About

The Story Behind the Method

In 1992, Mike Kunkle tried to work out what his best salespeople were doing that the others weren’t. He talked to his top performers, took notes, and looked for patterns. It produced good results, but without field observation or statistical analysis, it was more guessing than knowing.

A few years later, certified to deliver a sales program built on a multi-year study of high-performing sales organizations, he saw that a sales methodology didn’t have to come from one charismatic seller’s success story. It could come from evidence.

In 2002, he ran his first formal, statistically analyzed top-performer analysis. The next year, he led the project that set the pattern for everything after it: define performance tiers, gather real data, observe performers in the field, test what holds up, and build training and coaching around the findings rather than around assumptions. He ran versions of that work through 2019, across multiple companies and industries.

Across those studies, he examined what the top 4% of B2B sellers and sales managers did differently than everyone else. Some of what the top 4% do is hard to replicate. But the 16% just below them were often once-average sellers who figured out what worked in their industry, company, and market, and almost everything they do is replicable, repeatable, and learnable. The CoNavigator Method is built on those patterns.

What The CoNavigator Method Is

Top performers don’t push buyers, and they don’t really pull them either. They co-navigate the buying and sales process with them, in a partnership to solve problems and improve performance. The CoNavigator Method teaches that approach, and applies the same principles to how sales managers coach and lead their teams.

Core Principles

  • Shared Purpose: aligning with buyers, customers, and teams around their goals, challenges, and desired outcomes
  • Collaborative Navigation: guiding rather than directing, using expertise and partnership to find the best path forward
  • Value Co-Creation: uncovering, expanding, and delivering value together through dialogue and discovery
  • Trust-Based Relationships: building credibility through integrity, empathy, and a commitment to shared success
  • Outcome-Driven Action: focusing every engagement on meaningful results, not just completed transactions

About Mike Kunkle

Mike Kunkle

Mike Kunkle has spent more than 35 years helping organizations improve sales performance through sales training, sales enablement, coaching, and management development. He has served sales forces from 5 to 12,500 people across technology and SaaS, financial services, FinTech, healthcare and pharma, wholesale distribution, B2B industrial, manufacturing, meetings and conventions, and EdTech.

Sample results from his work include:

  • Reduced new-hire ramp time by 23–52% across four organizations
  • Newly trained four-month reps outperformed a control group of five-year reps by 21%
  • Increased sales per rep by 47% and profitability per rep by 11% within a year
  • Scaled productivity by 2.3 sales per employee per month, a $36.6M annual impact
  • Delivered $398M in year-over-year revenue growth and $9.96M net ROI through a full implementation of The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement framework and systems

Today, Mike is Senior Director of Sales Enablement at Velosio. He is also the founder of Transforming Sales Results, LLC, a founding board member of the Institute of Sales Professionals (US), and a board advisor to the Sales Education Foundation.

Books and resources by Mike Kunkle: