# Michael Griego

Michael Griego shares practical advice on sales execution and team leadership, drawing on experience as a top sales representative and sales VP. Their posts cover pipeline discipline, deal qualification, account prioritization, and coaching sales teams.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/michael-griego/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelgriego
- LinkedIn followers: 4,125
- Topics: artificial-intelligence, leadership, sales, sales-leadership
- Based on 11 dated posts, latest 2026-10-07

## Summary

Michael Griego is useful for concrete sales management ideas on pipeline gates, qualification, account planning, and team support.

- Best for: A B2B sales training company building pipeline discipline or sales leadership workshops.
- Not for: A brand outside B2B sales judged on audience scale or engagement volume.
- Check first: Confirm availability, pricing, deliverables, booking, and audience data on titles and seniority.

### Takeaways

- Sales stages without exit criteria are theater, not real pipeline progress.
- Every live deal needs two dated actions or it is not really moving.
- Use a two-column score of past spending and future potential for top 40 accounts.

## Main ideas

- **Sales stages are gates; without exit criteria, they’re theater**: Michael Griego argues that stage labels only work when each has proof attached; anyone can drag a deal forward and call it progress. The prescription: keep the stage list short, set two to five clear exit proofs per stage that a good rep can self-check in seconds, and use those proofs in post-mortems to identify the skipped gate when a deal goes sideways. Buy-in is a design problem, not a communication problem: ask top reps for the three things they always do before moving a deal, then write those answers into the exit list. The criteria come from the people who have to use them.
- **A two-variable sort decides where selling time goes**: Account prioritization uses a deliberately small tool: a spreadsheet with two columns—what a customer spent last year and what they could spend next year. Rate each account A, B, or C in about thirty seconds, then sort. A accounts get real plans; the top ten and twenty get the most attention; C accounts go on a leave-alone list with mailers only. The argument: a fast, crude sort beats a considered one that never gets run. Protecting time for the highest-value accounts is the exercise’s real output.
- **Qualification has to move past BANT, and the scorecard has to stay live**: BANT is a starting point, but it is not enough. Michael Griego points to MEDDIC and then MEDDPICC to cover what BANT misses: metrics, economic buyer, decision process, decision criteria, paper process, identified pain, competition, and champion. In client work, this becomes a custom scorecard in the CRM, with the qualification ask and its impact changing by sales stage so the checklist stays current rather than being filled out once. The failure mode is delivery, not the tool: weave qualification into discovery and it sounds like a conversation; fire questions and it sounds like an interrogation. Deals that cannot answer the basics should not be promoted.
- **Every live deal needs two dated actions, or it is not really moving**: Most sales activity is motion without progress, Michael Griego argues. The concrete test is next-step discipline: every live deal should have a dated buyer action and a dated seller action, both tied to a real decision or start date—not a vague promise to follow up. Deals that sit post-proposal for weeks point to an unclear-next-step problem, not a closing problem. That also signals a team that has not learned to qualify or run deeper discovery. The remedy is rigor, discipline, and purpose: end every meeting with dates and owners.
- **Leaders walk the field; reps who are buried rarely ask for help**: In their one post addressing leadership directly, Michael Griego reads a book about an East African shepherd as a sales leadership manual and builds the argument around the analogy. A cast sheep that rolls onto its back, heavy with its own wool, cannot rise alone and dies within days. They compare it to good reps buried under CRM admin and a territory twice the size it should be, who rarely ask for help. A CRM can flag a stalled rep before anyone notices, but someone still has to walk over and pull them up. Sheep will not lie down while hungry; similarly, a rep worried about comp or a thin pipeline cannot settle into patient discovery. Sheep will drink from a dirty puddle yards from a clean stream, like reps chasing a nearby bad-fit deal. The shepherd’s staff serves the flock’s welfare—hooking a sheep back onto the path or lifting it out of a thicket. That maps to leaders who walk the field with their people, clear obstacles before the team reaches them, and inspect deals up close. The leadership behaviors named are guidance, commitment, assistance, encouragement, protection, path-leading, discipline, and deep caring.
- **Personal checklists should graduate into rules the system enforces**: Four of the five posts follow the same arc: a simple personal tool, then the observation that the strongest companies encode its rule in the CRM or in a file feeding an AI workspace. The rules cover exit proofs in the CRM, a qualification scorecard that flags deals advanced without evidence, next-step rules that flag opportunities missing a dated buyer action, and cadence-based re-ranking of accounts against live CRM spend. Michael Griego calls for calibration both ways—not over-engineered, not underdone—because the failure mode is as often a system nobody maintains as no system at all. That priority ties the techniques together: individual judgment is the starting point, and encoding the rule helps it survive a growing book.

