Real Talk

At Under Armour, I was fortunate enough to work with brilliant people like Alison Teichman.  Early in our careers, we would meet weekly to discuss her team’s pipeline. After 20-30 minutes of a perfectly postured presentation of the deals at play, we would then begin a review that we affectionately named “real talk.” 

When we hit ‘real talk’, Alison would lower her tone, lean in and sing like a canary with nearly perfect accuracy of what would actually close. It was a shift in the conversation and our relationship.  She was no longer compelled to share the things I wanted to hear, instead she could tell me what I needed to know. 

With a bit of distance, it’s easy to see that the accuracy of a real talk review was based on factors that UA didn’t capture in a CRM.  We had the basics covered (timing, budget, products, people), but we lacked a methodology to account for qualitative indicators that separated proposals from real partners.  

While real talk was originally a game changer for me and Alison, it became transformational for the entire team when we began to capture contextual factors within our qualification process.  This provided all of us with a common language to really see which deals were .  With it, we unlocked better coaching, collaboration and accuracy in our forecasts.