Intro

There are a lot of good sales books, but there is a practical problem with sales books: most salespeople and sales leaders do not have the time to read all of them. Even when you do read them, the next problem appears quickly. You finish 250 pages with a lot of interesting ideas, put the book back on the shelf, and then have to figure out what exactly you should do differently in your next discovery call on Tuesday morning.

This article is for people who want to skip some of that translation work.

It is not really a summary of The JOLT Effect. If you want a chapter-by-chapter summary, there are plenty of those. What I want to focus on are the four behaviors at the center of the book, because I think they translate particularly well into actual sales conversations and into the way salespeople should think about progressing a deal.

The research behind The JOLT Effect, written by Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna, is one of the reasons I found the book particularly interesting. The authors worked with a huge dataset of sales conversations, around 2.5 million calls, and one of their main findings is that a very large percentage of deals do not end with a competitor winning. They end with the customer doing nothing.

That scale matters to me.

I have been selling for more than ten years. I have led sales organizations with dozens of salespeople and, despite moving into CSO and CRO roles, I have never really stopped selling myself. One of the advantages of spending most of my career in startups and scale-ups is that you never completely escape it anyway. Whenever we entered a new market, changed our ICP or introduced a new use case, I was usually one of the people who had to go into the first conversations and find out whether our assumptions actually worked with customers.

I consider that one of the biggest advantages I have had as a sales leader because my ideas about sales could never become completely theoretical. Eventually, somebody had to sit in front of an actual buyer and make them work.

My own experience obviously still has limitations. Even if you have seen thousands of opportunities and worked with a lot of salespeople, your sample is small compared with millions of conversations across companies, industries and deal sizes. That is why I enjoyed reading The JOLT Effect and then comparing its conclusions with what I had experienced myself over the previous decade.

Some of the behaviors in the book felt very familiar because I had already used them for years, sometimes consciously and sometimes simply because I had learned through experience that they worked. Other parts made me look backwards and realize that I had handled certain situations badly earlier in my career. There are also areas where I would add something to what the authors describe because of how I have seen these ideas play out in real opportunities.

That is what this article is about.

The four ideas behind JOLT are:

J: Judge the Level of Customer Indecision

O: Offer Your Recommendation

L: Limit the Exploration

T: Take Risk Off the Table

I would not describe JOLT as another qualification methodology. If you already use MEDDIC, SPICED, SPIN, BANT or something similar, there is no reason to replace it. I see these more as conversational and deal-management skills that sit on top of whatever methodology you already use.

That is how I have implemented them myself.

I added these ideas to our sales playbook at Taskbase and connected them to discovery calls, demos, workshops, executive meetings and later-stage deal conversations. A rep can qualify an opportunity with MEDDIC while simultaneously becoming much better at recognizing and reducing indecision. The two work very well together.

This is also one of the reasons I have become increasingly convinced that a modern sales playbook should contain much more than your sales stages and qualification fields. It should describe what good selling actually looks like inside those stages, including the questions reps should ask, the behaviors they should demonstrate, how they should guide the customer and when they should narrow or challenge the conversation.

Today this matters even more because AI can actually use that information. At Taskbase, for instance, we put these kinds of principles into the playbook so that the AI coach can use them when coaching reps, preparing them for meetings, analyzing skill development, suggesting tactics on deals and helping with follow-ups. If you are building a playbook yourself, you can absolutely take the ideas in this article and add them manually. If you do not have one yet and do not want to spend weeks building and maintaining it, that is one of the problems we built Taskbase to solve.

But whether you use Taskbase, Notion, a Google Doc or anything else is secondary.

The more interesting question is what you should actually teach.

These four behaviors are a very good place to start.

1. Judge the Level of Customer Indecision

The first idea in JOLT is to judge the level of customer indecision.

This starts with one of the central observations of the book: a lot of deals are not lost because another vendor wins. The customer simply chooses not to make a decision.

That is a different sales problem from competition.

Most salespeople are trained to create urgency around changing the status quo. We identify pain, quantify the impact, show why the current situation is costly and try to demonstrate that something needs to change. All of that remains important, but there comes a point where the customer might completely agree with you and still not buy.

The reason is quite simple. Making a decision introduces risk.

If I choose your software and the implementation fails, I made that decision. If I do nothing, it is often much easier to explain internally why nothing changed, especially inside larger organizations where several people become involved and where the person sponsoring the project might carry the reputational consequences if it goes badly.

One of the ways this shows up is through endless information gathering.

You finish a first meeting and the prospect asks for the presentation. Perhaps they want a one-pager that they can share internally. Later, they ask for another customer example, then perhaps another demo or a reference call.

None of those requests is inherently problematic. Buyers obviously need information, particularly early in the process when they are still trying to understand the product and the market.

The problem starts when information consumption becomes a substitute for decision-making.

