Cosmo Tech | The Decision Twin Platform for Supply Chain, Finance & Asset Leaders at Fortune 500 Scale | Simulate Tomorrow. Decide Today.

Over the past 30 years, I’ve led sales teams at fast-growing Tech & SaaS companies — to rebuild and refine the strategies and systems so sales teams can scale and drive revenue growth.

In recent roles, I was able:

- double revenue while EBITDA grew 400%
- drive a +34% YoY revenue growth

Today I’m working with Cosmo Tech to help enterprises simulate the future for faster decisions, better systems, and maximum opportunity.

That means: 

- Quantum-level decision making
- Complex system resiliency
- Future-proof roadmap

“Steve is “Instant Offense” for sales. This is very rare and very valuable. He’s truly world class at quickly creating and running strategic, data-driven sales teams to drive growth. Great at strategy and wading into the minutiae to uncover and fix and optimize the team and process.

He’s a great leader with great judgment who makes it fun to work on the most difficult challenges. He and I have worked together on two companies that were great successes.”

— Jeff O'Mara, General Manager EKAHAU/ CEO, Healthentic.

Feel free to join my newsletter below — you’ll get all my best systems and strategies for scaling sales into the future. 

Join my newsletter at www.salesgss.com/newsletter

Trying to figure out where to start to double sales in 2025? Click on my "FREE Sales Accelerator Assessment" www.salesgss.com/assessment

Steve Litzow

A 17-year-old enterprise tech company went from $25M to $65M in revenue without changing their team, market, or product strategy.

Here's what actually drove the transformation:
Revenue: $25M → $65M (160% growth) 
Recurring Revenue: $5M → $30M (6× increase) 
EBITDA margins: 20% → 50% 
Product velocity: 1 release every 4 years → 4 per year

When I ask CEOs what they think enabled this kind of growth, they usually say: 
"Better talent? Bigger pipeline? New market positioning?"

None of the above.

It was implementing a High-Intensity Rhythm of Business (HI-ROB).

Here's what it looked like in practice:
Daily 15-minute standups focused on:
- Pipeline movement (what changed overnight)
- Yesterday's activity vs. plan
- Today's activity commitments
- What's closing today + backup options

Weekly cross-functional reviews where every team reports using the same metrics, same format, same cadence.

The insight most teams miss: Elite execution isn't about having better people. 

It's about building systems that surface problems in 24 hours instead of 30 days.

That time compression is what separates:
- Forecast accuracy from CFO discounts
- Pipeline visibility from month-end surprises
- Revenue growth from revenue hope

The companies scaling predictably right now aren't necessarily the ones with the best talent. 

They're the ones with the best operating systems. 

salesgss.com/newsletter

Your sales team has 200+ hours of PMF intelligence.
Your product team sees maybe 5% of it.

That gap is killing your velocity.

Sales hears every objection, every “not yet,” every competitive blindside.
Product never sees most of it.

That’s where PMF actually erodes — in the gap between Sales intelligence and Product velocity.

And the fix isn’t another roadmap meeting.

It’s a bi-weekly execution ritual:
Sales brings: Top 3 deal blockers
Product maps: Clear ship windows
CEO enforces: Ruthless scope discipline
15 minutes. Twice a month.

This loop eliminates the three silent killers:
- Roadmap drift
- Ship-date ambiguity
- Competitive feature surprises

One company I worked with went from 1 release every 4 years → 4 releases per year using this exact loop.

Result: 2× revenue and expansion from a niche tool to a mainstream IT platform.

The data backs it up:
Elite product teams ship with 76% success  --  Average teams sit at 51%

That 25-point gap compounds into years of competitive advantage (or decline).

With Q1 planning six weeks away, now is the moment to fix your Sales → Product loop before you lock next year’s roadmap.

Product-market fit isn’t a milestone — it’s a 90-day referendum.

Full framework + the Q1 implementation plan is in this week’s SalesGSS newsletter.
Link in comments. 👇

Couldn’t agree more with Phillip — the ability to anticipate, not just react, is what separates leaders today.

Simulation is already helping our customers cut decision cycles, reduce risk, and move with confidence.

