I recently came across an idea that immediately stopped me in my tracks. In research spanning more than 300 structured interviews with commercial leaders, the language they used to describe their own performance split into two distinct camps — and the split predicted something important.
Across the wider group, 61 percent primarily used outcome nouns: targets, pipeline, market share, conversion. But among the smaller group who consistently demonstrated resilience, ownership, learning and sustained performance, the overwhelming majority were process-dominant.
// How commercial leaders described their own performance
61%
of the wider group spoke primarily in outcome nouns — targets, pipeline, market share, conversion
79%
of the high performers were process-dominant — they had listened, explored, mapped, tested and built
They did not simply describe the result. They explained how they had created it. That distinction matters enormously in complex B2B sales.
The Destination Without the Journey
Sales has developed a language that sounds impressive but often says very little. Transformation. Challenges. Solutions. Pipeline. Opportunity. Value. Engagement. Qualified lead. These words appear in SDR scripts, sales bootcamps, CRM notes, board reports and Monday morning pipeline reviews. They describe destinations, categories and desired outcomes. What they rarely explain is the journey.
✕ Nouns — sounds positive, proves nothing
"This is a major transformation opportunity. The customer has significant challenges, our solution is a strong fit and there is good stakeholder engagement."
✓ Verbs — proves the work happened
"We listened to the service team describe the current process, mapped the people involved in the decision, explored where delays occur, quantified the operational impact, tested our assumptions with the budget holder and agreed a workshop with procurement."
The first update could sit in a CRM for six weeks and continue to sound positive. The second contains evidence — what the salesperson did, what the customer contributed, how the opportunity actually moved forward. It also gives a sales manager something useful to inspect, challenge and coach.
Outcomes impress. Process verbs prove.
Nouns Can Hide an Absence of Progress
There is nothing inherently wrong with words such as pipeline, solution or transformation. We need nouns to name the things we are discussing. The problem begins when the noun becomes a substitute for the work.
A noun gives something a label. A process verb shows what happened. This is why noun-heavy pipeline updates can create false confidence — the language allows a salesperson to describe the opportunity they hope exists without revealing whether they've done enough to make it real.
Process language is harder to hide behind. If I say I have mapped the account, you can ask to see the map. If I say I have validated the business case, you can ask who validated it and what they said. If I say I have built a relationship, you can ask what access, influence or insight that relationship has produced.
The verb invites examination. That is precisely why it is valuable.
Change the Questions and You Change the Conversation
Most pipeline reviews concentrate on the outcome. Those questions matter, particularly when the business needs a forecast. But they don't tell us how the salesperson reached the answer — they can produce a collection of numbers without establishing whether the underlying opportunities are credible.
// The outcome questions we already ask
// The process questions we should add
Who have you listened to?
What have you learned that you didn't know before?
Which stakeholders have you mapped?
What assumptions have you tested?
What has the customer agreed to do?
These questions force the conversation away from optimism and towards evidence. They also make coaching more useful. A manager can help a salesperson improve how they explore a problem, map an organisation, test urgency or build consensus. It is much harder to coach someone to "create more transformation" or "generate better pipeline" without first turning those outcomes into actions.
Process Language Makes Performance Repeatable
One of the biggest challenges in sales leadership is distinguishing performance from repeatability. A salesperson can occasionally win through timing, personality, an existing relationship or sheer persistence. The deal still counts, but the explanation for it may not help anybody win the next one.
When high performers describe their process clearly, their success becomes easier to understand and replicate. They can explain how they opened the conversation, how they uncovered the real issue, how they found the people affected by it, how they navigated resistance and how they helped the customer reach a decision. That doesn't reduce selling to a rigid script — complex sales are too human and too unpredictable for that. It does, however, reveal the choices, behaviours and adjustments that influenced the result.
This matters when hiring too. A candidate who talks fluently about targets, achievements and market share may be impressive. A candidate who can explain what they changed after losing a deal, how they approached an unfamiliar account or how they rebuilt a stalled opportunity gives you evidence of how they think. The result tells you what happened once. The process offers clues about what they might be able to do again.
Our SDR Scripts Suffer From the Same Problem
Much of the language taught to SDRs is dominated by abstract outcomes: "We help organisations accelerate transformation, overcome challenges and unlock value through an innovative solution." It sounds polished. It also sounds like almost everybody else.
The customer does not experience "transformation" in the abstract. They experience a handover that takes too long, information that has to be rekeyed, a resident who has called three times, a clinician waiting for an answer, or a manager assembling a report manually on Friday afternoon.
// Good discovery moves toward the verbs
How does the work arrive?
Who checks it?
Where does it wait?
What happens when information is missing?
Who corrects it?
How do people know the task is complete?
Those questions uncover how the organisation actually operates. Only then can a salesperson credibly connect a proposed solution to an outcome. We should not abandon the destination. We should earn the right to talk about it by understanding the journey.
AI Can Make Noun-Heavy Selling Sound Even Better
This issue becomes more important as sales teams use generative AI.
// The risk
AI can turn a thin opportunity update into a beautifully written paragraph. It can make generic propositions sound confident and sophisticated. If the source material contains little more than the opportunity name, stage, value and product, the output is still empty. It is simply more polished emptiness.
The quality of an AI-generated account summary or deal review depends entirely on the process evidence supplied to it. What did we hear? What changed? Who is missing? Which assumption remains untested? What has the customer committed to? What did we try that failed? What did we learn? What happens next?
AI becomes genuinely useful when it helps us organise, compare and challenge those answers. It becomes dangerous when it disguises their absence.
Listen for the Verbs
At your next pipeline meeting, listen carefully to the language being used. Do you hear a stream of outcomes, categories and labels? Or do you hear people describing actions, discoveries, decisions and changes? This is not a grammar exercise. It is a way of determining whether an opportunity is progressing, whether a salesperson is learning, and whether success can be repeated.
// A simple rule
If an opportunity update contains more nouns than verbs, we probably understand what the salesperson wants, but not what they have actually done.
The best salespeople still care deeply about results. They know the target, understand the commercial outcome and take responsibility for delivering it. But when you ask them how they got there, they have an answer.
// And then they won
And then they won.
// Source
The research and language findings referenced here come from Jonathan "Johnny" Graham's Demons and Dealmakers, described in his chapter "UGLY" — part of his Demons and Dealmakers newsletter.