A buyer can keep asking for more because every additional piece of information feels as though it reduces the probability of making a bad choice. Another reference case might provide more certainty. A second demo might answer another concern. Speaking to one more customer might make the decision feel safer.

Sometimes it genuinely does.

At some point, however, the salesperson has to understand whether the customer still lacks important information or whether they are struggling with the decision itself.

This is where I would add something from my own experience to the JOLT idea.

If you are several meetings into a sales process and still have no idea whether the customer genuinely wants to solve the problem, I usually think something went wrong earlier in discovery.

There are certainly personality differences. Some buyers are much more analytical than others and naturally want more data and detail before moving forward. But in many cases, the salesperson has simply never forced a sufficiently clear conversation about priority.

One question I have used for years is:

“From zero to ten, how important are the use cases we’ve discussed today for you?”

I like the question because it forces the customer to take something that is usually vague and make it more explicit.

If somebody tells me eight, nine or ten, I am generally happy because we are probably talking about something they perceive as genuinely important.

Seven is more difficult.

Seven is a very convenient number. It sounds positive without requiring much commitment, which is why I treat it more cautiously. When somebody gives me seven or anything below it, I want to understand what is missing rather than trying to persuade them to simply give me a higher score.

So I ask:

“What would need to happen for this to become an eight?”

The answer usually tells you much more than another twenty minutes of product demonstration.

Perhaps they say that they would need a stronger business case. In another situation, they might tell you that one use case alone is not enough and that the project would need to solve two or three additional problems before it became strategically relevant. Sometimes the answer is much more fundamental and they explain that another internal initiative, such as a major Salesforce implementation, has complete priority for the next six months.

That is useful information because you now understand the reality of the opportunity.

It does not mean they will never buy, but it tells you that another case study is unlikely to suddenly transform a six into a nine. Once you have properly discussed the problem, the use cases and the priorities, I find it very difficult to manufacture strong urgency merely by sending more information.

There is still one avenue I would explore.

Maybe the problem is important somewhere else in the organization even if the person you are currently speaking with does not feel it strongly enough.

In that case I might ask:

“Who else in the organization could find this equally interesting, or perhaps even more important than you do?”

That might open another part of the account.

It will not always work because someone who sees your topic as a six is naturally less motivated to introduce you internally than somebody who sees it as a nine. Still, it is worth trying because otherwise there may not be much of an opportunity left.

Another moment where indecision becomes visible is at the end of meetings.

The prospect says:

“I’ll discuss it internally. Could you send me the deck?”

Many reps answer yes immediately and then send it.

I would usually ask another question first.

“Absolutely. What are you planning to do with it?”

Maybe they tell me that they are going to discuss it with their VP Sales, Head of RevOps and CFO.

Now I know what “discuss internally” actually means.

I can understand who those people are, what they are likely to care about and what needs to happen next. Once I have that context, I can make a recommendation instead of simply disappearing from the process.

I might say:

“I’ll send you everything. Can I suggest something as well? If you’re going to discuss this with those three people anyway, why don’t we already book 45 minutes together? A deck without the context from today’s conversation can be difficult to interpret, and they’ll almost certainly have questions. We can answer those immediately, everybody hears the same thing and it probably saves you quite a bit of internal back and forth.”

The customer may still say no.

That does not make the question wrong.

The salesperson’s job is not to avoid every uncomfortable question. It is to improve the chances of the customer actually progressing through the decision.

That leads directly into the second JOLT behavior.

2. Offer Your Recommendation

If I had understood this skill as well during my first five years in sales as I do today, I think I would have closed considerably more business.

The principle is simple: do not make the customer design the entire buying journey for you.

One of the questions I dislike most at the end of a sales meeting is:

“So, how would you like to proceed?”

There are situations where that is appropriate, especially when you are dealing with an experienced buyer who already has a clear internal process. As a default ending to a call, however, I do not like it very much.

You sell your product every day. You have watched other customers buy it, seen deals move quickly and seen others become stuck for months. Over time, you learn which stakeholders usually need to become involved, when procurement tends to appear, whether companies normally need a business case, which use cases produce the fastest time to value and where the buying process tends to become complicated.

Your buyer might be doing this for the first time.

Asking them to tell you what the ideal process should be does not make much sense if you are the person with more experience of the journey.

One question I like asking relatively early once an opportunity becomes serious is:

“How often have you bought something like this before?”

I find this an excellent champion test.

Occasionally somebody tells you they have led this exact type of purchase several times before, perhaps at their current company and at a previous one. That is useful because now you know you are dealing with an experienced buyer who probably has a fairly good understanding of the internal process.

Quite often, however, the answer is that they have never done it before, or at least never in their current organization.

That changes the amount of guidance they need.

