Check the Scoreboard Before You Take the Advice

Anyone can post a framework. Very few people posting sales advice have ever carried a revenue number to a board, missed one, and had to explain why. Before you change how your team sells based on something you read this week, spend five minutes finding out whether the person saying it has actually built something — not “worked in sales,” not “advised startups,” but owned a number and lived with the outcome.

The three questions that separate operators from narrators

Did they own the number, or influence it? There’s a real difference between the person who carried quota or ran the P&L and the person who consulted, coached, or commented from the sidelines. Both can have useful things to say. Only one has felt what happens when the plan is wrong and the quarter is already half over.

What actually happened, specifically? “Helped companies grow” is not an answer. “$44M to $215M in four years, here’s the transformation” is. If someone can’t name the company, the number, and the timeframe, they’re describing a feeling, not a result.

Would the team that worked for them say the same thing? Anyone can describe their own leadership well. Far fewer have former reports willing to publicly vouch for how it actually felt to be led by them. That asymmetry is the whole tell.

Why this matters more now, not less

AI made it trivially cheap to sound like an expert — polished posts, confident frameworks, a consistent content calendar, none of which requires having built anything. The volume of sales advice online has gone up. The signal hasn’t. If anything, the flood makes it easier for someone with real scars to get drowned out by someone with a better content strategy and no scars at all.

This isn’t a call to distrust everyone

It’s a call to do the same diligence on advice that you’d do on a hire. You wouldn’t promote someone to run revenue based on a well-produced LinkedIn post. Don’t let one change how you run your team either. Ask for the specific number, the specific company, and the specific outcome — and if you can’t get a straight answer to any of the three questions above, that’s the answer.

Every claim on this site is checkable for exactly that reason — the numbers, the companies, and the outcomes are named on Working With Me, not implied.