"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It's that they can't see the problem. They can't see the problem if they are looking in the wrong place. They can't see the problem if they have blinders on - for 'none are so blind as those that will not see'."

Gilbert K. Chesterton

We're going to start off our time together with some reflective thinking, as we apply this quote directly to CEOs and Presidents.

Let's face it, there are many CEOs who operate at an extremely strategic altitude, which in some instances, creates a disconnect from the day-to-day realities of their sales teams.

A CEO might see declining sales and start making assumptions, things such as, issues with pricing or marketing, when in reality, the sales team may be demoralized, undertrained, or misaligned with the product strategy.

If the CEO doesn’t engage directly with salespeople or frontline managers, they may never see the real problem.

A CEO might focus on CRM data, quarterly reports, or client churn rates (all valid), but miss the interpersonal dynamics, morale, or cultural issues within the sales team.

Real meaningful insights often come from ride-alongs, one-on-one conversations, or just plain feedback, not just spreadsheets.

A CEO may hold outdated beliefs about what motivates salespeople or may be resistant to hearing criticism about leadership or company culture.

If a CEO surrounds themselves with yes people, they may never hear the truth.

Question becomes... What can a CEO do differently in this post-trust sales world?

• Get closer to the sales team by regularly meeting with them, not just VPs.

• Encourage open and honest feedback by creating safe spaces for conversations.

• Challenge assumptions by asking, What might I be missing? or What would I see if I were in their shoes?

• Use data plus empathy by combining analytics with human insight to get a full picture of the sales team.

A Wake-Up Call for CEOs

As CEO, you carry the ultimate responsibility, growth, profit, and sustainability.

You pore over dashboards, forecast pipelines, and build strategies designed to scale. But let’s press pause for a moment.

Here’s the question you may not want to ask yourself... Do I really know my salespeople?

By this I mean, not the quotas they hit or miss. Not the deals they win or stall. Not the CRM updates they input.

What I’m talking about is their character, their core competencies, and their consistency, in other words, the human engine that drives your revenue. What makes them tick? What are they capable of?

In this post-trust world, the companies that win are those built on truth, love, and trust. And those virtues don’t show up in a KPI report, they show up in how your people show up.

Let's get this out on the table, this isn’t a motivational speech. It’s my challenge to you.

Because what your sales culture reveals is a direct reflection of you.

In Selling from the Heart, we know that authentic sales cultures start at the top. If trust is missing on the front lines, it probably started in the boardroom.

Your people crave real leadership, not inspection, but introspection.

Now, I'm going to ask you to ask yourself:

• Do I truly know my salespeople?

• Do my sales leaders model integrity or just enforce accountability?

• Have I created a culture where trust isn’t a strategy but a standard?

The real growth engine isn’t just in your process. It’s in your people.

Are you willing to lead from the heart or are you just managing from a spreadsheet?

Why the Sales Numbers Game Is Leading You Off Track

Running on dashboards, metrics, and KPIs... This becomes easy for CEOs to mistake visibility for understanding. Revenue projections, CRM dashboards, and pipeline velocity reports may provide a snapshot, but they rarely capture the soul of your sales team.

You can be rich in data and poor in insight.

You can’t lead authentically if you don’t know your people.

Allow this to be a wake-up call not just for sales leaders but for CEOs. If you want sustainable growth and I know you do, you must move beyond the what of sales performance and dive deep into the who behind the numbers.

Here's the uncomfortable truth. The sales world is drowning in empty suits, those who look sharp on paper but lack the relational depth, inner conviction, and emotional intelligence to inspire trust and deliver value.

The further removed you are from the front lines, the easier it is to assume your people are fine because the numbers look good.

Performance without purpose is fragile and not sustainable.

Ask yourself:

• When was the last time I truly listened to my salespeople, not about their quotas, but about their purpose?

• Can I name what drives them beyond their compensation plans?

• Have I cultivated a culture where relationships and character matter as much as win rates?

Heart-centered leadership isn't just a soft skill; it's a growth strategy.