I still want to understand their perspective because every company buys differently. I need to know who else has to become involved, what happens before a decision can be made and whether procurement, legal, IT security or a budget owner will enter the process.

Once I understand those things, however, I do not simply hand the process back to the customer.

I make a recommendation.

One sentence I use very frequently is:

“Given what you’ve told me, what I would do next is...”

Then I give them my view.

Perhaps I recommend bringing the broader sales leadership team into the next conversation. In another deal, the next useful step might be to stop demonstrating the product and instead build a business case for the economic buyer. Sometimes a workshop makes sense because we still have not agreed on the use cases. In a more mature opportunity, I might suggest putting together the implementation plan before we spend more time discussing commercial terms.

The exact recommendation depends on the situation, but the principle is that I should have an opinion.

This also goes beyond the next meeting.

Salespeople can recommend which use case the customer should start with, how a pilot should be structured, which stakeholders should participate, how many users should be involved initially and what the shortest path to meaningful value looks like.

The same applies to business cases.

If the deal is relatively large, I usually expect that some form of economic justification will eventually be needed. With a smaller deal, perhaps below €50,000 depending on the organization, I might approach it differently.

I could say:

“At this deal size, I normally wouldn’t build an enormous financial business case. What I would want to establish is that we’re solving a sufficiently important problem and that it connects to a business initiative the company already cares about. Does that fit with how investments of this size are normally made here?”

There is an important distinction in that kind of sentence.

I am not pretending that I understand their internal process better than they do. I am bringing pattern recognition from other deals into the conversation and giving the buyer something useful to react to.

That makes buying easier.

If you are still relatively new at your company, you can learn this surprisingly quickly by studying the cleanest deals that have already closed. I would not necessarily look only at the biggest deals. I would look at the ones where the sales process moved well, the customer became successful afterwards and there were relatively few unnecessary steps.

Ask your best rep about the cleanest deal they had in the last six months.

Understand what happened between the first meeting and the contract.

Who became involved, at what point did they join, what did the customer need in order to get comfortable, and where could the process have gone wrong?

Once you understand those patterns, you have something useful to recommend to the next customer.

A very good prospect will occasionally make this easy for you and ask:

“What would you recommend we do next?”

That is a nice signal because they recognize that you have seen this process before and are allowing you to guide them.

You cannot depend on receiving that invitation, though.

Most of the time, you need to take some responsibility for the process yourself.

This is not about becoming pushy. I see it much more as part of being useful to the customer, especially when the person you are working with has never bought something like your product before.

There is another idea that I personally connect very strongly to the first two JOLT behaviors, which is the concept of micro-decisions.

Micro-Decisions: How I Know Whether a Deal Is Actually Moving

Ultimately, there is one decision we care about most, which is signing the contract.

The problem is that nobody goes directly from vague interest to signing a significant B2B agreement.

A good deal contains many smaller decisions in between, and I find those extremely useful because they tell you whether the customer is genuinely progressing or whether the opportunity is mainly producing activity.

Imagine I have shown a customer six possible use cases.

I do not want to leave the meeting with six vague possibilities still floating around. At some point, I want to ask:

“Of everything we’ve discussed, which use cases could genuinely move the needle for you?”

Perhaps they choose numbers three and four.

That is a small decision.

Once we have that, I can continue:

“If we focus on those two, from zero to ten, how important is solving this?”

They might give me a six, which is obviously not where I want to be, but even that is valuable because it creates another conversation. Maybe adding one additional use case would make the project substantially more important, or perhaps the problem is simply not urgent enough today.

What matters is that the opportunity is becoming more concrete.

The same idea applies throughout the rest of the sales process. Agreeing who else needs to become involved is a micro-decision, as is actually bringing that person into the next meeting. Building a business case together, agreeing on the pilot structure, booking the next meeting while you are still on the call or involving the economic buyer all represent forms of commitment.

By contrast, a sentence such as:

“Send me the presentation and I’ll have a look.”

is not much of a decision.

It is an exchange of information.

You might still send the presentation, but I would not confuse that with meaningful progress.

If I look backwards at an opportunity and see that the customer has consistently made small commitments, I become much less concerned about indecision. If several meetings have passed and almost everything remains open, I start to worry.

The use cases have not really been chosen, the priority is vague, nobody new has joined and there is no agreement on how the decision will actually be made. At the same time, the prospect continues asking for information.

In that situation, I would not automatically respond by sending more.

I would try to create the next real decision.

That idea becomes particularly useful when you move into the third JOLT behavior.

3. Limit the Exploration

Of the four JOLT principles, this one has become much more relevant to me over the last year because AI has changed the amount of things software can suddenly do.

We feel that very strongly at Taskbase.

