Behavior Hacking Ep 8: More Pipeline Won't Fix Your Sales Problems

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Nate Nasralla:
You have seven companies in the portfolio now, right?

Paul Stansik:
That’s right.

Nate Nasralla:
So that means you’ve had to roll this out at least seven times — probably more, given your exits. What does that process look like?

Paul Stansik:
When I started this job six years ago, I was a little averse to templates. I thought they were too rigid. But it turns out, companies are hungry for them.
Pretty much every leader I talk to wants to measure their business better. They know an exit is coming someday. But the challenge is picking which metrics matter, especially in board meetings.
Take one of our recent portfolio companies. When you looked at their business as a whole, they were performing great, growing nicely. It seemed like the biggest opportunity was creating more pipeline. Win rates looked solid.
So, I assumed our reporting would focus on pipeline creation. But then I stopped myself.
This company had two very different segments: one established, one emerging. And when we broke the data apart, it told two very different stories.
Segment 1 (Established): Win rates were 40%+. The clear move was to generate more pipeline.
Segment 2 (Emerging): Win rates were half that. More pipeline wouldn’t solve the issue. We needed to increase win rates.
With this insight, we aligned with the CEO:
For the established segment, the focus was more pipeline. Every conversation started with “How’s pipe? How’s pipe? How’s pipe?”
For the emerging segment, we needed to prove we could win consistently before scaling. More touches wouldn’t help — better execution would.

Nate Nasralla:
That matches what I keep hearing from sales leaders.
A lot of teams still rely on an old playbook: just push more into the top of the funnel and assume it will work its way down. But that’s breaking down.
You can’t just force your way to revenue anymore. You have to finesse it.
So now the big question I’m hearing over and over is: “How do we look more like 40%, not 20%?”
Because if you can consistently win 40-50% of your pipeline, everything changes: your spend, your hiring, your strategy.
Are you hearing the same thing when you talk with sales and marketing leaders?

Paul Stansik:
Absolutely. The #1 challenge I hear isn’t pipeline. It’s time.
Leaders aren’t making enough time to step back and be introspective.
They’re stuck in the day-to-day, reacting to problems, without space to ask:
How is this really going?
What’s the real opportunity here?
What should we be doing next?
The best leaders wield their calendar like a weapon. They carve out time to reflect. It’s hard to do, but the ones who make it happen always perform better.

Nate Nasralla:
If you asked most leaders how they’re feeling right now, their default answer is “busy.”
But if you push past that, the real answer is: tired.
On Monday, I sat in a meeting where Nick, an SVP of Sales, asked his team: "How are we changing the way we run deal reviews? How often are we evaluating discovery? How many deals are we grading each week?"
It was a great conversation. Everyone was focused on setting goals, defining the number of deals reviewed per seller, per segment.
But then Nick flipped the conversation. He said: "Actually, what I want to do is block time on your calendars — time dedicated to reviewing deals. You tell me what it conflicts with, and I’ll clear it for you."

Paul Stansik:
That’s huge. Because the real battle isn’t about adding more things. It’s about stripping away what doesn’t matter.
Time needs to be protected: for deal reviews, for customer interviews, for the important but never urgent things.
Making time for reflection is one of the hardest things for leaders to do. But it’s also one of the most important.

Nate Nasralla:
So, to wrap this up, what’s your one word to sum up everything we’ve talked about?

Paul Stansik:
Clear.
The best leaders are clear on what’s happening, what’s most important, how they’re doing, and what they’re going to do next.
Clarity, clarity, clarity. That’s what I’m always looking for — whether as an investor, an operator, or a board member. And it’s what the best leaders always bring.