Mike Groeneveld

GTM Advisor | Extreme Ownership | Servant Leader | Angel Investor | VP of Global Sales at Everstage

Vice President of Global Sales

Everstage can help you unlock the power of incentives and turn your sales teams into a revenue-generating weapon. Sales commissions automation saves time, motivates your payees, achieves high-accuracy commissions and wins more deals. Hyper-growth companies like Chargebee, Postman, Nitro, Thought Machine and Sosafe trust Everstage to automate their commissions process.

Learn more about Everstage here - www.everstage.com

This AE blew a $250K deal by doing the exact thing most “smart” rep does under pressure.

He showed them everything.

Can we please stop showing every single thing to our prospects?

He walked in with the ROI spreadsheets, the architecture diagrams, and a feature tour that hit every checkbox before the buyer even opened their mouth. He showed everything because he thought information equaled value.

The prospect nodded the whole time. Then they gave him the "Kiss of Death": “Looks good. Send us the deck.”

That deal is dead. Not because the product was bad, but because the rep was too busy talking to actually listen.

I always stick to one first principle: Talk less. Listen more. Every extra slide you show is just another thing that can break in the buyer's mind.

Every feature you dump on them adds weight: more training, more rollout, more reasons for them to say, “Not this quarter.” You think you're proving value; you’re actually just creating fatigue.

In 2026, the "Information Dump" is a liability. Your prospect doesn't want a tour; they want relief.

If you’re hiding behind a 50-slide deck, you aren't selling, you're entertaining. And buyers don't sign for entertainment. They sign because you found the one thing that was keeping them up at night and you showed them how to fix it.

Stop over-explaining the logic. Start asking the questions that make the room go quiet. If you don't know what happens to that buyer personally if this project fails, you haven't even started the deal yet.

Earn the right to show the product by listening to the problem first.

SVP of Global Sales @ Everstage | Scaling B2B SaaS from 0-$100M | Extreme Ownership | Angel Investor

Saw an SMB rockstar rep PROMOTED as an enterprise rep. Six months down, this rep is on a PIP.

I love seeing reps grow. I promote people fast when they’ve earned it.

But I’m going to say the quiet part out loud: A lot of “SMB → Enterprise” promotions are career traps when the leader treats it like a title change instead of a nervous-system change.

Because the hardest part of enterprise sales has nothing to do with procurement.

It’s the silence.

In SMB, you get dopamine every week. Deals move. Prospects reply. You feel momentum.

In enterprise, you do great work, and then nothing happens for a while. No reply. No calendar movement. No clear “yes” or “no.”

Just a long, uncomfortable pause.

That’s dopamine withdrawal. And dopamine withdrawal does something ugly to good reps: They start reaching for a hit.

So they create activity that looks “busy” but actually hurts the deal.

↳ “Just checking in…”
↳ “Any update on this?”
↳ “Can we pull forward the timeline?”
↳ Discounting early to get a response
↳ Pushing the champion when the champion has zero leverage

They’re not being sloppy. They’re being human. They’re trying to fix the anxiety with motion.

Enterprise punishes that. Quietly.

Now the part leaders need to hear: If you promote someone and keep measuring them like SMB, you’re setting them up.

You’re asking for sprint metrics in a marathon. You’re asking for velocity where the system is designed for patience.

So the rep starts thinking they’re failing, when they’re actually ramping. Confidence drops. Panic rises. Bad habits show up. The deal gets suffocated.

Then we label it “they weren’t ready.” Sometimes they were ready. We weren’t.

My rule: if I make that promotion, I own the transition. That means I do three things immediately.

1. Warn them about the dopamine gap.

Tell them the truth: “You’ll feel like you’re doing nothing some weeks. You’re doing the work. It just doesn’t clap back instantly.”

2. Redefine what a win looks like.

In enterprise, a win can be: Getting looped into security early. Mapping power across three functions. Getting a second stakeholder meeting. Champion coaching that doesn’t feel urgent, but moves the internal story forward

3. Protect them from fake urgency.

Don’t turn their first 90 days into a weekly judgment cycle. Don’t make them explain every quiet week like it’s a crime.