We have been on the market with the current product for roughly nine months, and one of the strangest challenges we have is that the number of problems we can solve for a sales organization has expanded incredibly quickly. That sounds like a fantastic problem to have, and from a product perspective it is. From a sales perspective, however, it creates a very real danger because a product that can do too many things can overwhelm the buyer.

A lot of this comes from Taskbase being an AI-first product.

In traditional software, every new use case usually required somebody to build a separate interface around it. You needed another workflow, another feature and another part of the product. Today, much of this can happen through a conversational interface while the product still generates proper structured views whenever those are useful.

If I am a sales leader and want to understand how my reps are performing, I can ask for that and get a dashboard. The same interface can show me where individual reps stand in terms of their skills, prepare a prospecting list for the morning with the strongest signals ranked at the top, or generate a structured briefing before an important meeting.

The use cases extend much further than those examples.

Taskbase can help write follow-up emails and business cases, prepare or modify presentations, create spreadsheets, build prospecting lists, enrich contact data, update CRM information and help reps prepare for or learn from their calls.

From a product perspective, that breadth is exciting.

From a sales perspective, I could easily spend an hour explaining twenty different things that the platform could potentially do and leave the customer impressed but uncertain about where they should begin.

That is exactly where I think limiting the exploration becomes so important.

The salesperson should not open the entire product catalogue and tell the buyer to choose.

If I say that we can do all of these things and then ask the customer where they want to start, I have transferred a difficult decision to somebody who may not yet understand our product particularly well and who certainly has less experience than I do with how other customers achieve value from it.

I see my job differently.

I want to open the conversation widely enough that we can find the areas where value might exist, but then gradually narrow it until there are only a small number of concrete things that everybody agrees are worth solving.

How I Narrow Discovery at Taskbase

One way I do this is by not starting discovery with a long list of features or possible use cases.

I usually begin with three broader problems that we see repeatedly in sales organizations.

The first one is around rep performance.

Salespeople still have to conduct the customer conversation themselves. AI can prepare them, coach them, help afterwards and do a large amount of the surrounding work, but particularly in complex sales I do not believe the solution is an AI tool constantly feeding the rep live answers during the call.

Imagine a salesperson in an executive meeting who keeps looking at their screen because software has detected an objection and is now suggesting what they should say. I do not think that produces a strong salesperson. It is far more useful to develop the skills before the conversation and improve them afterwards.

So one real problem is that reps do not always have the skills they need to perform as well as they could in customer conversations.

The second problem is productivity.

A significant amount of a salesperson’s working week is still spent away from customers. They prepare meetings, write follow-up emails, build business cases, assemble presentations, research accounts, update CRM information and take care of administrative work that may be necessary but is not where the salesperson creates the most value.

The third problem is the sales playbook.

Many sales organizations either do not have one or have something that exists in fragments. There might be onboarding slides, process documentation, call scripts and random material spread across different places, while a lot of the actual knowledge about how the company sells still lives inside the heads of a few experienced people.

Historically, that was not ideal, but it was survivable because the uncomfortable truth was that many reps were not going to sit down and read a massive playbook anyway.

AI changes that.

Now your AI systems need to understand how your company sells, including the methodology, the process, the value proposition, the objection handling, the call structure and what good execution looks like in different situations. Suddenly the playbook becomes much more operationally important because it is no longer being written only for humans.

Those three problems give me enough room to discover where the conversation should go without confronting the customer with every possible use case at once.

If they tell me the playbook problem is the one that resonates most, I go down that path.

I might ask:

“Where are you today when it comes to your sales playbook?”

From there I want to understand why the current situation is actually a problem.

“What is difficult about the way you’re handling it today?”

If the answer remains relatively abstract, I might make it more personal:

“Why has that become a problem for you as a sales leader?”

Eventually, I want to understand what happens if nothing changes:

“What happens over the next six months if you continue the way you are working today?”

That is where the conversation starts telling me whether the topic is merely interesting or genuinely important.

Once we have gone deep enough, I might reopen the discussion briefly and ask whether either of the other two areas resonates as well. Sometimes there are two genuinely important problems, and there is no reason to ignore that.

The crucial part is that exploration eventually has to end.

At some point, we need to stop discovering additional things that Taskbase could theoretically solve and decide what we actually want to solve first.

There Are Several Decisions Hidden Inside a Use Case

This is another area where I think salespeople often stay too vague.

Finding a use case alone is not enough.

There are really several questions that need to be answered before it becomes commercially relevant.

First, does the customer have a problem worth solving?

Then comes the priority question. Is solving it important enough to do something about now?

Finally, we need to understand whether the buyer actually sees our product as a good solution to that problem.

Those things are not interchangeable.

A customer can have a painful problem and still not believe Taskbase is the right solution. They can also be extremely impressed with the product and clearly understand how it could solve something without having much urgency to tackle that problem this year.

Neither situation creates a particularly strong opportunity.

