Stop Running the Machine. Start Building It.
- Lolita Trachtengerts
- 8 hours ago
- 5 min read
In the Spotlight with Yuval Yeret, CEO & Founder, Yeret Agility
Every sales leader operates. Forecasts get reviewed. Pipelines get managed. Deals move or they don't.
But very few leaders also build.
Not hire. Not manage. Build — as in, step back and ask whether the way their team works is actually working.
In the latest episode of In the Spotlight, Roi Carmel sits down with Yuval Yeret, CEO and Founder of Yeret Agility, to dig into why the best revenue leaders carry two jobs at once — and why most only ever do one.
Yuval's career started in product development. He spent years helping engineering and product teams build self-improving organizations. Then he moved his practice into marketing and sales. His observation was simple: the same patterns that make engineering teams get faster and smarter apply to go-to-market teams too. But GTM orgs rarely use them.
His message is blunt. If the only conversations you're having are about this week's pipeline, you're operating. You're not building. And the gap between those two things is where teams quietly stall.
Curiosity Is Not Optional
Yuval brings up curiosity early. Not the sales kind — the kind where a leader looks at their own system and asks hard questions.
Is our qualification process working? Not in theory. In practice. Are pipeline reviews actually changing behavior? Or just consuming time? Did the last lost deal teach us anything, or did we move on?
The best leaders weave these questions into everyday work. They don't hold quarterly offsites to talk about improvement. They challenge the system in real time, during deal reviews, during forecast calls, during the Monday standup.
That tone sets the pace for the entire team. When a leader stays curious about how the team works — not just what the team produces — reps stop hiding behind activity. They start reflecting on outcomes.
Change Isn't a Project. It Never Was.
Yuval shares a stat that should make every RevOps leader uncomfortable: about 30% of organizational change actually gets adopted. That's the optimistic number.
Why does it fail? Same reason most products fail. Assumptions. Teams build out a full rollout plan, lock in the fields, buy the software, and then push it across the org. No testing. No iteration. No feedback loop.
Sound familiar? It should. It's what happens when companies deploy a new sales framework, a new tool, or a new methodology. One team tests MEDDPICC, it works for them, leadership says great — now everyone does it exactly the same way.
Except it doesn't work the same way everywhere. Different teams, different contexts, different problems. And when the rollout ignores that, adoption dies quietly while leadership reads dashboards that say otherwise.
Yuval's point is sharp: treat internal change the way you treat building a product. You don't ship a product and walk away. You iterate. You test. You learn what's broken and you fix it. Why would a process rollout be any different?
You Need the Trenches in the Room
One of the clearest points in this episode is about who drives change.
RevOps teams are often tasked with designing new processes, frameworks, and toolsets. They're the experts. But Yuval argues that the best results happen when RevOps co-creates with the sales force, not builds in isolation.
Salespeople know what's happening in the trenches. They know which parts of the process feel like friction and which ones actually help. When you exclude them from the design, you're building for a version of the sales motion that only exists in Salesforce fields.
The flip side matters too. When change is co-owned — when reps helped shape the approach — they don't resist it. They invested in it. It's theirs.
The 6-Week Campaign
Yuval walks through a case from Computer Associates. The situation will feel familiar to a lot of SaaS leaders right now: a competitive threat, a shifting value proposition, and no time to figure it all out.
One division took a different approach. They put inside sales, field marketing, product marketing, and digital marketing on the same team. They ran two-week sprints with clear goals — figure out the conference strategy, fix the pipeline messaging, build the competitive positioning.
The CMO started seeing something she'd wanted for years: people thinking and acting cross-functionally without needing her in the room. Her field marketing VP stopped looking at just field marketing. Her inside sales leaders finally had direct access to the copy, content, and messaging they needed to move deals.
The result: a competitive campaign launched in six weeks. Other divisions — still planning theirs.
Build the System When You Build the System
Yuval makes an important distinction. He's not saying sales teams should work in sprints every day. Day-to-day selling has its own rhythm. Pipeline calls, follow-ups, deal management — that's the operating side.
But when you need to work on the system — redesign a process, adopt a new framework, fix pipeline health — that's when you need cross-functional teams. That's when marketing and sales need to sit together. That's when you bring in the people who live in different parts of the value chain so the solution doesn't break at the handoffs.
It's the same principle Yuval saw at Gillette when R&D and commercial teams came together to build the exfoliating razor. The changes that move the needle require people from different disciplines in the same room.
What Leaders Should Take Away
Roi wraps the episode with a clean summary. Four things worth keeping:
Operating and building at the same time is hard, and necessary. Most leaders default to one.
When you build, don't just bring the people who operate. Bring the internal customers of the change. Bring people from other disciplines who influence the outcome.
Change isn't a project. It's iterative. Plan for an imperfect launch and stay curious about what's not working.
Co-create with your team. Don't deploy change at them. Deploy it with them.
About Our Guest
Yuval Yeret is the CEO and Founder of Yeret Agility. He has spent over two decades helping business, product, and go-to-market leaders improve focus, flow, and speed to impact. His career started in software engineering and R&D leadership before moving into organizational design — how people coordinate around complex work and how leaders build systems that get better over time, not just busier.
Yuval has worked with organizations including Gillette, CME Group, CA Technologies, Siemens, and CyberArk. He is a SAFe Fellow (one of fewer than 50 globally), a Professional Scrum Trainer at Scrum.org, co-author of the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams, and a Brickell Key Award winner recognized by the Lean/Kanban community. He hosts the Scaling with Agility podcast with over 100 episodes and is based in the Boston area.
Listen to the Full Conversation
🎙️ In the Spotlight with Yuval Yeret
🎧 Available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Q&A
Q: What's the difference between operating a team and building one?
A: Operating means running the current system — managing pipeline, reviewing deals, hitting targets. Building means improving the system itself — how the team qualifies, how they adopt tools, how they learn from losses.
Q: Why do most change initiatives fail in sales orgs?
A: Because they're treated as one-time projects with full rollouts, not iterative adoptions. Teams skip testing, ignore context differences across groups, and push frameworks before validating they fit.
Q: What does product-market fit have to do with internal change?
A: Internal adoption behaves like a market. Some people want the change, some need proof, some will resist. If you treat early success as a template and copy-paste it everywhere, you lose the people who needed a different path.
Q: Should RevOps own process change?
A: RevOps should lead the design, but co-create with the sales force. Reps know what works in the trenches. Excluding them produces processes that look good in dashboards but don't survive first contact with a buyer.
Q: When do cross-functional teams matter most?
A: When you're building or changing the system — not the day-to-day. Launching a new framework, fixing pipeline strategy, or redesigning competitive positioning all require people from sales, marketing, and product working together, not in silos.
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