Tom Pisello

Tom Pisello is a founder, CEO, speaker, and author with over 30 years of experience in value marketing and selling, sales enablement, and go-to-market (GTM) strategy. He is the founder of and Partner at Genius Drive, a consultancy that helps organizations craft, communicate, and quantify their value story to prospects and customers.

Tom is also a growth evangelist and a purpose-driven leader who founded Growth through Grief, a ministry and resource for widowers, and the Enterprise Value Collective (EVC) a community for value-centric sales, marketing and customer success professionals. 

Tom has authored several books on value management, enablement, and selling (Evolved Selling and Frugalnomics Survival Guide), and co hosts The Value Coffee Talk podcast. Tom is passionate about helping others achieve their personal and professional goals through value storytelling and leveraging a growth mindset.

When not at work, you can find Tom working out, running, playing piano, writing poetry and articles at a local Chelsea coffee shop, checking out vintage 356 or air-cooled 911 Porsches (for when he has a garage again), or walking the streets of New York City (with the Staying Alive soundtrack playing in his head).

Founder / CEO

Helping organizations better craft, communicate and quantify their value story to ever-more economic focused prospects and customers.

2025: It's a Wrap

Thank you all for such an incredible growth year: more than doubling our community memberships and podcast / article downloads!

See the stats: what you and the Business Value Collective community said were the most popular insight articles, podcasts and white papers. 

https://lnkd.in/dDy54W28

#valueselling #GTM #B2B
Genius Drive

Founder/Partner @ value selling consulting firm Genius Drive | Podcaster | Author | Helping B2B Solution Providers with Inspired Value Storytelling for improved Sales, Marketing and Customer Success

🎉 What does 2026 have in store?

Checkout my top 5 predictions for the New Year here: https://lnkd.in/dvf9wvZ8

#valueselling #GTM #B2B
Business Value Collective
Genius Drive

Ever want to get Inside the mind 🧠 of a PE Operating Partner, to learn what's working best (and what to absolutely avoid)? 

🎙️ Checkout our podcast with Mike Slater here: https://lnkd.in/eVwvgkbG

#PE #B2B #GTM

Genius Drive
Business Value Collective

👉 Value Leaders and Practitioners: Checkout this interview with Mike Samuels, revenue and value veteran at Pendo, to learn exactly how to optimize your value practice for 2026. ✅ 

🎙️ View the episode here: https://lnkd.in/eFMjUu6b

#valuemanagement #valueselling #GTM
Genius Drive
Business Value Collective

🎉 Realized Value: An absolute mandate for 2026 Customer Success.

Checkout the 🧠 research on why this should be your #1 priority for the New Year, and what our Business Value Collective shared is working best, where you should be investing, and what you definitely should avoid when it comes to Realized Value.

👉 Read more:
https://lnkd.in/d5hSirdF

#realizedvalue #valueselling #customersuccess
Genius Drive

Loved this conversation with Ray Meiring!

In the latest episode of the Value Coffee Talk podcast, Tom Pisello sits down with Ray Meiring, CEO of QorusDocs, to explore why proposals without value are destined to fall flat.

Ray shares a powerful analogy. A proposal without value is like a light bulb without electricity. It might look polished, but without the power of clearly articulated business value, it simply does not work.

Together, they discuss how proposal volumes are rising across industries, from technology to legal, professional services, and engineering. At the same time, proposals are becoming more complex, expectations are higher, and AI is pushing teams to move faster. In this environment, speed alone is not enough. Trust, credibility, and value must be present from the very first interaction.

The conversation dives into why value modeling must be embedded directly into proposals, not treated as a separate exercise. When proposals combine strong storytelling, compelling presentation, and defensible business value, they resonate with stakeholders, earn trust, and drive better buying decisions.

🔗 Watch the full episode: https://lnkd.in/g-GYDj2y 

We are proud to sponsor the Value Coffee Talk podcast. Follow Business Value Collective to stay up to date on the community resources.