That is why I want to reach a point where we have a manageable number of use cases and can rank them.

If we identified ten areas, I might ask:

“Of these ten, which ones are actually the most important for you?”

Maybe the customer chooses two.

Now we have something useful.

At that point, I would usually recommend focusing on those two and deliberately leave the others out of the initial project.

They have not disappeared forever. We are simply deciding that they do not need to be part of the first buying decision.

Once that decision has been made, the rest of the sales process should reflect it. The business case should be built around the same use cases, the pilot should test them, the success criteria should relate to them and the implementation discussion should focus on what is necessary to make those things work.

If a new senior stakeholder enters later in the process, I am completely comfortable reopening the discussion.

Perhaps the CRO joins and tells us that one of the use cases we selected is actually irrelevant from their perspective and that another one matters much more.

That is valuable information and exactly one of the reasons we multi-thread.

After hearing that new perspective, however, I want to narrow the scope again. Otherwise, every new stakeholder adds another requirement and another layer of complexity until a relatively simple initial project becomes something that nobody wants to approve.

Limiting the Use Case Reduces Much More Than Product Complexity

This is where the idea becomes particularly powerful in technology sales because limiting the scope has effects far beyond the demo.

If I try to sell ten use cases at once, we may suddenly need access to large parts of the customer’s CRM, several integrations and substantially more internal support. Security has more questions, data protection becomes more complicated because more data is being processed, and the implementation plan grows considerably.

What initially looked like a manageable project can quickly begin to resemble a transformation initiative.

If we start with two use cases, the situation can look completely different.

Perhaps two integrations are enough. Maybe we only need a handful of specific fields from the CRM rather than access to a much broader dataset. It may also be possible to start with twenty users instead of immediately rolling out the product to five hundred people.

The product has not become less capable.

We have simply reduced how much of that capability the customer has to evaluate at once.

That makes the decision easier to understand and, at the same time, reduces the operational risk attached to moving forward.

Which leads naturally into the final JOLT behavior.

4. Take Risk Off the Table

This is perhaps the most important principle if you are selling something new, and it is particularly relevant if you are working in a startup.

The central problem that keeps appearing throughout The JOLT Effect is that a buyer can believe change is necessary and still decide not to move because making a decision carries more personal and organizational risk than doing nothing.

That is the situation we need to change.

The easiest mistake is to respond by creating even more urgency. We explain the pain again, strengthen the ROI calculation and remind the customer of the cost of waiting.

Sometimes that helps.

There comes a point, however, where the buyer already understands the upside.

The remaining concern is about what happens if the decision goes wrong.

Perhaps they are worried about the implementation effort or whether the users will actually adopt the product. An integration might turn out to be more complicated than expected, or the results after three months could simply be much weaker than the vendor promised. In larger organizations, there is also a personal dimension because someone often has to defend the decision internally if the project disappoints.

Once you reach that stage, repeating the value proposition will only take you so far.

I want to change the nature of the conversation and think about how the customer can validate what we are promising without taking unnecessary risk.

Make Value Easy to Test

One of the most useful questions for a salesperson to ask themselves is how the customer can find out whether the product is valuable with as little risk as reasonably possible.

That usually means reducing several things at once.

I want the internal effort from the customer to remain manageable and avoid asking them to commit unnecessary resources before we have proven value. The amount of money exposed during the initial phase should make sense relative to the uncertainty, and wherever possible I prefer to start with a smaller number of users and a clearly defined scope.

The success criteria also need to be clear enough that, after a relatively short period, neither side has to enter into a philosophical discussion about whether the project worked.

For most products, I would try to prove something meaningful within one, two or three months.

There are obviously exceptions, and sometimes customers themselves want six months because that fits their internal cycle or because they believe they need more data before drawing a conclusion.

That can be reasonable.

I would still ask whether the evaluation really needs to be that long because the longer the initial phase becomes, the more the project starts to feel like a major internal initiative.

A two-month proof of value usually feels more manageable than a six-month transformation project.

This is also where sales becomes connected to product strategy.

If your product requires nine months of implementation before the customer sees anything measurable, the salesperson cannot solve that problem simply by becoming better at objection handling.

Especially in a startup, I would work hard on reducing time to value.

The easier it becomes to start with a limited amount of data and a small number of integrations, the easier it becomes for the customer to see something useful quickly. That has a direct impact on how sellable the product is because the customer no longer has to commit to a huge project before finding out whether the underlying assumptions are correct.

I Am Not Afraid of Pilots

I know many sales leaders who dislike pilots, and there are good reasons for that.

A poorly structured pilot can consume huge amounts of time from your sales and customer success teams, run for three months and then quietly expire without the customer ever making a real commitment.

I have seen that happen often enough to understand why people become allergic to them.

Still, I do not think the answer is to avoid pilots altogether.