## Work to read

- [“Stages without exit criteria are theater”](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/michaelgriego_as-a-top-rep-i-mostly-ignored-formal-stages-activity-7511787105170255873-EcqA)
- [The two-column prioritization matrix that survived a quota doubling](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/michaelgriego_the-epiphany-logical-prioritization-after-activity-7511017026316906496-D8TI)
- [The qualification miss: BANT as a starting point, not a system](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/michaelgriego_the-qualification-miss-bant-is-a-starting-activity-7510292249201627136-HJnX)
- [Next-step discipline: every live deal needs two dated actions](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/michaelgriego_execution-is-everything-sales-motions-without-activity-7509567471243141120-v7zg)
- [The shepherd: a leadership post about reps buried under their own workload](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/michaelgriego_been-reading-a-book-about-a-guy-who-worked-activity-7513599048231350272-2QPt)

## Partnerships

None of Michael Griego’s five posts describes or advertises a partnership product. They state no sponsorship terms, rates, deliverable specifications or brand collaborations; the LinkedIn profile is the only official partnership inquiry route mentioned. The posts do, however, offer a clear basis for a commissioned working relationship: Griego writes as a practitioner-coach for sales leaders, and each post ends with an exercise for an actual pipeline review—write three exit proofs for one stage; score the top forty accounts on last-year spend and next-year upside; write one line of proof for every deal past discovery, covering money, authority, need, timing and champion; and give every live deal a dated buyer action and a dated seller action. The posts also point to tooling a training or enablement partner would need to configure: exit criteria in a CRM, a current qualification scorecard in the CRM, and next-step rules that flag deals without a dated buyer action. A sales training company proposing a workshop could use those exercises as the engagement’s core content, but should ask Griego directly about the format, price and booking arrangements; none is specified in the posts.

## Alternatives

- Rosalyn Santa Elena: Choose Rosalyn Santa Elena when the training company's audience is RevOps or sales-operations leaders and the workshop should focus on forecast design rather than rep habits. The posts lay out a full diagnostic: forecasting treated as art when reps enter data inconsistently; stage definitions nobody understands; gut feel as the method; close dates that keep slipping or sit in the past; commit categories that mean different things to different managers; lightweight deal inspection; and no historical visibility. The fixes are equally concrete: define forecast categories in writing; align stage definitions and simple yes/no exit criteria across the whole organization at five or six stages; gate stage movement with required fields; run the same cadence on the same day every week; track forecast accuracy by rep, manager, and segment; pressure-test numbers with historical stage conversion rates; and build an early-warning system that surfaces at-risk deals before the pipeline call. A second post offers a ready-made escalation exercise: the same Salesforce license request written three ways, from order taker to business partner, ending with a recommendation and an offer to contact the account executive. That makes a workshop block on presenting ops work upward.
- Jose Aleman: Choose Jose Aleman when the need is capacity planning, hiring math, or how leadership hears bad news. The work argues that assuming ten new reps add ten quotas is the fastest way to miss next year's target, and shows the operational friction a finance model ignores: if the plan assumes a rep is productive in 90 days but the sales cycle runs five months, the ramp curve is impossible; doubling headcount without more inbound or outbound slices the same pipeline smaller; adding reps without a front-line manager kills deal inspection and win rates; and newer reps' territories too often come out of the patches of the people who built them. The second post gives a risk framework a workshop can run on real deals right away: a board can live with a miss but not a surprise; the CRM is the last place a rep will admit a deal is dying, so read behavior instead of sentiment. A close date pushed twice in a month means the deal leaves commit; a late-stage deal with nothing on the calendar gets inspected today; a buyer who went quiet after same-day replies gets executive outreach; and a deal two weeks out with legal not engaged is not closing in two weeks. Choose this alternative when attendees are planning next year's number or the workshop needs a board-communication and early-warning segment.
- Brandon Bornancin: Choose Brandon Bornancin when the workshop is about AI adoption or process debt rather than pipeline mechanics. The post makes one sharp, usable argument: do not automate everything; delete work that exists only because that is how it has always been done. Twelve CRM fields after every demo, when only four drive forecasting, means eight are friction. Automating all twelve skips the real question of whether they are needed at all: AI does not fix a bad process; it scales it. The order of questions is portable into a room: does this need to happen, can we delete it, can we make it faster, and only then, automate it. The hiring post adds context on the organization behind that view, with open inbound and outbound SDR, account executive, and marketing roles. Pick this alternative if the training company wants a session on rollout discipline before tooling, or if an AI or CRM vendor is sponsoring the engagement and the need is to do AI on the right things.

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