I did not expect my background in professional opera to become the core IP of a sales training book. But here we are.
The through-line is ensemble performance. For fifteen years I sang with professional opera companies. The thing that separated great ensembles from competent ones had nothing to do with individual skill. It was whether the performers were building one shared story or several individual stories that happened to share a stage.
When I moved into sales enablement, I kept watching the same pattern on account team calls. Skilled individual sellers showing up on the same Zoom window and telling different stories. The prospect could feel it. The deals slowed or died in ways that had nothing to do with the product or the price.
The framework I built from this is in a book called Think on Your Feet, Land on Your Numbers. The core principle is "yes, and" from improv: you build on what your scene partner gives you instead of redirecting or correcting. Applied to sales, it means your team picks up the baton from each other on calls and tells one coherent story the prospect can follow.
How I built the training module
Three components, in the order teams should learn them.
Simulation first. Before anyone reads anything, run call simulations where the only rule is that each person must acknowledge what the previous person said before adding their own content. "Building on what [teammate] just said..." is a legitimate bridge. Do this twice and the concept clicks faster than any written explanation.
Call analysis second. Pull recordings from real multi-person calls. Identify every moment where a team member failed to build on what the previous person offered. Call them "thread breaks." Count them per call. This creates a measurable baseline and surfaces specific moments to debrief.
Pre-call brief third. Four minutes, three questions, one shared destination before anyone dials in. This is the structural fix that makes the listening habit stick.
How I'm distributing it
ContentForge, which I also built and run. One core idea from the book goes in. Platform-specific content for eleven channels comes out. The blog post is the long-form anchor. Everything else adapts to format. I'm testing whether leading with the opera backstory outperforms leading with the sales principle. My bet is the personal story pulls harder. Early data this week will tell.
The lesson I'd give builders creating training content: experiential first, conceptual second. Always. The teams that adopted the framework fastest did the simulations before they read a single page of the book.
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