# Joey Trapasso

Joey Trapasso writes about B2B sales, sales leadership, recruiting, and team training, often using sports stories to explain practical lessons for revenue teams.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/joey-trapasso/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joey-trapasso-b707a2143
- Median of last 9 posts: 38 reactions, 9 comments (checked 2026-11-02)
- Topics: leadership, sales, recruiting, sales-leadership, sales-compensation
- Based on 8 dated posts, latest 2026-10-07

## Summary

Joey Trapasso is most useful for example-led B2B sales content on diagnosing deal loss, training, and team performance.

- Best for: A B2B sales software brand wanting sponsored content or a webinar on deal diagnosis.
- Not for: An AI prospecting vendor claiming signal tools replace manual pipeline research.
- Check first: Confirm availability, deliverables, and audience evidence for target roles before contacting them.

### Takeaways

- A dashboard may record a missed deadline without showing an earlier sales promise caused it.
- Signal detection got cheap; signal matching did not, especially for closed-lost opportunities.
- Training should be built for the moment the conversation goes wrong.

## Main ideas

- **The number that records a failure is usually not where the failure started**: Trapasso's central argument is about attribution. Reporting systems file a problem under the team or person whose name was on it, while the cause sat one step upstream and never appears in the same view. He tells managers to trace backwards: ask what a team was asked to do, not only what they failed to do. The same reasoning appears in a second post about results in general, where he argues a rep can blow out a quarter on one deal that fell into their lap, and a manager can look strong because they inherited a stacked team.
- **Finding a buying signal is cheap now; matching it to a deal you already lost is not**: Trapasso separates two jobs that tools often blur. Detection — a new CEO, a funding round, an acquisition — is well covered and no longer a differentiator. Matching a signal to the right opportunity is harder, because no tool remembers the exact reason a champion said no last year. He treats manic organisation as the actual skill, and argues that many of the hottest opportunities are already sitting closed and forgotten in the CRM while reps grind for new pipeline.
- **Training should be built for the moment the conversation goes wrong**: Two posts argue that most sales training is too clean to transfer to a live call. Role-plays are unrealistic, product training is a feature dump reps cannot use, and then teams expect performance anyway. His alternative is repeated drilling of decision trees, sized to the stakes, on the stated logic that you practise for the call where you are behind — not for the call that goes well.
- **Pay the promised reward, pay it on time, and make noise about it**: Trapasso treats how a company handles a big payout as a trust decision the whole team is watching. His claim is that leadership rolls out an uncapped plan without expecting anyone to reach it, then reaches for fine print when someone does, and that the resulting backlash is always bigger than leadership expects. His advice runs the other way: pay the check, pay it on time, publicise it, and recognise that there is usually money when leadership decides the result is worth rewarding.
- **Stubbornness is not commitment**: Trapasso argues that staying with a plan that is visibly not working is a different thing from staying committed to the goal, and that you do not need to know what will work in order to recognise what is not. He extends the same logic to leadership in transition: when a leader is on the way out, hard calls stop being made — territory changes wait, compensation questions wait, the rep who needs to be coached out waits — while the quarter still closes on the last day. His instruction is to make the change, name an interim and give someone on the team a real shot rather than a farewell tour.
- **Hire for drive; you can teach the market but not the caring**: Trapasso argues hiring managers over-weight industry experience, assuming someone who has not sold in the exact market will need too much coaching. His position is that toughness, drive, desire, grit and resilience cannot be coached, so the person who wants it is the better bet, with the manager supplying coaching and support — and telling them to rest when they are running on empty. He treats recruiting as a related but distinct skill from sales, which is where he says strong sales leaders get caught out.
- **A manager's job is the system around capable people**: The companion argument to hiring is that good managers build the conditions their people cannot control, rather than motivating harder. Get those conditions right, he argues, and most capable reps will succeed, which is why judging a manager on results alone can mislead.

