Lean Principles for High Performance Selling
Matt Gaskin joins Marcus Cauchi to challenge sales dogma, expose hidden inefficiencies, and lay out lean principles for high performance selling. But with a humane approach.
🔍 What if selling wasn’t about ‘closing’ but about making it effortless for customers to buy?
This episode dismantles outdated, wasteful, and buyer-hostile sales tactics, replacing them with Lean principles, built on respect, trust, and ruthless efficiency.
🔥 Sales teams waste 60–80% of their time on the wrong work. Want to fix that?
🚀 What You’ll Learn
1️⃣ The Brutal Truth About Sales Waste
- ❌ Chasing bad-fit leads that will never buy.
- ❌ Lying to customers, overpromising, hiding flaws, forcing urgency.
- ❌ Measuring the wrong things, such as activity instead of meaningful progress.
💡 Lean principles for high performance selling
Lean sales isn’t about doing more. It’s about removing everything that doesn’t serve the buyer.
2️⃣ The Buyer’s Brain is Wired for Threat Detection
- Every sales process either builds trust or triggers alarms.
- Objections = proof buyers don’t feel safe yet.
- The question isn’t “How do we close more?” but “How do we make it safe to buy?”
3️⃣ Selling is the Art of Elimination
🛠️ Sales is like sculpting: chip away everything that doesn’t belong.
🔍 What’s slowing down decisions? What’s making buying harder? Remove it.
4️⃣ Lean = Power to the Frontline
- Salespeople should own their process like engineers own Lean manufacturing.
- Leadership’s job: remove roadblocks, not create more.
- Sales, finance, marketing, and operations must work as one system.
5️⃣ Failure is a Superpower (If You Use It Right)
✅ Track mistakes. Learn weekly. Improve constantly.
✅ Eliminate what’s not working instead of ‘trying harder’.
✅ Most sales teams repeat bad habits instead of evolving. Be different.
6️⃣ What Happens When You Apply Lean to Sales?
- Better qualification = less wasted effort
- Smarter targeting = more trust, faster deals
- Process built for buyers = salespeople who love their job
💡 The best sales teams don’t ‘sell’, they create clarity, eliminate doubt, and let customers step forward.
🛠️ 5 Things to Do Right Now
✅ Audit your sales process. Where are you creating friction?
✅ Start a Failure Log. Track bad outcomes, tweak, and improve weekly.
✅ Kill bad-fit leads early. Prioritise buying intent over quantity.
✅ Get outside the sales bubble. Spend time with customers and frontline teams.
✅ Ask this question daily: “What conditions make it easy for customers to say YES?”
🎯 Final Thought
💡 “Most sales teams are optimised for busywork, not outcomes. What would your process look like if your only goal was to make buying effortless?”
Connect on LinkedIn
Books
Jeffrey Liker – The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership https://amzn.to/4i1qPPk
Podcast Ryan Tierney – https://www.leanmadesimple.com/podcast