CEO at Cosmo Tech I Global Business Leader I Chief Technology Officer

Enterprises today face a simple truth: disruption is no longer an occasional event, it’s a constant. Supply shocks, market volatility, and regulatory 

Open article: From Intelligent to Autonomous: How AI-Simulation Unlocks the Self-Learning Enterprise by Phillip Hazen • 2 min read

From Intelligent to Autonomous: How AI-Simulation Unlocks the Self-Learning Enterprise

The new advantage isn’t faster outreach — it’s faster proof.

✅ Days 0–7 (Sales): Define success metric + provision sandbox
✅ Days 8–21 (Product): Automate setup + guide onboarding
✅ Days 22–30 (CS): Deliver one-page ROI snapshot

Track what matters:
• TTFV (Time-to-First-Value) — leading indicator of conversion
• Activation → Expansion Ratio (≤60 days) — proof that value sticks

The teams that show ROI inside 30 days stay alive in deals CFOs can’t kill.

Read the full playbook → salesgss.com/newsletter

#SaaS #SalesStrategy #RevenueGrowth #SalesGSS

Great insight, Philipp.
Transforming Weibull and other reliability models into continuously learning systems through AI simulation is where asset management becomes truly prescriptive. It’s exciting to see this thinking gain momentum across the SAP ecosystem.

Yesterday I shared my first impressions on sessions about Predictive Maintenance, RCM, Asset Maintenance 5.0, and deep dives into data acquisition and diagnostic hardware at the Asset Performance conference. Today, I want to share one idea that really stuck with me—something that could be transformational if applied across the entire asset lifecycle:

Weibull distribution.
It’s a statistical tool that uses failure data from operations—data that’s often easy to get. It doesn’t need huge datasets, and because it’s based on probability distributions, it provides interpretable confidence intervals. That means maintenance experts can use it with confidence.
Of course, it comes with challenges: modeling expertise and thorough data cleansing are essential.

But the opportunities are huge. Startup Cosmo Tech showed a very innovative approach how operational data (e.g. failures, financials, risk) can be used to simulate different maintenance policies and predict their impact on CAPEX, OPEX, or any custom risk KPI you define is relevant for your business. This enables to test strategies before implementing them—using models they can actually understand.

My takeaway: Weibull distribution shouldn’t be a one-time tool for investment decisions. It should be part of a continuous loop:
- Define strategies based on simulations
- Implement and measure performance of such strategies
- Learn from cases where the policies been violates or fails, e.g. when using CBM or RUL predictions missed a failure beyond what is to be expected from a statistical model.

With continuous closed loops to monitor, improve, and optimize your maintenance strategies and operations, it would be possible to unleash the full power of Weibull distribution—or, as a matter of fact, any AI or model-based tool.

Thanks Olivier Blancke & Steven Coates for the insightful demo and nice discussion we had during the conference.

This is how leading utilities are using AI Simulation to prioritize investments, balance risk, and accelerate the energy transition.
Join Cosmo Tech and Groupe E on Dec 2 to see it in practice.

Join us for an insightful webinar with Cosmo Tech and Groupe E on December 2nd.

Ana Nazaré, Strategic Asset Manager at Groupe E, and Maxime Le Pendeven, Key Account Director at Cosmo Tech, will explore how Cosmo Tech AI Simulation empowers Groupe E to 𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘻𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘳𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘤𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘴, 𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘺, 𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘭 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘦-𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘨𝘳𝘪𝘥 𝘧𝘭𝘦𝘹𝘪𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘭𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴 - 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘦 𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘦𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘨𝘪𝘤 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘥𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴.

Whether you’re managing renewable energy plants, large industrial fleets, or complex infrastructure, this session is for you.

👉 Register here: https://hubs.ly/Q03Rxpwj0

#ai #simulation #assetmanagement #aip #digitaltransformation #innovation #energy #utility

Buyers don’t wait 90 days for ROI anymore.

The window for proof has collapsed — from quarters to weeks.

▪ 78 % of B2B buyers now expect measurable ROI within six months (G2)
▪ Deal slippage nearly doubled year-over-year (Kluster)
▪ Interactive demos lift conversions ≈ 25 % (Navattic)

If your product still takes three months to prove value, you’re already behind competitors who do it in 14 days.

👉 Stop selling platforms. Start selling proof.

This week’s SalesGSS issue breaks down how to:
• Re-engineer your first-value moment
• Turn demos into ROI trials
• Track the 3 KPIs boards now watch

Read here → salesgss.com/newsletter

#B2BSales #SaaS #SalesLeadership #GrowthStrategy

Most B2B tech CEOs think they have a meeting problem.
But the data says something very different.