## Work to read

- [The box score says Brandon Aubrey missed an extra point. It doesn't say Javonte Williams made him kick it from 48 yards](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joey-trapasso-b707a2143_the-box-score-says-brandon-aubrey-missed-activity-7505264109442093056-Z3KL)
- [Signal detection got cheap. Signal matching didn't](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joey-trapasso-b707a2143_signal-detection-got-cheap-signal-matching-activity-7501286312423907332-88NA)
- [UFC bantamweight Champion Petr Yan would be great at sales](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joey-trapasso-b707a2143_ufc-bantamweight-champion-petr-yan-would-activity-7520541040936747009-Q8WI)
- [They're calling it cartoon villain level evil](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joey-trapasso-b707a2143_theyre-calling-it-cartoon-villain-level-activity-7519419883323891712--hHa)
- [Lame duck leaders are a death sentence to high growth organizations](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joey-trapasso-b707a2143_lame-duck-leaders-are-a-death-sentence-to-activity-7520921991869190144-FyTM)
- [Recruiting and sales are cousins](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joey-trapasso-b707a2143_recruiting-and-sales-are-cousins-sort-of-activity-7516507563350233088-MW38)
- [The Yankees have a $300 million roster and a problem money can't fix](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joey-trapasso-b707a2143_the-yankees-have-a-300-million-roster-and-activity-7513998793881612288-j61V)

## Partnerships

The supplied posts do not document sponsorship formats, a media kit, rates, or a partnership inquiry route. They show Joey Trapasso writing about B2B sales, leadership, recruiting, and training, often using sports examples to make practical points—for instance, tracing a missed go-live date back to what Sales promised rather than relying only on the dashboard. No post in this set identifies a paid partnership. A brand considering a collaboration would need to establish availability, deliverables, scope, and fees directly; the posts do not establish whether Joey accepts partnerships.

## Alternatives

- Mark Zides: Choose Mark Zides when the sponsored work should sell prevention rather than post-mortem. The same campaign decision — helping a B2B sales software company show buyers how to find deal problems before they land on a dashboard — can be served by Zides's weekly pipeline review, the hour he put on the calendar every Friday at CoreAxis and has run in some form at every company since. Every deal got the same question: what would it take to move this toward close next week? The second reviewed post extends that into a founder math argument: 15 selling hours a week, one deal eating 10 of them, roughly 75 deals a year never taking a vacation, and a $3M ceiling at $40K a deal. A sponsor whose product manages pipeline cadence, forecasting, or founder-led selling can build a series or webinar around that rhythm and reach founder-operators directly. The case for Zides is strongest if the brief shifts from diagnosing a loss to scheduling the review that catches it earlier.
- Maria Scheifler: Choose Maria Scheifler when the campaign should sit before the close rather than after it. For a B2B sales software company, the same decision — moving buyers past dashboard-level reporting — becomes an account-fit argument. Scheifler describes bringing a CEO, head of sales, head of marketing, and customer success into one conversation about best customers: who the champion was, why the company needed the solution, whether it had implemented something similar before, then turning that into a score built into the CRM. The concrete illustration is a client comparing existing customers rated around 50 against pipeline prospects rated 10 or minus 5, and the conclusion that a bad-fit account usually does not survive renewal. A sponsor selling scoring, ICP alignment, or CRM data work can use that to reach teams whose pipeline is full and nothing is closing. She also takes up a question from Sangram Vajre's newsletter about what breaks first when AI enters go-to-market, landing on the point that AI exposes cracks already present.
- Jamie Wilson: Choose Jamie Wilson when the campaign brief is aimed at founders and executives rather than front-line reps. Wilson's reviewed post frames the same beyond-the-dashboard problem at the leadership level: the sales leader is almost never the problem, the sales leader is usually the evidence of the problem. Thin pipeline usually traces to an ICP that was wrong before anyone walked in the door, stalled deals to a sales cycle that was never designed and just evolved, and reps who cannot close to a demo that is a feature tour nobody asked for. The post names a specific pattern of fractional engagements — product not ready for the target market, pricing that forces every deal into a weak negotiation, an untouched CRM, a 90-day mandate to fix sales — and reports 21-plus such engagements. A sponsor whose product surfaces root cause before a sales hire, or that supports fractional sales leadership, can build a leadership-facing webinar from that argument.

---
AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/