Clarity Begins with the Trust Formula, But Only If You’re Willing to Look in the Mirror

If you want to forecast revenue with confidence, don’t just audit your sales teams' pipeline, audit trust.

The Trust Formula isn’t just a framework for salespeople. It’s a diagnostic tool for leaders.

Here's the formula:

• AR – Authentic Relationships

• MV – Meaningful Value

• IE – Inspirational Experiences

• DH – Disciplined Habits

These are not soft skills, they are core skills in a post-trust world. And they don’t start with your team; they start with you.

So, reflect:

• Are your frontline leaders building authentic relationships, or do they default to managing through metrics?

• Is your team delivering meaningful value that goes beyond features and benefits and speaks to the heart of the client’s challenge?

• Is your client experience inspiring or is it just a series of steps toward a transaction?

• Are disciplined habits embedded in your culture or are they wishfully listed in slide decks and quarterly memos?

Sales growth is a reflection of your cultural operating system.

If even one part of the Trust Formula is missing, your growth is capped. No strategy, CRM, or reorg will fix what only culture and character can solve.

Sales Leadership Is Not Sales Management, and the Cost of Confusing the Two Is Culture

Sales management counts the dirt. Sales leadership cultivates the soil.

Management is tactical. Things like quotas, pipelines, and spreadsheets. Leadership is transformational. Things like character, trust, and coaching.

You can’t coach what you don’t model.

As CEO, the real scoreboard is not just revenue. It’s how revenue is earned.

Ask yourself:

• Are my sales leaders known for developing people, or for driving reports?

• Do they invest in their reps beyond training, do they really know their stories, their fears, their motivations?

• Are they equipping their team to sell with authenticity, or just pressure?

The best sales leaders build teams that are trusted by the market because they are rooted in trust internally.

This might be the cold glass of water... Your culture is perfectly designed for the results you’re getting.

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Questions Every CEO Must Ask, If Growth and Trust Actually Matter

Most CEOs obsess over dashboards, but the metrics that matter most often go unmeasured. You want to grow? Then it all starts by asking better questions, the kind that challenge assumptions and illuminate blind spots.

Here’s your real leadership audit:

1. Do I know who on my sales team is relational and who is just transactional?

Let's be real, not everyone sells the same way. Yet, if you manage them like they do, you’re managing from convenience, not conviction.

Relational sellers build trust before they ask for attention. Transactional sellers chase short-term wins and burn long-term equity. If you don’t know the difference or worse, if you’re unknowingly rewarding the wrong behavior, then you’re killing culture and compounding sales churn.

Your team’s authentic selling styles aren’t just personality traits; they're leading indicators of trust and loyalty.

2. Do my sales leaders coach to values or just chase metrics?

You don’t need another performance review; you need a belief review.

What values are your sales managers instilling? What behaviors are they modeling, celebrating, or tolerating? Because when you promote someone to lead, you don’t just give them a team, you give them influence. And that influence either builds a culture of trust… or corrodes it silently.

Sales leadership that ignores values is just management with a louder voice.

3. Can I honestly say our sales team is trusted by the market?

Let's forget win rates for a moment. What does your sales team's reputation say? Do clients light up when your salespeople walk in or brace themselves for a pitch?

Trust isn’t a sentiment. It’s a signal. Trust is the only true competitive advantage. It converts faster, costs less, and stays longer.

You don’t scale revenue by asking your sales team for more effort. You scale it by cultivating more trust.

Trust starts with how well you see your salespeople, not just what they produce.

You Need Visibility Beneath the Metrics, Because Numbers Alone Don’t Tell the Truth

You and your sales managers are tracking activity. They're forecasting pipeline. They're measuring conversion.

What if the real reasons behind your team’s performance or underperformance aren’t living in your dashboards?

This might get a bit uncomfortable... Your CRM is only as honest as the culture feeding it.

Metrics reflect behavior. But they rarely reveal beliefs. And belief starts with what your salespeople actually feel, value, and trust. This is what drives sustainable growth.