Only 37% of meetings have an agenda.
Executives say 67% of them fail.
Teams waste 392 hours a year sitting in them.

But here’s the truth:

Meetings aren’t the problem.
Visibility lag is.

If you’re still discovering slippage at the end of the month, you’re already 30 days behind the teams you’re competing with.

Across the $25M–$65M companies I’ve worked inside, the pattern is identical:

Elite teams surface deal risk in 24 hours.
Average teams: 7–14 days.
Struggling teams: after the month closes.

This one gap explains revenue misses more than pipeline size, talent, or marketing.

The companies that scale consistently run a tight Rhythm of Business (ROB):

Daily (15 minutes):
• Pipeline movement
• Yesterday’s activity
• Today’s targets
• Deals closing today
• Backup if #1 slips

Everyone stands.
Cameras on.
Pipeline open.

Weekly:
Every function reports progress on the same goals, using the same metrics, in the same format.

No silos.
No spin.
No surprises.

Slippage is a visibility problem — not a talent problem.
Fix the cadence → fix the outcome.

If you want more on operating cadence, forecasting accuracy, and mid-market sales strategy, subscribe to my weekly newsletter - salesgss.com/newsletter.

The earliest sign your deal is slipping?
A single stakeholder goes silent for 11–14 days.

Across the teams I’ve led and advised, this Silent Thread Indicator is the #1 early warning signal.

When even one stakeholder goes dark for 14 days:
• Decision momentum breaks
• Champion confidence drops
• Parallel blockers emerge
• CFO/IT lose context
• Legal quietly resets the evaluation

Probability of stall increases 6–8X —
even if your champion absolutely loves you.

This is why single-threading kills Q4 forecasts.
You don’t lose because someone said “no.”
You lose because someone stopped saying anything.

Monday rule:
Any deal with a silent thread = at-risk deal.
Don’t wait for the stage to slip.
Re-engage immediately.
––
Full breakdown (and the Q1 2026 multi-threading plan) is in the new SalesGSS Newsletter issue.

linkedin.com/company/getdatabees/

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li_at

Your prospects aren’t waiting 379 days because your category is complex.
They’re waiting because they can’t see momentum.

In 2025, PMF isn’t something you “achieve.”
It’s something your market re-evaluates every 90 days.

When you go two quarters without visible product news, buyers assume:
“Are they still investing?”
“Are they falling behind competitors?”
“Will this product still matter in 12 months?”

One quiet quarter doesn’t kill deals.
Two quiet quarters trigger the PMF death spiral:
longer cycles → lower win rates → silent champions → stalled pipeline.

Quarterly updates aren’t nice-to-have.
They’re your only defense against ambiguity.

If your deal cycles are extending while your roadmap isn’t shipping visibly every 90 days, that’s not a market problem — it’s a product velocity problem.

If you want the full framework, my latest SalesGSS newsletter is live - www.salesgss.kit.com

Most stalled deals don’t die in competition.

They die in conference rooms you’ll never enter.

Here’s what’s happening across $5M–$50M SaaS teams:
• Buyers spend 83% of the journey without you
• Buying committees: 10–11 stakeholders
• Only 9% of deals are multi-threaded
• Champion turnover: 81%
• Champion leaves → 80% deal loss rate

This is the Single-Thread Death Spiral:
One relationship in a 10-person committee is a gamble — not a forecast.

The simplest diagnostic I know:
How many unique stakeholders are engaged right now in your top 10 opportunities?

Benchmarks:
• 1–2 threads: Critical risk
• 3–4 threads: Baseline safety
• 5+ threads: Elite execution (6X win rate)

Thread count is now a leading indicator — not a “nice to have.”
If half your late-stage pipeline has fewer than 3 threads…
your Q4 number isn’t slipping — it’s already gone.
––
Full breakdown is in today’s SalesGSS newsletter -  https://lnkd.in/gZJeATBP

Wesleyne .

Sales Leadership Whisperer & Therapist | Transforming Sales Organizations By Training Sales Teams & Managers Together | Former Chemist Providing Effective, Edgy Sales Strategy | Ring My 🔔 for Sales Leadership Insights

Most CEOs don’t hire me because they need sales training.
They hire me because their sales team is underperforming and no one can explain why.

