Atomic Sales Strategy: Win the Week, Win the Year

Dave Lambert is the GM of Iterable, a Top Rated Customer Communication AI Platform. He achieve President’s Club for 2024 at Iterable and prior to that Global MVP 2022, President’s Club 2022 and 2021 at Medallia.

Lets’ dive right into how Dave focuses on winning the week and as such wins the year!

There’s a quiet revolution happening in how high-performing sales leaders think about growth. It’s less about sweeping strategy documents and more about precision. Less about moonshots and more about the atomic habits that drive consistent, predictable wins.

I was reminded of this when I spoke with David Lambert, General Manager of APAC at Iterable — a man who has turned methodical consistency into an art form. Dave has led teams across continents, won President’s Club multiple times, and built go-to-market machines from zero in some of the most competitive software markets in the world. Yet his philosophy on success is surprisingly understated.

“It’s not rocket science,” he told me. “You just have to work out what you need to do every week — Monday to Friday — and then repeat it. Win the week, and you’ll win the year.”

That single line could sit on a thousand sales dashboards. But beneath its simplicity lies a philosophy every leader should study — one that fuses focus, rhythm, and discipline into something far more powerful than the sum of its parts.

1. Shrinking Strategy: The Power of Small, Consistent Wins

There’s a comforting illusion in long-term planning. Multi-quarter targets, bold forecasts, and sweeping initiatives feel strategic — but in reality, they can distance teams from the actual levers that create movement.

Dave’s antidote is what I’d call atomic strategy: breaking ambition into controllable, measurable micro-actions. It’s the difference between “grow pipeline by 50%” and “speak to 40 new prospects this week.”

“When we started building the region at Iterable,” Dave explained, “we didn’t have a huge marketing budget or a partner network. So we asked a simple question: What do we have? A couple of BDRs, a handful of account executives, and a quota. That was it. So we built the plan around that.”

Every team member knew their personal rhythm — how many conversations, meetings, and opportunities they needed each week to stay on track. Those numbers weren’t aspirational; they were behavioural. And when you compound the right behaviours, performance stops being luck and starts being math.

It’s a philosophy that sounds deceptively boring. But as any top-performing sales leader knows, consistency is a superpower.

Grand strategies can collapse under their own ambition. Atomic ones thrive because they’re human-sized. You can execute them, measure them, and — crucially — improve them.

2. Start with Subtraction: Strategy is What You Don’t Do

Most sales leaders love addition — new markets, new verticals, new plays. Dave loves subtraction.

“I think less about what we should do,” he said, “and more about what we shouldn’t. That’s the core of strategy to me.”

It’s a radical kind of focus. When Iterable began its regional expansion, he deliberately chose not to pursue Japan or Korea out of the gates, despite the potential. The reasoning was simple: spreading thinly kills velocity. Concentration wins momentum.

Every “no” sharpened the team’s collective attention. They weren’t debating which industries to chase; they were executing within clear lanes. The result was faster learning cycles, cleaner feedback loops, and an operating rhythm the entire region could rally around.

It reminded me of something Jeff Bezos once said: “Focus is about saying no.” Dave has turned that into operational muscle. It’s not just clarity for clarity’s sake — it’s an act of protection. Every unnecessary “yes” steals energy from the atomic actions that actually move the number.

For leaders, the takeaway is simple but hard to practise: your focus is finite. Guard it like profit margin.

3. The Four-Year Sprint: How Elite Performers Compound Skills

Before Iterable, Dave spent nine years at Medallia, winning global MVP and President’s Club honours multiple times. But the most revealing part of his story wasn’t his trophies; it was how he thought about time.

“I think about my career in four-year stints,” he said. “Every four years, I ask: what am I learning now that gets me to the next stage?”

Those stints might happen within the same company, but they’re treated like new chapters. Each one has a distinct goal — a skill to master, a capability to build, a set of experiences to stack.

It’s an idea that maps beautifully onto team development too. Instead of endless linear progressions, leaders can design four-year sprints around growth phases. Years one and two: foundation and process mastery. Years three and four: autonomy and innovation. Then it resets — new challenges, new focus, new learning curve.

For Dave, those cycles built a rare form of adaptability. He calls it “behavioural variety” — the ability to adjust, to read the room, to change language and posture depending on the context. It’s why he’s been able to thrive across consulting, product marketing, and enterprise SaaS leadership.

In a world obsessed with acceleration, the four-year sprint reminds us that compound interest still applies to careers.

4. Trust as a Strategy, Not a Slogan

In competitive markets, it’s easy to chase speed at the cost of integrity. But as Dave points out, “trust is probably the one way you can win in a market where everyone’s promising the same thing.”

That sentence should be written above every enterprise sales desk.

Trust is the currency buyers don’t realise they’re trading until it’s gone. Overpromise once, and renewal conversations become hostage negotiations. Tell the truth — even if it costs you a deal — and you build reputation equity that compounds faster than ARR.

At Iterable, “trust” isn’t a poster in reception; it’s a living operating principle. Reps are encouraged to tell prospects when a feature doesn’t exist or when a competitor might be a better fit. It’s disarmingly rare. And that honesty creates gravitational pull.

It’s also smart economics. In low-trust markets, differentiation through honesty is efficient. It reduces friction, shortens cycles, and keeps customers for longer. You don’t win every deal, but you win the right ones — the kind that stay and expand.