If you want real visibility, you must start looking beneath the numbers.

That means implementing a new kind of review, one that confronts the human side inside your sales team.

1. Create An Authenticity Assessment

• Who's showing up with heart, not just hustle?

• Who leads with intention instead of impression management?

• Who’s playing the long game of trust, not just chasing commissions?

Authenticity is not a soft skill. Your customers can spot authenticity fakes. This isn’t about sentiment. It’s about sales integrity and it directly impact retention and deal size.

2. Create A Relational Depth Report

• Who are the true connectors within your sales team?

• Who’s building relational depth with clients vs. single-point vulnerability?

• Who can make the call that gets a stalled deal moving, not because of power, but because of relationship equity?

Relational sellers are revenue stabilizers. They don’t just win more deals; they open doors and create sustainability. If you’re not tracking relational depth, you’re gambling on shallow wins and high churn.

3. Create A Trust Audit

• Where's trust eroding inside my team? What’s broken inside will bleed outside.

• Are my sales leaders modeling what they ask for?

• Is our comp plan rewarding behavior that builds long-term success or just short-term noise?

No CRM field can quantify trust, but it will show up in the data. Things like longer sales cycles, higher no-decisions and team turnover. If you wait until the metrics collapse, you’ve waited too long.

The time is now to act with courage.

• Shift comp plans to reward relational growth and long-term thinking.

• Reassign leadership that manages from fear instead of modeling from the heart.

• Bring in coaches who understand authentic selling, not just legacy pressure tactics in modern packaging.

When you prioritize trust over trends, you’ll stop chasing growth and start compounding it.

The Real KPI That Matters, But No One's Tracking

Revenue, profit, and pipeline velocity... These are the familiar dials on your dashboard, the ones you review in every boardroom and forecast meeting.

In this distrust-saturated market, those metrics don’t tell the full story. They show what’s happening. Not why it's happening.

I believe you need to track a deeper metric, one that reveals whether your sales team is truly positioned to win long-term.

Trusted Relationships Per Rep (TRPR)

This is the real indicator of sales health in a post-trust world.

Ask yourself...

How many trusted relationships does each salesperson have with their clients? Not just contacts. Not just conversations. I'm talking about connections built on credibility, consistency and care.

Because trust isn’t just a value, it’s the sales multiplier:

• It accelerates decisions.

• It lowers resistance.

• It expands influence inside accounts.

• And it reduces churn on both sides of the table.

If you can’t answer this question clearly, then your strategy may be a high-gloss version of hope.

Allow this to be your boardroom moment of truth:

• Do I truly know my salespeople beyond their quotas?

• Do I truly know which of my leaders are growing trust and which are quietly eroding it?

• Do I truly have clarity beneath the metrics, or just a comforting illusion?

What are you doing systematically and intentionally to increase TRPR?

Your answer to that question will tell you whether you’re just chasing revenue or building a business that can truly be trusted.

From the Heart, Not the Hustle

As a CEO, your influence on revenue isn’t confined to strategy decks or quarterly calls. Your real impact is cultural. It’s how you shape what gets celebrated, tolerated, and repeated when no one’s watching.

The business community is flooded with noise and tactics. Your team doesn't need more hustle. They need more heart. More truth. More leaders who have the courage to care before they command.

Your sales team is a reflection of your leadership, your values, and your willingness to build trust before asking for transactions.

Deeply reflect on this one... The more your culture prioritizes authenticity over image, service over spin doctor tactics, and relationships over reach, the more the community, your clients, respond in kind.

So, ask yourself not just how your team sells, but who they’re becoming in the process. Are they becoming trusted advisors? Are they building reputational equity? Are they proud of how they win or just pressured to win at any cost?

When you lead from the heart, your team stops chasing revenue… And starts becoming the reason it shows up.

That’s Selling from the Heart. That’s not just leadership, that’s legacy.

Originally published on Larry Levine's LinkedIn.