METHOD · EXTRACT TO SUSTAIN
The playbook isn’t a binder. It’s your source code.
MXL turns top-performer judgment into a skill that runs in your CRM, your AI workspace, a sales roleplay practice simulator, live deal and call scoring, and your manager cadence. Small, owned, scored, recurring.
WHERE THE METHOD COMES FROM
Mike Griego carried a quota before he carried a title. Top salesperson at IBM first, then sales and leadership roles across Silicon Valley: StorageTek, Gartner, and a run of technology companies through every innovation wave. Stanford MBA. Author of three sales books, including No Excuses! A Better Way to Sell and 42 Rules to Increase Sales Effectiveness. More than 10,000 salespeople trained across 100+ companies, from Fortune 500s to high-growth startups. His Udemy course on enterprise selling has taught 6,000+ students worldwide with a 4.8/5 star rating.
He has watched every sales technology cycle arrive with a promise and leave with a shrug. CRM was going to fix sales. Then marketing automation. Then engagement platforms. Each one made disciplined teams better and changed nothing for everyone else, because the tool was never the problem. The system was.
MXL is that thirty years of pattern recognition, shipped a new way. The methods were pressure-tested in the most demanding sales environment in the world.
THE OPERATING LOOP
Extract.
2-3 WEEKS · MXL-LED
We interview your top performers and study your wins and losses. Not what the training says they do. What they actually do: the judgment, the sequencing, the questions they ask when a deal wobbles. The raw material never leaves your building undocumented again.
PRODUCES: INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS · WIN/LOSS PATTERNS · THE JUDGMENT MAP
Encode.
2-4 WEEKS · MXL-LED
What they do becomes working assets: playbook language, CRM stages and exit criteria, AI context files, and simulator scenarios built from your real deals and your real objections. A binder describes the motion. A skill performs it.
PRODUCES: PLAYBOOK · CRM SPEC · CONTEXT FILES · SIMULATOR SCENARIOS
Train.
2-3 SESSIONS · YOUR TEAM IN THE ROOM
Live working sessions with your team, built around your accounts and your language. Short and specific. For multi-brand platforms, this includes cross-company kickoffs and sales conferences we design and run. Your reps leave with moves for deals currently in their pipeline, not concepts for deals in general.
PRODUCES: A TEAM THAT BUILT ITS OWN PLAYBOOK
Practice.
CONTINUOUS · REP-LED
Reps rehearse in an AI simulator until they’re certified. Every session scored against the playbook, every transcript reviewed. Practice happens before the customer call, not on it.
PRODUCES: CERTIFIED REPS · SCORED TRANSCRIPTS · Manager coaching guides
Sustain.
MONTHLY + QUARTERLY
Monthly coaching, live calls scored against the playbook, quarterly refreshes as your market moves. Every quarter names the next three moves.
PRODUCES: QUARTERLY RE-BASELINE · THE NEXT THREE MOVES
THE BUY-IN INDEX
Most of this work happens behind the scenes. We extract, encode, build the scenarios, and draft the deliverables. Your leadership shows up at a small number of defined moments, and those moments are not optional.
What MXL does without you.
Where leadership must show up.
THE MULTIPLIER
The six areas measure whether a sales system exists. The Buy-In Index measures whether leadership will keep it alive. In thirty years of engagements, the failures never failed on playbook quality. They failed on buy-in: not enthusiasm, but whether the room agrees on what is broken, agrees on why, and has someone who owns the fix.
A company can score 80 on system design and realize a fraction of it, and the score should say so. On the free assessment it is self-reported and applied as a multiplier. In the paid diagnostic it is measured and reported on its own, because it is the gate on everything else, not a peer score.
WHAT IT READS
01
Agreement on the problem. Does leadership name the same gaps the field names, or are there two versions of what is wrong?
02
Agreement on the cause. Where the room is split on why, the fix stalls before it starts. We document the split instead of papering over it.
03
Ownership of the fix. A named person, a cadence, and consequences. Initiatives with a partner attached and no rhythm behind them are the most common way a sound plan never gets installed.
On the free assessment these are self-reported through four behavioral questions and applied as a multiplier between ×0.70 and ×1.00. In the diagnostic they are scored from interviews and reported on their own.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE ON THE ASSESSMENT
50
40
FRAGILE
Buy-in ×0.8
Your system scored 50. Your leadership commitment means you’ll realize 40 of it.
Buy-in is rarely the constraint. Ownership is. We measure both, because a plan nobody owns is a plan that does not happen.
THE SHIPPING FORMAT
The simulator.
Reps rehearse your real selling situations against an AI counterpart and certify before they’re tested on a customer. Then live calls and deals are transcribed and scored.
The context files.
Your playbook, ICP, and deal logic encoded so every AI tool your team touches runs on your way of selling, not a generic average.
The scorecard.
Six areas, benchmarked against lower-middle-market peers, re-baselined quarterly. The same taxonomy from your first assessment to your board rollup.
THE AI OBJECTION
You can, and you should use AI everywhere. Here's what AI does well and what it can’t do at all.
AI handles this well. We’ll help you set it up.
Drafting and refreshing playbook content
On-demand roleplay practice for reps
Scoring calls against a defined rubric
Generating training decks and summaries
We even help you load our playbooks into your own AI workspace
What AI can’t do. And where installs fail without it.
Decide what’s right for your deal model (not an LLM average)
Make the team own a playbook by building it with them
Sit in the forecast call and call a deal that isn’t real
Hold leadership to the weekly rhythm when it gets hard
Diagnose why buy-in is slipping before it kills the install
SYS CHECK · EVIDENCE, NOT GUT FEEL
Baseline captured at day zero. Re-measured at day 90 and every quarter after. Forecast accuracy, pipeline coverage, stage hygiene, and certification rates, reported in a format a board can read in five minutes.
We’re hired to install a system that outlasts us. The scorecard keeps us honest; the quarterly rhythm keeps us present.
BASELINE DAY 0 · RE-MEASURED DAY 90 · EVERY QUARTER NAMES THE NEXT THREE MOVES
T-MINUS 30 Days
See the method run on your numbers.
Four weeks. Your sales system scored against lower-middle-market benchmarks, and the three moves that matter most.
Book a fit call
OR TAKE THE 3-MINUTE ASSESSMENT →