#GeniusDrive #ValueCoffeeTalk #Podcast #ValueSelling #ProposalManagement #RevenueLeadership #ValueEnablement #GTMStrategy #B2BSaaS #BusinessValue

✅  Checkout a valuable Value Coffee Talk episode with Angela Hughes , revenue acceleration leader from Ping Identity 🔒 - on how to best elevate customer conversations to drive bigger opportunities and better win rates. 📈 

🎙️ https://lnkd.in/eq9BksPh

#b2b #salesenablement #valueselling
Genius Drive
Business Value Collective

🚀 New Episode Alert! 🎙️

🤔 Ever wondered if sales engineers hold the key to unlocking customer value? 

In Episode 91 of Value Coffee Talk, I sit down with Stephen Morse, CEO of the SE Leadership Institute, to explore how SEs are evolving beyond technical roles 🛠️ into strategic value creators. 💵 

👉 Listen now: https://lnkd.in/dJFtJvrk

#Podcast #SalesEngineering #ValueSelling
Genius Drive
Business Value Collective

Open article: Episode 91: Unlocking Customer Value - Do Sales Engineers Hold The Key? by geniusdrive.com

Episode 91: Unlocking Customer Value - Do Sales Engineers Hold The Key?

What's next for Value Leaders in 2026? Checkout @Max Elster's take here in this Value Coffee Talk podcast!

Max Elster, CEO and Founder of Minoa, explains that value teams are evolving from deal support to value orchestration. The modern value leader no longer focuses on building isolated business cases, but on owning the end to end value narrative across the entire go to market motion.

In this new role, value teams align sales, marketing, customer success, and product around a shared value framework. They ensure every asset, message, and customer conversation ties back to real use cases, outcomes, and consistent positioning. This shift is being driven by CROs and executive teams who want value to operate as a system, not a one off activity.

Value leaders are becoming the owners of how value is defined, communicated, and scaled. Orchestrating value is now a leadership responsibility, not just an enablement function.

#GeniusDrive #ValueCoffeeTalk #Podcast #ValueSelling #ValueLeadership #ValueEngineering #GTMStrategy #RevenueGrowth #CustomerOutcomes #ValueOrchestration #B2BSaaS #SalesEnablement

🚀 New Value Coffee Talk Episode! 🎙️

In Episode 90, I talk with Tom Canning, experienced CRO and Operating Advisor, about the emotional toll GTM and sales teams face when customer priorities shift and deals slip out of their control. We dig into why burnout is so common - and how to build resilience to stay confident and successful.

Key points to inspire you into the New Year:
 • Burnout often stems from lack of control
 • Customer shifts create stress and uncertainty
 • Emotional resilience is essential in GTM
 • Strong support systems help reduce burnout

👉 Listen here: https://lnkd.in/eMAnUDwQ

#GTM #SalesLeadership #Resilience
Genius Drive
Business Value Collective

Open article: Episode 90: B2B GTM - The Emotional Toll of Customer Control by geniusdrive.com

Episode 90: B2B GTM - The Emotional Toll of Customer Control

David Brock

Partners In EXCELLENCE

Partners In EXCELLENCE helps its clients OutPerform and OutSell their competitors.  We are a global consulting company focused on business strategy development, M&A integration, strategic partnering, turnarounds, and sales excellence.  Our clients represent global 500 technology, industrial, telecom, professional services leaders; as well as high growth technology start-ups.

Founder/CEO

DecisionLink

DecisionLink  is a powerful tool to help sales people develop and communicate differentiated value through all phases of the Customer Buying Process.  It enables sales people to engage the customer in provocative, data based conversations in their very first call.  It engages the customer in building the value delivery model, collaboratively through the sales process.  www.decisionlink.com

Member of the Advisory Board

Akoonu

Board Of Directors

Accompany

Member Of The Board Of Advisors

Future Selling Institute

Future Selling Institute is a community focused on the personal, professional, and career development of Sales Leaders.

www.futuresellinginstitute.com provides a range of learning resources, webcasts, interviews, white papers, tools, expert and peer discussions critical to anyone invovled in leading the sales function in their organization.

Co-Founder

Pertinence

AI based analytics focused on manufacturing process improvement and predictive maintenance.

