You Get What You Inspect
A lesson from my first sales manager job and what finally changed about it.
In 2006, researchers at Newcastle University ran a simple experiment on an honesty-box coffee station: some weeks the price list carried a photo of eyes, other weeks a photo of flowers. Nothing else changed. During the “eyes” weeks, people paid nearly three times more for their drinks. Nobody was actually watching, a picture of being watched was enough to change behavior.
Pictured: five of the ten weekly stimulus images from the study, alternated with photos of flowers – never shown to subjects together.
Reading about that experiment again, it reminded me of a conversation I had early in my career, as a young sales manager.
I was complaining to my boss. My reps needed to be on top of every detail of every deal for me to build a forecast I actually trusted and getting them there felt like a full-time job on top of my actual job. He didn’t offer much sympathy.
“You get what you inspect.”
He was right, and I hated that he was right. Because at the time, “inspect” had exactly one method: sit down with a rep and walk every open deal line by line, rebuilding the picture from their memory. Who they’d actually spoken to. What the prospect had said mattered to them. Whether the deal was really where the stage said it was. None of it lived anywhere except in the rep’s head and their notebook — so my job became reconstructing the truth, deal by deal, hour by hour, usually the night before I had to defend the number upward.
It worked, in the sense that it was the only tool I had. It also meant the forecast was only ever as good as what a rep remembered to tell me, in that room, under pressure and I could only inspect as many deals as I had hours in the week.
What Changes: The AI Was Already Listening
Running iSEEit now, I think about that conversation with my old boss a lot. He wasn’t wrong about the principle. What was missing was a way to inspect that didn’t depend on a rep’s memory — or mine.
iSEEit Sales AI listens to the calls and reads the emails, and surfaces the MEDDPICC elements directly from what the prospect said — Decision Criteria, Required Capabilities, Compelling Reason to buy, Champion behavior, and the rest — tied back to the moment it was said and by whom. Rep and manager are no longer working from two different memories of the same call. They’re working from the same facts.
The rep’s side changes even more than that. Every call turns into meeting minutes automatically, so nothing the prospect said gets lost between one call and the next. Action items are already drafted, not reconstructed from memory before the next one-on-one. And everything ever discussed with a prospect — across every call, every email, every deal — becomes a repository the rep can simply ask, in chat, instead of digging back through a recording or a thread.
CRM updates work the same way. Instead of sitting down after every call to fill in fields from scratch, the rep is prompted with the updates the AI already drafted from the conversation — Decision Criteria filled in, a new stakeholder flagged, a risk noted — and simply approves, edits, or declines them. The system does the typing. The rep stays in control of what goes in.
The Saying Still Holds — It Just Means Something Different Now
My old boss was right, and he’d still be right today: you get what you inspect. He just didn’t know yet that inspection wouldn’t always mean interrogation. It’s no longer a once-a-week reconstruction exercise limited to whichever deals made it onto the review agenda. It’s available on every deal, all the time, built from what actually happened rather than what a rep remembered to mention.
That changes what a deal review is for. It stops being the moment where the facts get established, under time pressure, from memory. It becomes the moment where we look at the same facts together and decide what to do about them.
That’s the shift iSEEit Sales AI is built around: MEDDPICC qualification drawn from real conversations, not rep recollection — so reps get their time back, and leaders finally get to ask less and know more.
See how it works: now.iseeit.com/sales-ai
Coffee-station study: Bateson, Nettle & Roberts (2006), “Cues of being watched enhance cooperation in a real-world setting,” Biology Letters.
