Doug Adamic on Sales Discovery, Pipeline Quality and Why He Resists Discounting

Harry Stebbings asks Doug Adamic when he fell in love with sales. Adamic began in finance and accounting, then a friend encouraged him to meet a recruiter. His first sales job was at Cintas, where the training and the people helped him understand the profession and immediately enjoy it.

Adamic thinks appreciation for sales can be learned. An entrepreneurial spirit helps, but the complexity becomes rewarding when a salesperson sees the work as improving a customer's business and producing specific outcomes.

He describes his 16 years at Concur and SAP as two chapters. He says Concur grew from roughly $50–60 million in sales to nearly $1 billion before SAP acquired it. Growing with a disruptive business and then learning to scale globally inside a much larger organization gave him different experiences.

At Concur, combining travel and expense management met significant industry resistance. Adamic learned to persist with an unfamiliar idea and explain a business problem customers might not yet recognize. He also credits leaders and coaches, and says he later built new departments at Brex to support its customer journey.

Stebbings says people who worked with Adamic praised his listening. Adamic attributes it to genuine interest in how people work and whether he can help improve their business. He tries to be present, set aside preconceptions and listen for a problem where his team can make a meaningful difference.

Adamic says his team records and reviews calls through an enablement function. Instead of judging a conversation as one block, it breaks the sales method into steps: listening, discovery questions, access to information competitors might miss, and how the team uses that information to make its solution relevant to the buyer's criteria.

His phrase “pipeline is our air” means demand creation is not marketing's job alone. He aligns the go-to-market organization around creating demand, converting pipeline profitably, and protecting and growing the customer base. Everyone, regardless of function, should consider how they contribute to future demand.

Stebbings asks how to set pipeline goals without generating lots of low-quality leads. Adamic starts with the source—such as inbound, partners, self-generated opportunities or internal referrals—then examines attributes and conversion at each stage. Comparing messages and channels allows the team to direct effort toward the combinations that work.

He says the goal is quality rather than an automatic requirement for five or ten times the quarterly target in pipeline. At Concur, he says, the team entered a quarter with less than one times coverage because it understood how to generate and convert opportunities in its customer base. That example reflects his team's experience, not a universal target.

For Brex, different people and organizational levels can initiate a purchase for different reasons. Adamic stresses product marketing and content that speak to each persona, as well as lead scoring and accurate data. Without reliable data capture, it is difficult to see how sources and opportunities convert over time.

Stebbings suggests demand creation is harder in 2023 than in 2021. Adamic challenges the generalization for Brex's spend-management business: companies need to manage employee and vendor spending in both good and difficult times, and tighter budgets can make the value of doing so more apparent. He has a commercial interest in that product category.

He acknowledges that money is tight and that Brex competes for a company's total budget, not just against direct competitors. The answer, in his view, is a clear value proposition tied to a business challenge. He says prospects may now require many more contacts before showing interest—his estimate rises from four or five touches in earlier years to 16 or 20, an observation rather than a universal benchmark.

Adamic describes a complex sale as threading several needles with one toss. A campaign begins with the first hello and may need to persuade five, six or seven people. He urges representatives to be deliberate about each interaction because a prospective customer may not offer many chances to recover from a poor campaign.

To distinguish a buyer from an influencer, Adamic suggests asking about the last similar purchase the person led and listening for a specific account of what happened. His teams also use patterns from comparable organizations to coach representatives on where authority usually sits and when the decision-maker may become visible.

Building multiple champions requires constructive tension, Adamic says. He explains the steps needed to determine whether a partnership makes sense and frames them as a way for both parties to reach a decision faster. He believes a salesperson sometimes has to challenge the customer and introduce a problem the customer has not yet recognized.

Asked whether that challenge is easier at startups than large corporations, he says both are difficult in different ways. Large organizations bring more layers, politics and history, while younger businesses have different patterns. Neither eliminates the need to work through resistance.

Another Adamic phrase, “more trips to the bank to make bigger deposits,” describes his obligation to help salespeople become more effective. As territories shrink and quotas rise, better systems and playbooks should allow a representative to accomplish more and earn more without simply working longer hours.

He asks representatives to examine whether each activity moves them toward that goal. Forcing deals or refusing to assess whether their work is effective can create friction. When a task slows them down, he wants them to raise it so leadership can investigate and remove the obstacle.

How can a salesperson create urgency when the customer's problem is not an emergency? Adamic says a compelling case shows how a solution saves money or time, creates revenue, or delivers another material result. If the cost of delay is clear and credible, the customer can understand why waiting has consequences.

That case depends on thorough discovery, multiple conversations and a business case the people involved believe. Adamic calls Brex's field a mandatory but non-core process. He says discovery should reveal whether the customer has a problem now, sees one approaching, or has a person or group seeking to lead a transformation; these three buying motivations are his framework.

On discounting, Adamic says sellers should charge for the value they deliver and stand behind it when the discovery work supports the price. He worries that discounts used to manufacture urgency establish a bad buying pattern and undermine deal size. His argument assumes the supplier repeatedly fulfills its promise; he cites Brex as his own example.

“Lengthen your stride and quicken your step” is his shorthand for improving effectiveness as quotas increase. He suggests diagnosing what prevents a representative or team from moving faster, removing those obstacles and providing the right tools. The details differ across teams, but the aim is consistent improvement rather than activity for its own sake.

