30 years ago, I was sitting in an MIT lecture hall on a Saturday morning, when I first heard the word "disintermediation" from one of the founders of what is now Silicon Valley. I did not attend MIT, but as an English major from BC, I was fascinated by the sound of the word and its alliteration. As a techy nerd, who at that time had already been using Arpanet for 5 years, I sat there fascinated by the potential scope of what was to come.
The evolution that did take place giving birth to the launch of the web, Mosaic and Netscape was glacially slow by today's AI standards, but the word itself (dis-in-ter-mee-dee-ey-shuhn) has stuck with me in my lifelong pursuit of the science of sales.
Disintermediation: the elimination of roadblocks and the removal of artificial entities such as multiple distributors and third-party sales representatives between me and my customers is what we practice at the firm, and it's what I've been teaching at Tufts and MIT for 20 years. The very exciting result is that that change is happening faster and faster with the introduction of new attitudes and new tools on the part of the best sales organizations led by sales leaders who fully embrace change. Most importantly to consider is that fact that your prospects and your existing customers do not want "to be sold"!
This is not a time for incremental change!
Rearchitecting your sales organization means ripping out the walls. You need to begin with totally reimagining the status quo and looking at what stands between you and your prospects. If your current sales funnel is 120 days for a $50k deal, ask yourself...why couldn't it be 45 days?
The reality is that it can if you were to stop thinking about selling through intermediaries, influencers and subordinate managers and just went directly to the C-level manager. No one can speak to the financial value of your solutions better than you, so stop wasting time and figure out the exact value propositions that shrink time and increase profitability for your prospects and deliver that messaging in exacting language and through those channels that the real decision makers actually use every day. 10 years ago, this directive was hype; today it's immediate reality happening this Friday morning.
Most sales change initiatives fail!
Gartner reported last month that "nearly 90%" of sales change initiatives fail. Unfortunately, I'm not surprised, since we've experienced multiple hundreds of sales organizations by now, and when we're doing discovery with a new prospect who has failed at attempting to make incremental changes, we see:
- They take way too long measured by a year rather than 3 or 4 months. If you were rebuilding your kitchen at home, you wouldn't put up with 12 months. Rearchitecting and rebuilding your sales processes, building in new templates, improving the look and content of your slide decks, getting every one to use the exact words of your value propositions and follow detailed playbooks while rewiring your CRM is a lot easier and far less painful than a kitchen remodeling. 90-120 days should be your model
- Managers take their eye off the revenue ball while spending time on the rearchitecting. No question, going through a sales process change while making sure that you hit your quota requirements will require more time on your part. There's no way around this, so if you're currently putting in 55-60 hour weeks, during this rebuild, you're going to be spending 80. To lessen the time, think about repurposing one or two of your marketing or customer success people as extra sets of hands to build some of the new tools.
- There is a lack of discipline for an absolute requirement for 100% commitment from everyone on the team. As a manager, your job is not only to preach and coach your culture, it's to demonstrate it in your own actions. If there's a problem, a slowness, a lack of commitment on the part of your sales team, your job is to run to the fire and stop it, not just to watch from the sidelines and let it burn.
A few ideas to think about as you approach the 2nd half of 2026.
- Ruthlessly prioritize two or three non-negotiable, high-impact goals for change in H2. Hammer down on only two or three since you and your implementation team are most importantly responsible for your quarterly numbers that you committed to back in December. We also know from decades of doing this, that while sales teams undertaking massive change are very good at two or three major objectives...in addition to their quota...they are terrible at four, five or more primary objectives. That's why salespeople are often called "hunters". Search-Hunt-Win-Repeat !
- Break down the silos and take a sledgehammer to the walls. In rebuilding that kitchen, things are going to get "very messy". There's just no way to pretend that everything is going to be the same...and yet, you and family are going to need to be able to eat in the meantime. You need to carefully plan and architect how the new kitchen [substitute "sales process"] will function and then stop what you're doing, rip out the old and install the new. With offsite builds of the cabinets [steps in your sales process], the new marble countertops [your new sales playbook] and the plumbing, electricity and Wi-Fi outlets [your HubSpot CRM], the work can be completed in weeks.
- Get 100% commitment from everyone to change. If it is not there, eliminate that roadblock, or more emphatically, take the person off the team. Ideally, there's someplace else other than in Sales where that person can lend value, and if not, quickly remove the person from the company and move on.
What's happening in the world around us, whether you accept it or not, is a massive transformation of both ideas and actions that are changing every aspect of how we thought about marketing and selling back in "the old days" of 2024/ As sales managers, we have a decision to make to either embrace this change, do the research, study and read more, ask different and more probing questions and then commit to and actually embrace major change...or be left behind.
Check out how we think at Sales Optimization Success Tactics for 2026!
Have a great day selling today and a superb weekend!
Jack is a Managing Partner of Derby Management, a strategy consulting firm, and founder of the Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts University, where he has taught for 20 years. Every semester is significantly updated, with heavy emphasis in 2026 on AI in Marketing & Sales. At Derby Management, Jack and his team architect and build business strategies focused on sales and marketing processes, tools, and technology platforms.
| www.derbymanagement.com | Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts