Outcome Selling

Aligning RevOps around what client really want with Sam Barcus of New Leaf Partners

Author

Royce Hall
May 15, 2025

About

Sam Barcus is a partner at New Leaf Partners, and he has shared with us his philosophy on consulting that prioritizes outcomes, relationships, and mindset. At the heart of his approach are three core personal pillars—self-awareness, gratitude, and authenticity—which shape how he builds trust, aligns teams, and drives meaningful client impact.

🔑 Key Themes:

Sam’s 3 Pillars for Consulting

1. Self-Awareness – Knowing your own triggers, biases, and impact. This has to do with knowing your strengths, your communication styles, emotional intelligence, and personality.

2. Learning – We may not all be professional researchers, or have handfuls of hours to spend on professional development every week, but we should all be lifelong learners. Whether that is reading a book, or listening to a podcast (be sure to listen to my interview with Sam below 🙂), learning and constantly evolving will help our careers and help us grow.

3. Authenticity – Showing up as yourself. Be true to your own values and identity. This can be difficult in extremely political organizations and in the modern AI driven world, but you have to be yourself and constantly work on improving that self.

Outcome Selling

"You put the client first - think about what is important to the client and you align around their needs, their expectations. You will never get to where you need to be if you don't listen to what they're saying to you."

Sam Barcus

Client-Centric Collaboration

Real value is created by listening well and co-designing with clients, not by pushing prepackaged solutions. Too often sellers want to jump to advertising their solution or “pitch slapping” to close a deal quickly. But this is really a disservice to the client and your own opportunity. When you actually listen and collaborate with your client, you will have happier clients and bigger deals.

Scope Creep and Misalignment

"Make and keep promises. Whether you're in operations or whether you're a marketer or whether you're a salesperson, or engineer, you have to know how to make and keep promises."

Clients have long memories about the things you have promised them - from timelines to features, to guaranteed services. You must be diligent to keep these promises top of mind and not allow scope creep to ruin your client relationships. And sometimes this means telling people what they don’t want to hear in order to correctly manage expectations.

Generosity Driven Sales

If you really want to build long term trust with your clients that lead to long term partnerships, you have to lead with generosity. Calling only at the end of the quarter to see if you can sell them something isn’t being generous, that’s being selfish and commission focused. You want to follow up with your connections regularly with something of value to provide to them. It takes more effort, but that is the only way genuine relationships are made.

Podcast with Sam Barcus

If you are looking for sales training and enablement to help you build long-term, profitable relationships with your clients and prospects, reach out to Sam and New Leaf Partners here:

Offer

Are you interested in Agentforce and need some training beyond the trailhead, then take a look at AI Force Training:

In this portal you will have access to the AI Fundamentals Podcast (hosted by 2 AI hosts!), AI for CRM Certification Experience (replacing Salesforce’s defunct AI cert), and the Agentforce Boot Camp for those wanting a deeper dive and hands on experience building Agents for the world of tomorrow!

Get your free access to my proprietary portal here!