Particularly for startups, a pilot can be an extremely strong trust mechanism because you are effectively telling the customer that you are comfortable letting them test the product in a real environment before they take on the full risk of the decision.

If you believe the product works, that confidence should be something you can use commercially.

The crucial part is how the pilot is structured.

Once you have a product that has already worked for several customers and you are no longer at the very earliest stage, I usually prefer the pilot to sit inside a longer-term commercial agreement rather than being a completely separate contract that simply expires after two or three months.

Imagine the customer ultimately wants to use the product with one hundred people.

We might start with twenty.

The agreement already reflects the intended commercial relationship, while the first phase gives the customer a clearly defined possibility to cancel if the agreed goals are not achieved.

If the pilot succeeds, there is no need to renegotiate the entire relationship.

The customer simply continues and expands into the intended usage.

I prefer that structure because the pilot is then testing a commercial relationship that both sides genuinely intend to continue rather than running an isolated experiment with no commitment behind it.

It also avoids another problem.

When a three-month pilot contract simply expires, you can arrive at the end and find yourself effectively selling the entire deal again. Procurement might return, legal may want another agreement and the buyer has to make another major decision.

You have created another point at which indecision can reappear.

The exact contractual structure obviously depends on your company, product, market and legal environment. I am talking about the commercial principle here, not suggesting that every organization should use exactly the same clause.

The principle is that the customer should have a credible way out if you fail to deliver, while the intention to continue beyond the pilot should already exist from the beginning.

Very Early Startups Need to Take More Risk Themselves

The situation changes when you are extremely early.

If you have no customers, no strong references and little evidence that the product works consistently, you cannot expect the buyer to carry all the uncertainty.

Sometimes that means offering a free pilot.

Founders often dislike that because naturally everyone wants to charge immediately, but if nobody trusts the product yet, somebody has to absorb the initial risk and very often that has to be the vendor.

There are different ways to structure this depending on your position.

A very early company might run the pilot for free because getting the first real customer and learning from the implementation is more valuable than the initial revenue. In another case, charging for the pilot but offering a refund if the agreed outcome is completely missed can make sense. You can also charge only for the initial period and expand the commercial relationship after both sides have seen enough evidence.

As the company matures and more proof exists, you can ask for more commitment from the beginning.

The important part is that the structure evolves with the amount of trust you have earned in the market.

Buyers Have Good Reasons to Be Skeptical

I have been on the other side of this myself.

In 2021, I bought Cognism, and one important part of the setup was the HubSpot integration we expected to work.

It did not.

They eventually solved the issue, and I remember the client focus from their side being genuinely good. They worked on it and after a few months the integration was functioning.

For us, the experience was still frustrating because we had bought something based partly on the expectation that an important part of the product would work immediately, and then it did not.

Most experienced B2B buyers have some version of that story.

They have seen integrations that looked straightforward during the sales process become unexpectedly complicated during implementation. They have bought features that appeared impressive in a demo and were much less useful once real users interacted with them. Some have also experienced long implementations, low adoption or vendors who were extremely responsive before signature and far more difficult to reach afterwards.

That history sits in the room with you when the customer evaluates your product.

It is one reason I would never automatically interpret a request for a pilot as a negative signal.

Sometimes the buyer is behaving completely rationally.

They have been burned before and want evidence that this time will be different.

If you know the product works, you should be able to design a process that gives them that evidence without turning the pilot into an endless consulting project.

This is where all four JOLT ideas start reinforcing each other.

When the initial project focuses on only a small number of meaningful use cases, the implementation usually becomes easier as well. A narrower scope often means fewer integrations, less data and fewer people involved. That makes the value easier to test, and once the success criteria are agreed upfront, the customer has a much clearer way of deciding whether the product actually delivered what was promised.

The final decision becomes less frightening because the buyer no longer feels they have to gamble on the entire vision immediately.

Bringing the Four JOLT Skills Together

The reason I like these four ideas so much is that I do not really experience them as four independent techniques.

They describe one continuous problem.

A customer enters the sales process because something has created enough interest for them to speak with you, but from there they have to make a series of increasingly consequential decisions under uncertainty.

Your first responsibility is to understand how serious that uncertainty is.

That is the J.

You need to distinguish between a customer who simply lacks an important piece of information and one who has difficulty committing to anything. This is where the micro-decisions become useful because behavior tells you far more than polite interest. If the buyer keeps choosing priorities, involving additional people and agreeing on concrete next steps, I am much less worried than when several meetings have passed without any meaningful commitment.

Then you help them navigate.

That is the O.

I do not mean controlling the customer’s buying process or forcing them through your internal sales stages. What I mean is bringing experience into the conversation. If I have watched twenty companies successfully buy and implement something like this, while the person opposite me has never done it before, there is value in sharing what I think the next step should be.