Because enterprise sales isn’t hard because it’s complex. It’s hard because it’s slow. And slow messes with your head.

So if you’re a leader and you’re promoting an SMB star into enterprise, please hear this: Don’t rush the process. Don’t hand them a bigger quota and call it “growth.” If you made the call, you own the ramp.

Otherwise, the silence will do what it always does. It won’t teach them. It’ll break them.

And that’s a leadership failure. Not a rep failure.

I don’t care if you worked at a decacorn. Tell me about the time you lost your biggest deal and how you didn’t quit the next morning.

A famous logo makes a lot of reps look great. When the brand does the heavy lifting and the market is hot, quota becomes a wave you can ride. Plenty of people hit 120% in those years.

2026 won’t reward that.

This is a grind year. Buyers are tighter. Committees are slower. Champions move. Budgets get questioned. The rep who only knows how to sell with wind at their back will get exposed fast.

So the resume I care about is different.

I want the rep who can say, “I lost the deal at the one-yard line. Here’s why it happened. Here’s what I changed. And here’s what I did the next morning.”

I want the rep who lived through a pivot, a churn spike, a territory getting carved up, a manager who stopped believing, and still kept producing.

Because that’s what builds a real seller.

“Logo reps” usually fold the moment the brand stops opening doors. And that’s not a character flaw. It’s a training gap. They never had to build their own edge.

Grit is a muscle. You don’t get it from trophies. You get it from getting hit and showing up anyway.

A resume full of big names and President’s Club from the easy years doesn’t tell the story.

The story is what happened when everything went wrong.

That’s the only thing that predicts who survives the year ahead.

Most sales leaders think a paycheck on the 15th is what keeps a rep hungry. They’re wrong.

In 2026, the game is won or lost on anticipation, not the reward. If you’re waiting until the end of the month to show your team the money, I think you’ve already lost the mental battle.

Dopamine isn't the “I got paid” moment. That’s a rear-view mirror. Real dopamine is the “I’m close” moment. It’s the spike that hits when a rep feels the hunt working. It’s why an AE can take ten brutal “no’s” and still make the eleventh call, they’re chasing the feeling that the next one is the break.

The problem though, is that most comp systems are ledgers, not triggers.

The flow is always: Close deal → Wait for Ops → Wait for Finance → Payout weeks later. 

By the time that money hits the bank account, the brain has already moved on. You haven't reinforced the behavior, you’ve just paid for history.

I call it the Dopamine Gap.

When a rep can’t see the needle move today, they stop feeling the itch. If the follow-up, the multi-threading, and the next-step locking don't show immediate progress, the brain says, “This can wait.”

In the old world, the AE finishes a demo at 2pm, feels tired, and closes their laptop.

In the 2026 world, the AE logs a Mutual Action Plan, adds a stakeholder, and their dashboard updates instantly. Their projected payout ticks up. Their accelerator progress moves.

That tiny “I can see this working” moment is the performance lever. It’s progress, not just work. And progress is addictive.

Real-time earnings visibility is not a "nice-to-have" UI feature. It is a psychological necessity. If your reps can’t see their potential earnings update live as they move a deal forward before it even closes, you are leaving a stupid amount of energy on the table.

In a global sales engine, energy is the only currency that matters. Stop paying for history. Start fueling the hunt.

If you’ve marked a deal ‘Commit’ in your 2026 forecast, it can be a lie.

I recently audited two deals marked as 'Commit' in a forecast, one for $92k and another for $140k. The notes were identical: ‘Buyer is confident, the champion is engaged, and calls are going well.’

But after years of doing this, you realize that ‘going well’ isn’t a forecast. It’s just a pleasant conversation.

In 2026, we have to stop mistaking momentum for a commitment. Momentum is polite, but a real Commit is an exchange of capital.

