Motivation can sometimes be the big catch-all when it comes to underperformance within a sales team or for an individual.

If motivation isn’t the issue then it might well be discipline, or lack off.

What if it’s a language problem?

When a forecast slips, when a “committed” deal disappears, when someone hides a stalling opportunity until it’s too late to save…?

A sales leaders’ instinct might be to push harder, inspect more, and ask “are we going to close this or not?” But according to David Marquet in *Leadership Is Language*, that instinct makes the problem worse and ultimately the words we reach for under pressure are the exact words that drive the truth deeper underground.

‘Leadership is Language’ has sat on my bookshelf for 5 years as a recommendation from a friend, a thoroughbred sales leader, who swore it to be one of the most influential books in leadership.

With no shortage of books to read, I picked it up last month and what follows only confirms the books relevance for sales leaders.

According to Marquet,  modern management language was forged in the early industrial age, when work was split between ‘deciders’ (those who made the decisions)  and ‘doers’ (those who did the dirty work) As I flipped over every page I thought immediately of those industries at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, many of which are forgotten or taken for granted – textiles, coal, iron, transport.

The language then (1700s) was engineered for compliance – do your task, hit your number, don’t deviate, don’t think too hard. It worked when work was physical and repetitive.

Sales is definitely not physical and repetitive.

It’s judgment-heavy, fast-changing, and dependent on reps surfacing inconvenient truths early.

Yet sales culture is arguably the *most* “doer” environment left in the modern office. Relentless pressure sell more, hit quotas, advance deals, the “always be closing,” mentality, leaderboards, targets…

We’ve optimised the language for action and accidentally suppressed the thinking.

Marquet anchors this in the 2015 sinking of the cargo ship *El Faro*, which sailed directly into a hurricane and lost all 33 crew.

The voyage recorder showed crew members who could see the danger but never felt able to challenge the captain’s plan. They had the information. The language of the ship made it unsayable.

Every sales leader has their own *El Faro* — the deal everyone privately knew was dead but nobody flagged, the quota the team nodded along to and quietly gave up on, the forecast that was technically “committed” right up until it wasn’t. The information was in the room. The language kept it hidden.

Redwork and bluework

In simple terms, Marquet divides work into two modes

‘Redwork’ is all about execution, dialing, demoing, sending the proposal.

In ‘redwork’ variability is the enemy. You want consistency and momentum. It’s all about the process.

‘Bluework’ is the strategy, deciding, reflecting, deciding *whether* to proceed.

In ‘bluework’ variability is an asset. You want diverse views, dissent, and honest assessment.

Sales teams can get trapped in continuous redwork – more activity, more pipeline, more calls, never stopping to think.

Good sales leadership creates a rhythm which is defined by a robust process which allows the team to alternate between redwork into bluework, giving space and time to reflect and decide, then back into committed action.

The six plays below are simply the moves that create that rhythm.

1.Control the clock, don’t obey it

The default sales reflex is forward motion — always advance the deal, always book the next call. Marquet’s first play is the deliberate pause, what he calls a “red dot”: the ability of anyone to stop the work and ask, “should we actually be doing this?”

In practice – build pauses into your sales cycle. Before a big proposal goes out or a deal gets marked “commit,” call a red dot — stop and genuinely ask whether this opportunity is qualified, or whether momentum is carrying a bad deal forward. In pipeline reviews, resist the reflex to advance everything. Sometimes the most valuable move is to pause a deal, not push it.

2.Collaborate, don’t coerce

“Are we going to close this?” is a coercive question — it pressures the rep toward yes. It feels like inspection, but it manufactures the optimism you’re trying to detect.

In practice – replace binary, pressure-laden questions with calibrated ones. Instead of “Is this deal good?” ask, “On a scale of one to five, how confident are you this closes in Q2 — and what’s driving that number?” The scale invites a real answer; the follow-up surfaces the risk a yes/no would have buried.

3. Commit, don’t comply

Compliance is what you get when a sales exec nods at a quota they had no hand in shaping. Commitment is what you get when they helped build the plan. The difference shows up the moment things get hard: a complied-with target gets abandoned under pressure; a committed-to one gets defended.

In practice – once a territory plan, account strategy, or deal approach is decided, get genuine commitment — but only *after* real deliberation. If your team strategy meetings are you talking and reps writing it down, you have compliance dressed as alignment. Let them debate the plan, shape it, and own it. Then commit hard.

4.Complete, don’t continue

Sales is an infinite treadmill – the quarter ends and the next one starts at zero. That endless continuation is exhausting and, worse, it removes the natural stopping points where teams learn.

In practice – Carve the work into finite chunks with real endpoints. Mark the close of a deal with a genuine moment, not just a Slack emoji. Run an actual post-mortem on a lost deal while the details are fresh. End a prospecting sprint deliberately and ask what worked. Completion creates the pause that makes the blue work (reflection) possible. Without it, your team grinds without ever getting smarter.

Nothing kills team momentum like grinding for results with out a clear end in sight.

5. Improve, don’t prove

In a “prove” culture, reps defend their numbers — deal reviews become performances, and struggling opportunities stay hidden because admitting them looks like weakness. In an “improve” culture, the goal is getting better, so reps bring you the messy deal *early*, while you can still help.

In practice – redesign your deal reviews and call coaching around improvement, not judgment. The question shifts from “Why is this deal slipping?” (prove) to “What would make this deal stronger, and where are you stuck?” (improve). When a rep brings you a deal that’s in trouble, your reaction in that moment teaches the entire team whether honesty is safe.

The sales leaders becomes a sales coach and not a sales mentor – helping the sales exec or the ‘coachee’ find the answers for themselves, rather than pointing out their weaknesses.

6. Connect, don’t conform

The bigger the gap between sales leader the team, the less truth flows upward. A junior SDR who senses the ICP isn’t quite right, or that the demo keeps breaking, will only tell you if the environment created is a psychologically safe one, that it is ok to respectfully challenge the status quo. (Something that I personally didn’t always find easy)

In practice – allow communication to flow from the team upwards. For me the simplest, most powerful move from the book is to ‘speak last’. In a deal review, if you give your read first, you get conformity and blind spots — everyone calibrates to the boss. If you ask the room first and speak last, you get information. The person with the most ‘perceived’ power should not influence everyone else in thinking and speaking.

The result…?

The 6 stages should help your team move fludily between redwork and bluework — out of pure execution and into honest thinking, then back into committed action.

And every play asks the sales leader to do the counterintuitive thing under pressure –  pause instead of push, ask instead of tell, invite dissent instead of demanding alignment, speak last instead of first.

That’s the part that’s genuinely hard. When the month, quarter  or year’s totals are on the line, every instinct might tell you to talk more, inspect harder, and drive the number.

Leadership is Language suggests that following that exact instinct is what silences the people holding the information you most need.

Better forecasting, healthier teams, and fewer surprise losses don’t come from more pressure.

They come from changing the questions you ask and the words you use.

Try this as a one-week experiment

You don’t need to overhaul your culture to test this. Pick one play and run it for a week:

– In every forecast conversation, replace “Will this close?” with “One to five, how confident — and why?”

– In your next deal review, ask the room first and be the last person to speak.

– When a rep brings you a deal in trouble, respond with “good — what do you need?” instead of “why didn’t I know sooner?”

Watch what comes to the surface. The deals you were about to lose were going to teach you this lesson anyway.

Better to learn it from your language than from your pipeline.

Thanks for reading.