Make It Stick

You've done the boardroom work. 

You've excavated what your best people actually do: the behaviors, the instincts, the intangibles that nobody had written down.

You've validated it with your best customers. You've heard, in their words, why they buy from you and why they stay.

Most companies never get this far. But you have (wait… you have, right?)

Now what?

This is the moment of truth. You have the insights, the clarity, the answers to the test. The question is whether you'll do anything systematic with them.

Without integration, this knowledge stays in a slide deck. It gets mentioned in a meeting or two. Everyone nods. And then they go back to doing what they were doing before.

That's not transformation. That's a workshop.

The Integration Problem

Excavating and validating are hard work. Integrating what you've learned into the daily operations of your sales organization? That's where the real challenge begins.

Integration isn't a one-time event. It's a commitment to changing how your team operates; how they're trained, how they're coached, how they prepare, how they meet, how they talk about what they do.

You don't get the benefits of the insights without operational change.

It doesn't work that way.

What Integration Actually Looks Like

Integration means taking everything you've excavated and validated and embedding it into the fabric of how your team operates.

Training

Your onboarding can't just be product knowledge and CRM tutorials. It has to include the specific behaviors that make your best people successful.

What do they do in the first conversation with a prospect? How do they handle objections? Not generically, but in your market, with your customers? What questions do they ask that others don't? What are the little things your top performers do that make a big difference?

If you've done the excavation work, you have answers to these questions. Now you have to teach them. Explicitly, not just by osmosis and hoping something sticks.

Playbooks and SOPs

Document what good looks like. Not in generic terms, but in specific, demonstrable language.

"Build relationships" isn't a playbook. "In the first meeting, ask about their current workflow and listen for friction points before presenting any solutions" is a playbook.

The goal isn't to put people in a box. It's to give them a foundation so they're not starting from scratch. Your veterans have built their success on thousands of interactions. Your new people deserve a head start, and there’s no reason not to know what that looks like.

Team Meetings

This is the most underutilized integration point.

Most sales meetings are pipeline reviews. Opportunity updates. Forecast discussions. Those matter, but they don't transmit wisdom.

What if part of every team meeting was dedicated to sharing what's working? Not wins, what's working. The specific thing someone did that moved a deal forward. The question that unlocked a conversation. The insight that changed a customer's mind.

This is how the invisible becomes visible. This is how unconscious competence becomes conscious and transferable.

Coaching Conversations

Managers need to know what they're coaching toward.

If you've done the work I’ve outlined over the past few weeks, you know ‘what good looks like here’ in your organization. Now your coaching conversations have a target. You're not just asking "how's the pipeline?" You're asking "did you do the thing we know works?"

That's accountability. And accountability is what makes behavior change stick.

The Transmission Problem

Here's what happens without integration:

Bob has been your top performer for 20 years. He knows exactly what to do in every situation. He's developed instincts that newer reps don't have.

You tell Sarah to shadow Bob. Bob tells Sarah to "build relationships" and "pick up the phone when they call."

Sarah nods. She takes notes. She watches Bob in action.

Then she struggles for the better part of a year trying to figure out what Bob actually does.

Why? Because what Bob says he does and what Bob actually does are completely different things. He can't articulate his own unconscious competence, and without a system for transmitting that knowledge, it stays locked in his head.

Then he retires, and it's gone.

Integration solves this. It takes what Bob knows, even if Bob can't fully articulate it, and turns it into something teachable.

The Rhythm of Integration

Integration isn't a project. It's an ongoing discipline.

Weekly: Team meetings that include wisdom-sharing, not just pipeline reviews.

Monthly: Coaching conversations that reinforce the specific behaviors you've identified.

Quarterly: Review and refine. What's working? What's not? What have you learned from wins and losses that should be added to the playbook?

Annually: Go back to your best customers. Validate again. Markets change. Customers evolve. Your understanding should too.

This rhythm keeps the insights alive. It prevents the slow drift back to generic habits and surface-level differentiation.

The Payoff

When you integrate ‘what good looks like here,’ several things shift:

New reps ramp faster because they're learning what actually works, not hoping they figure it out on their own.

Your messaging sharpens because everyone is speaking from the same validated truth, not individual assumptions.

Succession planning becomes less terrifying because the knowledge isn't locked in veterans' heads, it's documented, taught, and reinforced.

Your team operates with more confidence because they know what to do and they have the tools to deliver it.

You can actually scale because you're not dependent on a handful of people who ‘just get it.’

The Hard Part

Integration requires commitment. It requires changing how you run meetings, how you coach, how you onboard, how you hold people accountable.

It's not glamorous. It's operational. It's ongoing.

And life will get in the way. The quarter gets busy. The team has fires to put out. The playbook never gets written. The meeting rhythm never gets established. The insights you worked so hard to uncover slowly fade back into the background.

That's the risk. And it's why most companies, even the ones that do the excavation and validation work, never see the full return on that investment.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

Integration is where the insights become operational. Where the unconscious becomes conscious. Where the intangible becomes teachable.

You've already done what most companies won't. Don't stop now.

This is Part 3 of a series on doing the hard work up front that makes selling easier. The framework: Excavate → Validate → Integrate.