The Boardroom Work
The best salespeople do things that many others don’t, but few can actually explain what those things are.
✧ It's the intangibles.
✧ The instincts.
✧ Knowing when to call.
✧ Understanding the inner workings and rhythms of a customer's business.
✧ Integrating yourself into their world in a way that makes their life easier.
When one of those reps leaves, customers don't just notice; they panic.
"What will we do without you?"
That reaction isn't about product knowledge or pricing. It's about the way that person showed up.
But ask that same rep to explain exactly what they do differently, and most can't. Not precisely.
Certainly not in a way someone else could replicate.
That's the problem most companies face. Their best people do things that work, and nobody's written it down.
It lives in instinct; in unconscious competence.
You can't train what you can't explain. You can't replicate what you can't articulate.
That's where the boardroom work comes in.
What Exactly Is the Boardroom Work?
It's the internal excavation that surfaces these behaviors.
Not a strategy session.
Not a pipeline review.
A deliberate effort to go 2-3 levels deeper on what your best people actually do, and why it matters to customers.
Most companies think they've done this work, but they haven't dug deep enough.
Who's in the Room
You want 4-5 people from the team. A mix of top performers, newer reps, and a leader to facilitate and referee. Everyone has a point of view worth hearing.
If the team is large, you select the people whose opinions will be most valuable and productive. The room can get too big to be productive, but you need enough perspective to pressure-test what you think you know.
The Core Questions
I wrote about these in the Five Forgotten Fundamentals of Prospecting back in 2017, and they still hold:
What makes you different?
What makes that valuable?
Why does that matter?
This is the foundation of your unique value proposition. But most companies stop here. They get surface-level answers and move on.
What "Surface" Looks Like
You know you're at the surface when your differentiators sound like this:
"Relationships"
"Trust"
"Experience"
"We really care about our customers."
These aren't wrong. They’re probably true.
But when most of your competitors are saying the same things, they're not differentiators.
The real question is: what's underneath those words that makes them true for you in a way that's different from everyone else?
"We have great relationships." → What specifically do you do that builds those relationships? What do your competitors not do?
"Trust" → Trust in what? How is that trust earned? What's the moment a customer realizes they trust you?
"Experience" → Experience doing what, specifically? What has that experience taught you that a less experienced competitor hasn't learned yet?
The Real Work: Going 2-3 Levels Deeper
You compile the differentiators. Great, we've got three.
Then you ask why.
Why is that valuable?
Why is that unique?
In what ways is it unique?
What are the buying motives that connect to this uniqueness?
What outcomes are we generating that competitors aren't?
Why are those outcomes different?
This is where most companies check out. The questions feel pedantic. The discussions feel circular. Someone in the room wants to wrap it up and get back to "real work."
But this is the real work.
What Happens in That Room
You start articulating things out loud.
You argue about the right term.
You push back on easy answers.
You have discussions that sound pedantic but are actually excavating clarity.
You're not just listing differentiators, you're pressure-testing them until you understand them well enough to validate externally.
The discomfort is a feature, not a bug. If it feels easy, you're not going deep enough.
The Asterisk: Charisma and Gravitas
Some of what makes top performers successful is nonverbal. Energy. Presence. That human element you can't fully train.
Influence is both verbal and nonverbal. Some people have a gravitas that attracts others to them, and that's something you can't systematize in a boardroom.
You have to acknowledge it. Hire for it. Leverage it when you have it.
But it's not the focus of this work.
You can't build a system on charisma, but you can build one on clarity.
The Payoff
The more clarity you have internally, the more easily you can go out and validate it with customers.
That's the next step: taking what you've uncovered in the boardroom and testing it in real conversations with your best customers. Not to sell them anything (at that time), but to learn whether what you think makes you different is actually what makes them buy.
But you can't validate what you haven't articulated.
And you can't articulate what you haven't excavated.
The boardroom work comes first.
This Is About More Than Messaging
This is about distilling What Good Looks Like Here. It’s adjacent to messaging and vital to it, but I want to be clear: the value you bring to the market is about much more than the words you use to communicate it.
Once you've done this excavation, you'll have the raw material to build your sales messaging, the words you use to articulate your value proposition.
If you need help with that part, my friend Mike Weinberg has a simple world-class framework. His AI-assisted Your Sales Story course is the best I've seen. Mike’s a legend, and this course is worth its weight in gold.
But the messaging comes after you've done the digging.
Most companies try to craft a story before they've uncovered the truth. That's backwards.
Do the boardroom work first. Then tell the story.
This is Part 1 of a series on doing the hard work up front that makes selling easier. Next up: Assumption vs. Evidence