If your buyer hasn’t risked their time, their internal reputation, or their budget, they aren't actually in your forecast. I’ve learned to start looking for friction as a sign of health. Real deals are uncomfortable because the buyer has to stick their neck out to fight for a line item.

Before you call a deal a ‘Commit,’ look for these specific signals:

↳ Legal: Not a status update, but returned redlines with a firm signature date attached to the timeline.

↳ Security: Documented architectural clearance from the stakeholders, not just a ‘heads up’ to the IT team.

↳ Ownership: The buyer has written the internal business case or Board memo themselves. If your team is still writing their decks for them, it’s not a Commit.

↳ Power: Access to the 'Secret Boss', the person who can kill the deal without ever meeting you. If you haven’t looked them in the eye, you have a wish, not a win.

A forecast built on a rep’s 'gut feeling' is ultimately a leadership failure. Feelings don't pay the bills, and they don't hold up in a QBR.

Belief is free. Commitment costs the buyer political capital. If they haven’t spent any of that capital yet, you don’t have a forecast. You have a fantasy. And you simply cannot run a global revenue engine on a fantasy.

Saw a Reddit thread: “I just fired my AI email writer tool for outbound that was supposed to scale my business.”

Their Tier-1 prospect told them: “I’m not a prompt. Stop treating me like one.”

That line should scare every sales team right now.

Because the tools are getting better. Faster, cleaner, and more “on brand.”

Outbound is getting worse.

Not because the sentences are broken. Because the human is missing.

Understand this: AI can help you write. But it can’t help you notice. It can’t help you care. It can’t help you hold context when a buyer is drowning in meetings, pressure, internal politics, and ten other vendors saying the same thing with different synonyms.

Prospects don’t hate automation. They hate feeling processed. They hate feeling like they’re step 3 in somebody’s workflow.

They hate when the email sounds like it was built to “get a reply” instead of built to show, “I actually understand what you’re dealing with.”

And the part sales leaders need to own: reps should use AI to remove admin friction, not to avoid the hardest part of selling, which is THINKING.

Thinking takes energy. It requires attention. It forces you to have an opinion about what matters to this specific buyer, in this specific moment.

A template feels safe, and a prompt probably feels productive. But a Tier-1 buyer can smell it from a mile away.

So here’s a simple 24-hour reset I’d challenge every rep to do:

Turn that bot off, and write like a human again. Don’t try to be poetic or clever, it might not work anyway. So, just be human.

Use real words that people use in conversations instead of writing like you swallowed the Oxford Dictionary.

Use this structure:

1. One specific reason you reached out (an actual observation, not flattery)
2. One honest hypothesis about what might be shifting in their world
3. One question that lets them correct you

That’s like person talking. Not a machine “personalizing.”

And if you do use AI, use it where it belongs:

- tightening your own draft
- removing fluff
- making it shorter
- fixing clarity

Do not use it to outsource your thinking. Because your prospect is not a prompt.

And if they feel like one, you’re already dead in the deal.

If the deal only works when your champion is in the room, you don’t have a deal. You have a BABYSITTER.

A lot of reps get fooled because the deal feels “easy.”

Calls happen, everyone’s friendly, and the next steps keep moving. 

That’s usually your champion doing unpaid work behind the scenes. They’re the one pulling people into meetings, calming internal drama, and making your thing sound safer than it is.

The moment they leave is when you finally meet the real account.

So don’t ask, “Who’s my backup champion?” That’s amateur hour. Ask the question your forecast is scared of: “Who inside this company wants this deal to fail?”

Every org has one. Sometimes it’s Finance. Sometimes it’s IT. Sometimes it’s the VP who hates anything they didn’t pick. If you don’t know that person and you don’t know their reason, your deal is built on vibes.

One more check: if your champion resigned tomorrow, would anyone still chase this without being asked?

If the answer is unclear, well I don’t have to tell you that it’s bad news.

And you should stop calling it pipeline. It’s a relationship with an expiry date.

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