growth, their innovation, their market share, their risks and their ambitions. They are your client, and you are their champion.

When a customer feels that shift, they feel they are getting far more than they are paying for.

They trust you more, and they hand you bigger deals, faster, without being asked.

4. Risk as a Lever for Acceleration

Your sales process is the systematic elimination of customer risk.

So we asked the team to think consciously about the risks their customers were facing now, and the ones they would face in the future. Strategic, operational, financial and innovation risk.

How well do you understand your customer’s risks?

How are you helping them mitigate each one?

When your solution becomes associated with the removal of risk, your customer says yes to larger deals, and says it faster.

The Result

At the start of this engagement, they had 24 million-dollar deals. 

9 months later, that number stood at 65, almost 3x the starting point.

The target gave them direction.

The real leverage was in the thinking behind every single deal: managers who coach, teams who focus, and conversations that belong entirely to the customer. 

And full credit to this team, whose discipline and consistent execution turned those shifts into results.

So here’s my question for you: if you slowed your team down for one quarter, which of these four shifts would create the biggest acceleration in your deals?

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