They’ve replaced leaders.
They’ve invested in tools.
They’ve tried quick wins.

But the numbers are still inconsistent.
Pipeline meetings feel like guesswork.
And only a few reps carry the weight.

That’s not a sales rep problem. It’s a leadership and system problem.

I help CEOs fix what’s actually broken.

We start with the root.
I evaluate your team across 21 core competencies.
We uncover the gaps you can’t see on a dashboard.
Then we rebuild from the inside out.

We coach your sales leaders to lead, not chase.
We align people, process, and performance.
We create a system your team believes in and can execute without micromanagement.

What does that look like in real life?
• A team stuck at 75 percent quota reached 136 percent after we restructured their strategy
• A sales manager ready to resign led an eight million dollar turnaround in sixty days
• A client closed a six-figure deal the day after one mindset session

If you don’t address the root, the cycle repeats.
More turnover. Missed numbers. Burnout at the top.
The cost is hidden, but real.

I work best with CEOs of companies where sales is complex and performance depends on leadership alignment
That includes manufacturing, industrial services, technical field sales, customer experience providers, and companies with long sales cycles and high-value deals

The sales problem won’t solve itself
But with the right system and leadership, it becomes predictable

Book a time to talk — link in the Featured section

The Transformed Sales Podcast Host

There are no comprehensive training programs for sales managers in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Manufacturing fields. Their sales teams are usually composed of technical people who have trouble simplifying complex products for prospects to understand. As a former chemist that transitioned into an international sales manager leading teams of technical sales reps, I understand the challenge of that new role.

I have developed a proprietary 7-step sales leadership blueprint based on my 12 years of experience that identifies the blind spots, gaps and inefficiencies in the process, teams and management of sales in technical fields. My coach like approach allows me to work alongside managers to develop their sales leadership and teaching skills.

Building strong teams starts with hiring the right people. My methodology equips managers with a science-based approach to identify weak links and strong salespeople within the organization. By utilizing an objective sales specific assessment tool, I guarantee candidates that are recommended will be within the top 50% of the sales organization within six months. 

Many new sales managers fail because they lack the framework to coach salespeople into sales superstars. They lean on what they did to become successful at sales and focus on the top 20% of their team that is producing the majority of the revenue. In order to overcome this, sales managers must develop a proactive sales coaching culture instead of providing ad hoc advice.  Working together, we develop a systematic and actionable sales process that any salesperson can use on day one as a roadmap to success. This allows the manager to develop individualized action plans allowing every salesperson on the team to perform at to their max potential, so they hit their monthly quotas. 

If you're a Science, Technology, Engineering or Manufacturing company & want to build a killer sales teams that hits quota monthly? contact me wgreer@transformedsales.com|281-941-7272

Wesleyne Whittaker

The hardest feedback I ever received came disguised as a quiet comment in a tense meeting.

I was leading my sales team through a rough quarter. 
You could feel the frustration settling in. 
Not loud. 
Not obvious. 
Just sitting underneath everything they said and did. 

So I asked, 
“What’s getting in your way?” 

One rep spoke up. 
“We just don’t feel seen.” 

My first instinct was to defend myself. 
To explain. 
To list everything I was doing to support them. 

But something in me said pause. 
So I did. 

And in that quiet moment, I finally heard what I had been missing. 
They didn’t need perfection. 
They needed presence. 

They didn’t want more structure or more direction. 
They wanted a leader who could sit in the truth with them without trying to fix it too fast. 

That meeting reminded me of something I’ve learned again and again. 
People rarely share their real truth first. 
They wait to see if you’re the kind of leader who can handle it. 

Listening isn’t passive. 
It’s leadership. 
It’s giving people the safety to be honest without bracing for your reaction. 

When was the last time you created enough space for someone to tell you what they really needed?

Your Sales Team Isn’t Broken. Your Strategy Is | Sales Struggles Are Strategy Problems. Not People Problems | BELIEF Selling™, the Framework CEOs Use to Drive Consistent Sales Execution

The hardest leadership lesson I learned this week had nothing to do with work. It started with me saying, I’m empty. 

I had a hard conversation with someone this week. 
Not a blow up. 
Not a conflict. 
Just the truth I’ve avoided saying out loud. 

“I’m emotionally tapped out. 
I don’t have anything else to give right now.” 

Those words felt heavy. 
Because I am used to being the strong one. 
The steady one. 
The one who keeps showing up even when my tank is past empty. 