Stebbings asks whether speed comes from individual talent or the surrounding tools and product. Adamic says both matter. Experience can help, but so can curiosity, discipline, ownership and accountability; those qualities work best with appropriate systems and a useful playbook.

A recurring bottleneck, he says, is failing to understand the outcome the company is trying to produce for a customer. Representatives may be excited to demonstrate features before understanding how the customer's business works. Adamic wants them to identify a measurable outcome and explain why their solution can help achieve it.

For Adamic, a sales playbook sets out the sequence of a campaign and the criteria to complete before progressing. Skipping a step can surface later as a broken promise or weak partnership. He presents the checklist as a way to explore whether a partnership is appropriate, not as a trick to force a purchase.

Playbooks must evolve as a company learns. Adamic says a Brex department catalogs feedback from the field, and the team introduces accumulated changes at appropriate intervals. He avoids launching changes mid-quarter; particularly disruptive changes may wait for a half-year or annual transition to protect business continuity.

When motivating a team to pursue a quarter, Adamic starts with personal goals and the resources needed to achieve them. He wants people to connect professional development to those aspirations and understand the opportunity in front of them. His aim, he says, is a sustainable organization, not simply a short-lived burst of energy to hit a quota.

Large, marquee customers may need executive sponsorship, but Adamic does not think the CEO must lead every important sale. The broader leadership team has a responsibility to participate in go-to-market work, and that involvement should be distributed rather than concentrated on one person.

A good handoff to customer success starts before the contract is signed. Adamic follows the entire lifecycle: awareness, a sales process suited to the buyer's role, captured discovery, implementation and the introduction of customer success. The sales representative stays close during the transition before stepping away.

The information that matters is the customer's problem and the outcome promised during the sale. Customer success should track delivery through implementation and business reviews. If the company fulfills that promise consistently, Adamic says, it earns trust to propose solving another problem; expansion is a result of the relationship, not its starting point.

Stebbings asks whether customers now demand more proof of return before expanding. Adamic agrees and says trust disappears when a customer believes the salesperson is serving personal or company interests rather than the customer's needs. Research, insight and value analysis should support an honest discussion of where the supplier can and cannot help.

For deal reviews, frontline managers gather their teams to assess the customer's challenges, the value of solving them, coverage of relevant stakeholders and gaps in information. The objective is a path to a decision—either a partnership or an early no—rather than an endless process.

Adamic says losing is reasonable when the customer has no problem the company uniquely solves, or when events outside the seller's control intervene. Pushing an unsuitable solution creates trouble during implementation and customer success. Since time can kill deals, an early no can be as useful as a later yes.

The loss that frustrates him is a surprise: a stakeholder the team never spoke to, another department evaluating a similar product, or some other important fact discovered only at the end. Stebbings challenges him with a sudden change in a customer's funding situation. Adamic replies that sellers should understand the customer's finances, anticipate risks where possible and evaluate their value proposition against those risks.

When a deal slips into the next quarter, Adamic acknowledges that not every transaction will close on schedule. He believes predictability improves when seller and customer agree early on an evaluation, decision and implementation timeline, then hold each other accountable. A mutual plan helps distinguish a buyer seeking to solve a problem from someone merely shopping.

Asked about the hardest part of being a revenue leader, Adamic points to human unpredictability. Even a carefully organized system interacts with people who have good days, bad days and events outside work. That variability grows as teams and the number of customer contacts scale.

Earlier in his career, he says, being a strong sales leader meant sitting at the top of the leaderboard. Now he finds satisfaction in building the systems, departments and infrastructure that make strong results a byproduct. His family analogy is to focus on the small things the box score does not show; the score follows from doing them well.

On hiring, Adamic wants a mix of people with relevant industry expertise and people who understand the customer segment but bring a fresh perspective. At Brex, experienced sellers can contribute knowledge of the CFO's office and spend management, while others can challenge assumptions about a newer solution.

He says founders and sales leaders often underestimate the support a representative needs. A salesperson cannot be expected to invent the positioning, campaign process and information strategy alone. Enablement, tools and expertise do not need to be enormous, but the surrounding team must help the seller do the job well.

Adamic expects AI to change sales through call analysis, pattern recognition, outreach and marketing. He sees an opportunity to reduce friction and make people more effective, while arguing that complicated, multi-product solution sales will remain difficult to strip of their human element. This is his forecast from the 2023 interview.

In the quick-fire round, he says selling value remains central, while leading a pitch with features and functionality has become less effective as buyers encounter more innovation. He also thinks corporate gift policies have reduced the usefulness of entertainment-based relationship building. Customers, he argues, value useful insights and constructive challenges.

His advice to a new sales leader is to understand what buying criteria need to change for a prospect to recognize the product's distinctive value. He would also like the profession to move beyond the stereotype of the slick salesperson and be seen as consulting that helps businesses improve.

After a missed quarter, Adamic recommends examining what went wrong while identifying positive leading indicators. He encourages a team to avoid turning the miss into a pattern, stay focused on its system and playbook, and use evidence of progress to maintain morale.

Asked which sales strategy impresses him, Adamic names Salesforce for selling value and creating a customer-success motion across a broad range of products. He describes it as a standard he strives toward when building his own business. Stebbings closes by thanking him for the conversation.