After that, you reduce the number of things they have to evaluate.

That is the L.

Discovery should be broad enough to uncover where the real value might sit, but at some point you have to choose. Continuing to add possibilities indefinitely may make the product look impressive while making the buying decision increasingly difficult.

Once you have selected the use cases and the priorities, the final responsibility is to make that smaller decision safer.

That is the T.

Instead of asking the buyer to bet the entire project on your claims, create a credible way for them to validate the assumptions behind the purchase with a manageable amount of effort and risk.

When you look at JOLT this way, I do not see it competing with MEDDIC, SPICED or SPIN.

MEDDIC can help me understand whether I have a champion, whether I know the decision criteria and whether I understand the economic buyer. JOLT helps me think about how the humans involved in that process actually become comfortable enough to move from one decision to the next.

I want both.

What I Would Take Into My Next Deal

If you do not want to remember everything in this article, I would keep one idea in mind: look for decisions rather than activity.

A customer asking for another presentation is doing something, but that does not necessarily mean the opportunity is progressing. A customer who has selected the initial use cases, introduced their VP Sales and agreed to build the business case with you has shown something very different.

When those commitments are missing, sending more information should not automatically be your response.

Try to understand what is holding the customer back and then decide what kind of help they actually need. Sometimes the right answer is a clearer recommendation about the next step. In other situations, the opportunity has simply become too broad and needs to be narrowed before anybody can make sense of it. Later in the process, the remaining obstacle may have much less to do with value and much more to do with the risk the buyer feels they are taking.

None of this is particularly complicated when written down.

Doing it well in a real sales conversation requires much more confidence.

You have to tell the customer that perhaps you should not spend another hour discussing additional use cases. You need to be willing to suggest bringing their colleagues into the conversation instead of quietly sending the deck. At some point you also have to ask whether the problem is genuinely important enough to solve and accept the answer if it is not.

Those moments are uncomfortable, which is one reason a lot of salespeople avoid them.

But in my experience, this is also where much of the difference between average and very strong salespeople sits.

The best salespeople I have worked with do not simply create activity around an opportunity and hope that enough meetings eventually produce a contract. They continuously help the customer reduce uncertainty, make the next sensible decision and move through the buying process with enough confidence to keep going.

That, more than anything else, is what I took from The JOLT Effect.

Thank you for reading

Patrick

Ari Albertini is the CEO of FTAPI, a leading German software company focused on secure data exchange and compliance. Based in Munich, FTAPI helps organizations securely transfer, process, and manage sensitive information while meeting strict regulatory requirements.

Their customers are primarily mid-market and enterprise organizations in highly regulated industries such as healthcare, financial services, and the public sector. Buyers are typically IT leaders, information security leaders, and compliance stakeholders looking to ensure that critical data remains secure across the organization.

Episode Preview

What does it take to get a CEO’s attention today?

In this episode, Ari Albertini shares how he personally evaluates software vendors, why most outreach never gets a response, and what separates the few salespeople who actually earn a meeting.

We discuss why long LinkedIn messages usually fail, what good personalization actually looks like, and why most sales outreach is rejected before it even gets a fair chance. Ari also shares a real example of a startup that successfully sold him software by focusing on a problem he urgently needed to solve rather than leading with features.

The conversation then moves into how buying decisions are made inside FTAPI. Ari explains when he gets involved, what he expects from internal champions before he signs a deal, and why a business case often matters less than many sellers think.

One of the most interesting parts of the discussion is around negotiations. Ari explains why sales reps unintentionally weaken their position when they reveal they don’t have authority to negotiate, why executive-to-executive conversations can dramatically speed up deals, and what goes through his mind when a seller says they need multiple approvals just to offer a small discount.

We also discuss how he works with his CFO, how larger purchases get approved, why he uses AI to review contracts and pricing before signing, and what kinds of honesty and transparency from vendors immediately increase trust.

If you sell to CEOs, founders, executives, or enterprise buyers, this episode provides a rare look at how one experienced software CEO actually evaluates vendors, approves investments, negotiates contracts, and decides who earns his attention.

When I left the preparation call, I felt pretty good about the meeting.

Looking back, that feeling is interesting because it was probably the moment where I was furthest away from realising what was about to happen.

The opportunity had developed over several months. One of our sales reps had cold-called a semiconductor company in Switzerland. It wasn’t really an account that naturally fit into our ICP, but the conversations became interesting quite quickly. What started as a discussion around sales coaching gradually revealed a much larger challenge inside the organisation.

The company invested time into developing salespeople. Managers coached. Training programmes existed. Nobody questioned whether learning and development mattered.

The frustration came afterwards.

A manager would sit in a call, notice a weakness, give feedback, and move on. Sometimes there would be a workshop. Sometimes an external training. Sometimes a negotiation course.