Founding Team, COO

Keithley

Vice President

Tektronix

Director

We help organizations and individuals achieve profound improvements in their ability to achieve their goals.  Focusing on the customer facing side of the organization, we work with sales and marketing organizations to effectively and efficiently reach their customers---OutPerforming and OutSelling their competition.

We are recognized experts in sales productivity/effectiveness, channel development, strategic alliances/partnering, value proposition development, leadership and business strategy.

We have a global consulting practice, supporting clients and individuals in every continent.  Our experience spans many industries, including technology industries (IT hardware, software, services, telecom, semiconductor, electronic components, scientific instrumentation, data acquisition, process control), industrial products, basic materials, financial and professional services, consumer products, retail, not for profit and other sectors.

We work with Global 50 through early stage companies, around the world.

We provide coaching and mentoring to individuals ranging from CEO through individual contributors.

Our work is published in many magazines and blogs.  We speak widely in conferences and with individual companies.

Specialties: Maximizing the productivity, impact and effectiveness of sales professionals.
Strategy development and execution on Routes To Market/Channels.
Development and implementation of Strategic Partnerships and Alliances.
Developing and communicating differentiated value propositions.
New product introductions and launches.
Development and execution of high impact business strategies.
Leadership development, coaching and mentoring.
Market strategy, segmentation and research.

Author of the Sales Manager Survival Guide.  Called "THE Go-To resource for sales managers."


If you are curious about the book, Is "Good Enough" Good Enough, Mindsets and Behaviors for Sales Excellence.

But you are struggling to find the time to read it....

I've created a series of short videos that summarize the key points of each chapter.

It allows you to quickly understand the key ideas, perhaps also wetting your appetite to read the entire book.  Enjoy!
https://lnkd.in/gsWFj2CP

Author "Sales Manager Survival Guide,"​ CEO at Partners In EXCELLENCE, Ruthless Pragmatist

As we start the New Year, let me pose a provocative question;

Why do we continue to invest so heavily in losing?

Many of you will react, "Dave, you're crazy, we're winning!  We hit our numbers for 2025!  And we are going to do more in 2026!"

But when you look at it, we are dumping millions of dollars into things that produce worsening results.   Acceptable win rates are now in the 15-20% range.  This means we are investing in losing 80-85% of the deals we compete in!

Percent of reps hitting goal is in the mid-30% range.  Rather than understanding what causes that poor performance, we churn through people, asking them to do the same things, producing the same bad results.

We invest in tools, technologies, AI to amplify what we are doing, yet not changing the results produced.

Yet, so many say, "We are hitting the numbers!"

What these people are missing is, they could be doing so much more--at virtually no incremental cost.

What if we looked at the money we are spending to lose 80-85% of our deals and asked, "What do we need to do differently?  How do we reallocate our investments to improve our win rates?"

Something as simple as increasing win rates by 50%.  Moving from a 15% win rate to a 22.5% win rate, drives a 50% increase in revenue!

Making this change requires breaking out of doing what we have always done, looking at how we can learn, change, grow, and improve.  It's focusing on how we get more out of every dollar we invest, rather than just throwing more money at the same problem.

As we move into 2026, it's an opportunity to do a reset.  We need to think about the mindsets and behaviors that drive higher performance.

It means, initially, identifying one change, then dedicating ourselves to implementing that change.

It all comes down to choice.  What choice will you make for this New Year?

All the best for an exciting 2026!
https://lnkd.in/gSpPRYYD

As we start the New Year, we create all sorts of resolutions focused on improvement and doing better.

Here's something counterintuitive: Mediocrity is actually harder than excellence.
We think settling for "good enough" is easier. Going through the motions conserves energy. We're being practical.

We've got it wrong.

We still have to show up. We still have to do the work.

Hit the activity metrics. Send the emails. Make the calls. Attend the meetings. Update CRM. Deal with difficult customers and managers pushing us about pipelines and numbers.

None of that goes away because we've lowered our standards.  We still have to put in the hours.

But there's another factor that makes "good enough" tougher than excellence.

It's the weight of knowing.

Knowing we aren't as prepared as we should be. Knowing we should have asked better questions. Knowing we aren't connecting—and scrambling to fix it on the fly.

Then there are the shortcuts that don't produce what we hoped. So we double down, creating more work. Or we give up, making more excuses. Customers ghost us because we wasted their time.

Then, we find ourselves spending more time defending our mediocrity—to managers, others, ourselves—than doing the work.

We're not taking the easier path. It feels easy in the next five minutes, but costs us more over the ensuing months.

The work is hard either way. The question is what we get back from it.

Excellence is hard work that builds something.

Mediocrity is hard work that doesn't.

We have to put in the work. The choice is what we get back from it.
https://lnkd.in/guDpXRUP

Nobody wants to be mediocre, but why do so many settle for it?

Ask any salesperson if they want to hit the President’s Club. Do they want to be the top earner?  Do they want the top job? The answer is always, "ABSOLUTELY!"

Leaders are the same; they want the top-performing team, recognition, and potential promotion.  They want their organization to be the envy of the industry.

But desire is cheap. Nobody wants to be mediocre, yet so many settle for it. 

Why?

Because we fall in love with the result, but we despise the process. We want the outcome without the grind.

We chase the "easy path," the hacks, the shortcuts, the guru’s playbook, the AI prompts.  We ignore the years of failure and adaptation that actually built their success.

Mark Manson suggests the most important question of our lives isn’t: "What do you want?" but "What are you willing to struggle for?"

If you want to kill mediocrity, you must look at the gap between what you want and the struggle required to get it:

Sellers want the income of a top performer. The struggle, however, is the rejection of rigorous prospecting. The tedium of deep research. The discipline to stop pitching and start truly understanding the customer.

Leaders want the recognition and the high-performing team. The struggle: The discomfort of difficult conversations. The patience required for genuine coaching. The exhausting discipline of modeling excellence every single hour of the day.

If you look at that list and think, "That’s too much work," you have chosen mediocrity.

The reality is that mediocrity is the harder path.

It requires effort to show up and do the bare minimum. You still have to work. But you do it while carrying the heavy mental weight of knowing you are underperforming. You carry the regret of potential left on the table.
Failure is harder than succeeding.

So, stop asking yourself what you want. Ask yourself: What am I willing to struggle for?
https://lnkd.in/gtiPs3Bs

Wow Craig! It took me close to 200 pages to say what you said so concisely. Thank you! Excellence is a journey, we can never settle, we have to constantly be challenging ourselves to get better.

Nimble CRM Trainer & Consultant Offering Customized Solutions for Solopreneurs & Small Teams | Unsure if Nimble CRM is Right for You? Book Your FREE 30-Minute Zoom Call Now!

I have just finished reading David Brock 's newest book, “Is Good Enough Good Enough.” Let’s just say that, despite being in B2B sales and management for close to 50 years, I have work to do😊 It’s like looking in a mirror and not liking what you see. However, I’m always up for a challenge!

If you are currently in sales, or sales management, and I don’t care how successful you are or you think you are, this book is a must read! I have been mostly-retired for about 18 years now so I am no longer fully active in the selling game. 

So, why am I reading it? I am always interested in anything that Dave has to say, insatiable curiosity, and because the principles that Dave discusses are applicable in your personal as well as in your selling lives. Get yours on Amazon! https://lnkd.in/gq-K2P-2

A few key takeaways … 

●     Curiosity counts! I already scored high in this area 😊
●     Accountability vs excuses. What could I have done better?
●     Becoming buyer vs seller centric. Guess which wins!
●     Quality trumps quantity. Do not confuse activity with productivity.
●     Practice makes permanent. This is how habits and reflex are formed.
●     Consistency wins! It might be boring but the results make up for it!
●     Many great lessons come from failures. Fail forward.
●     Adapt or die. What worked 5 years ago, won’t necessarily work today.
●     There is a huge difference between “knowing” and “doing.”
●     The right mindsets and behaviors will drive sales success!
●     In the long run, being excellent takes less effort than being mediocre.
●     Build excellence. Good enough is rarely good enough!

I fully expect to read this book at least 3 times. Dave has also developed a wonderful AI interface to help you along as you progress. Thanks, Dave!

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David Brock

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