In other words: trust isn’t moralising. It’s math. The compounding value of reputation is the ultimate atomic advantage.

5. Hiring for Motor, Not Pedigree

When Dave started building out his regional team, he made a counterintuitive choice: hire for energy and alignment, not for perfect experience.

“I’ll take someone who’s coachable and believes in what we’re building,” he said, “over someone with the perfect CV who’s just along for the ride.”

At this stage of a company’s growth, chemistry and curiosity matter more than credentials. The wrong personality — even a competent one — can drag an early-stage team off rhythm. But someone with genuine belief and a self-starter mindset will pull the group forward.

This approach shifts hiring from qualification to calibration. The question isn’t can they do the job; it’s will they make us better?

Dave looks for what he calls “motor”: the intrinsic drive to figure things out. Not the hustle-culture version of grinding weekends, but the professional curiosity that turns uncertainty into opportunity. Motor is coachable. Entitlement isn’t.

It’s a refreshing reminder for leaders everywhere: you can train skill. You can’t manufacture hunger.

6. When the Numbers Slip: Pause, Don’t Panic

Every leader hits turbulence. The key is knowing when to hold the line versus when to change course. Most people, under pressure, start re-engineering everything — new comp plans, new messaging, new markets — often compounding chaos.

Dave’s instinct is the opposite. “Don’t have a knee-jerk reaction,” he says. “Ask first: are we just going through a bad patch?”

Instead of tearing up playbooks, he checks whether the system is still sound. If it is, he gives it time. Small adjustments replace sweeping overhauls. Data is used directionally, not obsessively.

“I don’t think you need that much data to make most business decisions,” he adds. “You can usually make them with less than half, because most things can be undone.”

That last part is gold. Sales leaders overestimate the permanence of their choices. Dave’s bias toward reversible experimentation keeps teams moving without the fear of failure. You learn faster, you waste less energy, and you preserve morale.

The deeper message: leadership isn’t about constant motion. It’s about intelligent stillness — knowing when not to flinch.

7. Growth Mindset, Operationalised

Every company claims to value a “growth mindset.” Few operationalise it. At Medallia, the principle was so embedded that Carol Dweck, who coined the term, would occasionally visit the office. It wasn’t theory; it was practice.

For Dave, growth mindset means celebrating effort as much as outcome — especially in high-growth environments where the goalposts never stop moving. Failure isn’t fatal if it comes from the right work. That belief gives teams permission to keep iterating, to stay in motion, to learn in public.

Combined with trust, it creates a culture where people are ambitious and safe. They’re encouraged to try new plays without fearing blame. That’s not soft culture — it’s high-performing culture with psychological oxygen.

As a leader, your job isn’t to remove challenge. It’s to make learning survivable. That’s what keeps people engaged through the grind.

8. The Math of Momentum

Underneath all of Dave’s philosophies sits a single operating truth: consistency compounds faster than bursts of brilliance.

If you can identify the few atomic metrics that sit within your control — the actions that actually lead to revenue — and build your operating cadence around them, you turn volatility into predictability. That’s the essence of “win the week, win the year.”

• You can’t control the market, but you can control outreach volume.
  
  
• You can’t control timing, but you can control discovery rigour.
  
  
• You can’t control budget cycles, but you can control follow-up.
  
  

Once those are tracked weekly, improvement becomes visible. Coaching becomes data-backed. The flywheel starts spinning.

The irony is that this “boring” approach produces extraordinary results. It’s how Dave’s teams hit quota, quarter after quarter. It’s how high performers build careers that look linear on LinkedIn but are actually the product of small, relentless course corrections.

9. The Human Element: Adaptability as Advantage

When Dave jokes that he’s the “fox” in the Myers-Briggs Buzzfeed version — the one labelled “manipulative” — he’s really talking about adaptability. The ability to read the room, to sense context, to adjust communication without losing authenticity.

It’s not politics for self-interest; it’s emotional intelligence applied to business outcomes. He frames it as understanding what matters to other people and finding alignment through that lens. “The world is unfair,” he says. “Once you accept that, you can work out how to move through it.”

In volatile environments — new markets, early-stage teams, PE-backed companies under pressure — adaptability isn’t optional. It’s the difference between rigid leaders who burn out and contextual leaders who build longevity.

It also connects the dots across every theme Dave raised: focus, rhythm, trust, growth mindset. Each one relies on adaptability. The ability to adjust pace without breaking rhythm. To hold conviction without clinging to certainty. That’s what separates good managers from real leaders.

Summary: The Discipline of Small Things

Atomic Sales Strategy isn’t about shrinking ambition. It’s about increasing precision. It’s the understanding that success isn’t born in the boardroom — it’s built in the Monday-to-Friday rhythm of measurable, controllable actions.

Dave Lambert’s leadership lessons read like a manual for modern SaaS growth:

• Strategy starts with what you don’t do.
  
  
• Trust and truth scale faster than spin.
  
  
• Hire the motor, not the resume.
  
  
• Protect your rhythm; resist panic.
  
  
• Build a culture where learning is safe and consistency is sacred.
  
  

“Win the week, win the year” isn’t just a slogan — it’s a discipline. It’s how you turn chaos into cadence, and ambition into achievement.