About David Standing
Director – David Standing | Withinnovation
David Standing is a commercial leader, consultant, investor and author with more than 30 years’ experience in sales, leadership and business performance.
His career began in professional sport, playing first-class cricket for Sussex CCC in the 1980s. It was an experience that shaped much of his later thinking about business: sustained performance is rarely accidental. It comes from structure, preparation, coaching, measurement, accountability and continuous improvement.
Since moving into business, David has worked as a salesperson, led sales teams, run multi-million-pound businesses, held CEO roles, invested in growing companies and, for nearly 20 years, advised business owners and commercial leaders on improving performance.
Throughout that career, one question has remained central to his work:
Why do sales still go up and down, however hard the team works?
David believes the answer is rarely as simple as the quality or effort of the salespeople themselves. More often, the constraint lies in the commercial environment surrounding them.
Too many organisations rely on processes that have evolved rather than been intentionally designed: forecasts that aren’t fully trusted, targets without a clear plan for achieving them, CRM systems rich in data but poor in insight, managers consumed by firefighting, and revenue that depends too heavily on a small number of individuals.
David’s work focuses on changing that.
Through Accordant Partners, he works with business owners, CEOs and commercial leaders to design and install the structures, disciplines, processes and management rhythms that make commercial performance more consistent, predictable and scalable.
He has worked across sport, leisure, hospitality, health and wellness and a range of other sectors, including work with organisations such as Tottenham Hotspur and Sussex County Cricket Club, alongside advising, investing in and helping develop growing businesses.
David has brought much of that experience and thinking together in his book, The Sales Operating System.
Its central premise is simple:
Predictable sales performance doesn’t happen by accident. It is designed.
Rather than offering another sales methodology or collection of closing techniques, the book challenges leaders to look beyond the salesperson and consider the organisation that produces commercial performance: how opportunities are created and managed, how people are coached, how pipelines and forecasts operate, how performance is measured and how the entire commercial system works together.
David is currently making The Sales Operating System available free of charge, with readers simply covering postage and packaging. Follow the link below for details.
📩 Get in Touch
If you need a top‑notch event management and production team, you’ve just found them.
📧 Email: info@withinnovation.co.uk
📞 Phone: +44 (0) 7974 805329
Let’s create something extraordinary together