But this week reminded me of something leadership and entrepreneurship have taught me again and again. 
You cannot keep giving from a place you refuse to acknowledge is drained. 

In sales we talk about follow through. 
In leadership we talk about support. 
In entrepreneurship we talk about grit and resilience. 

But we rarely talk about capacity. 
We rarely admit when the weight is too much. 
We rarely say, “I can’t keep carrying this alone.” 

That conversation taught me something important. 
Honesty creates alignment. 
When you name your limits, the right people rise to meet you. 
They decide whether they want to be part of the support or part of the strain. 

Sometimes the bravest thing you can say isn’t yes. 
It’s “I’m empty.” 
Because that’s the moment where real leadership begins. 

When was the last time you told the truth about what you no longer have the capacity to hold?

Seven years ago, I started Transformed Sales with more questions than answers. 
I didn’t have a blueprint. 
I didn’t have a team. 
I just had this quiet conviction that wouldn’t let me go. 

In those early days I kept wondering why talented people weren’t performing at the level they were capable of. 
And then I saw it up close. 
Not in the metrics. 
In the people. 

Most teams don’t struggle because they lack skill. 
They struggle because they don’t believe they can do more than what they’ve always done. 
The root always shows up in the fruit. 

I’ve worked with solopreneurs. 
I’ve worked with publicly traded companies. 
Different worlds. Same pattern. 
People grow first. 
Performance follows. 

The moment I understood that, everything shifted for me. 
My business. 
My leadership. 
My impact. 

I stopped fixing surface problems. 
I started helping leaders see what was happening inside their people. 
That’s when the real transformation happened. 

Seven years later, I’m grateful. 
For the clients who trusted me. 
For the rooms I never imagined I’d walk into. 
For the courage to keep going when it would’ve been easier to stop. 

If there’s one thing these seven years taught me it's 

Your next level won’t come from a new tactic. 
It’ll come from the version of you willing to believe differently about yourself. 

Seven years in. 
And I’m just getting started. 

What’s one belief you had to outgrow to reach your next level?

A client told me no and it forced me to face a truth I didn’t want to see.

I once met with a client I knew I could help. 
I brought the data. 
The results. 
The message I thought would land. 

And they still told me no. 

It stung. 
Not because I lost the opportunity. 
But because I knew I had missed something important. 

So instead of wrapping up and moving on, I asked, 
“What made you decide that?” 

The client looked at me and said, 
“You’re focused on selling the solution. 
You’re not focused on what we’re actually struggling with.” 

That sentence hit harder than the no. 

I went back and rebuilt my discovery process from the ground up. 
Less proving. 
More understanding. 
Less talking. 
More listening. 

Three months later, that same client came back and said yes. 
Not because the offer changed. 
Because I did. 

That’s when I learned no isn’t rejection. 
No is redirection. 
No is feedback. 
No is information. 
No is an invitation to grow. 

What could your last no be trying to teach you?

Here’s why most people struggle in sales

 
❌ They’re pitching on the first call
❌ Selling to everyone
❌ Showing 6–7 offers at once
❌ And creating proposals in a language the buyer doesn’t even use.
 
No wonder closing feels heavy.

One of the simplest frameworks I teach is the Two-Call Sales Process, and while chatting with Kris Ward on the Win the Hour Win the Day Podcast, I broke down exactly why it works and why so many sellers are unintentionally adding friction to the buyer journey.
 
📌 Niche until it hurts.
Stop trying to sell to the world.
The smallest niche you can confidently reach will always convert better than a massive one you can’t.
 
📌 First call is a discovery, NOT a pitch.
Not slides. Not demos. Not information-dumping.
Just connection, curiosity, and understanding your buyer’s world in their own language.
 
📌 Fewer offers equals fewer barriers
Have one clear offer, not five.
Buyers gain confidence when choices are simple.
You don’t need more packages.
 
📌 Proposals should sound like the client wrote them.
Mirror the buyer’s language so they feel seen, heard, and understood.
When buyers read their own language reflected back, they immediately feel alignment.
 
If you’ve been feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or like your sales calls aren’t converting the way they should, this episode will shift the way you think about selling forever.

Listen to the full episode https://lnkd.in/dYuMjFBx

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The Battle

Steve Litzow

Wesleyne Whittaker

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Engagements

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