A few months later, they found themselves asking the same question again: had anything actually changed?

Not whether people enjoyed the training. Not whether they attended it. Whether the behaviours had changed and whether those changes lasted.

That challenge eventually led us to a sales director responsible for teams across EMEA. We spoke several times. The discussions became more detailed. The initiative became clearer. The company was actively looking for a better way to approach coaching and skill development.

Eventually, the sales director told us he needed some time internally.

I tried to book another meeting.

He wasn’t interested.

I tried again.

Same answer.

A third attempt didn’t change much either.

Normally, I don’t particularly like leaving opportunities without a defined next step. In this case, however, he was transparent. He wanted to discuss things internally and suggested that I come back in a couple of months.

So I did.

Or more accurately, my AI coach reminded me to.

I had instructed it to draft a follow-up email after two months and remind me to send it. When the reminder appeared, I sent the email and received a reply about twenty minutes later.

Apparently the timing was perfect.

Not only did he want another conversation, he wanted a larger stakeholder session. Even better, he suggested a preparation meeting beforehand.

As salespeople, we often talk about champions. Most of the time, that simply means somebody who responds to emails and occasionally helps us navigate the organisation.

This was something different.

He organised the meeting.

He gathered the stakeholders.

He invested time helping me prepare.

During that preparation session, we discussed the use cases they cared about, the challenges they wanted solved, and the questions he expected from the broader group.

At one point I asked whether we should build a business case.

His answer surprised me slightly.

The discussion, in his view, wasn’t really about revenue. Revenue moved too much because of external market conditions. What they wanted was visibility into skill development and confidence that people were improving over time.

I accepted the answer and moved on.

Even now, I am not entirely sure what I think about it. Companies do not usually buy software because skills improve. They buy software because they believe those skills eventually influence outcomes that matter. Maybe that discussion should have been explored further. Maybe it wouldn’t have changed anything.

At the time, it felt like a minor detail.

What mattered to me was that I knew the pains, I knew the use cases, and I thought I knew exactly what the audience wanted to see.

Walking Into the Meeting

The meeting itself was scheduled for forty-five minutes.

When I joined, there were ten people sitting together in a conference room. I was the only person joining remotely.

I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about whether that mattered.

Part of me thinks it did.

Part of me thinks that focusing on it risks missing the bigger issue.

Being remote certainly made it harder to read the room. When ten people sit together physically, there are dozens of signals flying around the room that never make it through a webcam. Somebody becomes impatient. Somebody agrees. Somebody looks confused. Somebody checks out completely.

Whether I would have picked up on those signals in person, I don’t know.

The reason I hesitate to put too much emphasis on it is because the biggest mistakes happened before any of that would have mattered.

The meeting started with introductions.

Everybody briefly explained their role and responsibility.

Then I introduced myself.

Then I introduced the company.

Then I started talking about their current state and future state.

None of those things sounded unreasonable to me at the time.

In fact, if you had asked me before the meeting how I planned to run it, I probably would have described that exact sequence with quite a bit of confidence.

There were ten stakeholders in the room. Some of them had never met me before. Establishing credibility seemed sensible.

Talking about their challenges seemed sensible.

Creating context before jumping into the product seemed sensible.

The issue wasn’t that any of those things were fundamentally wrong.

The issue was that I had completely misunderstood what kind of meeting this was.

That sounds obvious now.

It wasn’t obvious then.

In my head, I was still helping people understand the problem.

The people in the room had already accepted the problem.

The sales director and I had spent several meetings discussing it.

The stakeholders had likely discussed it internally.

Nobody had blocked time in their calendar because they were curious about whether coaching mattered.

They had blocked time because they wanted to see whether our product could help.

That distinction only became obvious afterwards.

At one point, my champion interrupted and said that people would like to see the demo.

At the time, I interpreted that as enthusiasm.

Looking back, I think he was helping me.

Not because people were unhappy. Simply because the meeting had already reached the point where the product needed to take centre stage.

I didn’t recognise that quickly enough.

By the time I started the demo, almost thirty minutes had passed.

Demonstrating My World

The strange thing about the demo is that I don’t think the content itself was wrong.

The use cases were relevant.

The examples were relevant.

The challenges they wanted solved were exactly the challenges I focused on.

If somebody asked me today which use cases I should demonstrate in a similar situation, I would probably choose many of the same ones.

The issue sat somewhere else.

One of the things I demonstrated was my own Slack environment.

At first glance, that sounds perfectly reasonable. After all, I use our AI coach every day. If a prospect wants to understand how the product works, showing real usage feels more authentic than creating a polished demo environment that nobody actually uses.

That was my thinking.

The problem is that I forgot how unusual my own working environment has become.

Over the last few years, AI has gradually become part of how I operate. It helps me prepare meetings. It drafts follow-ups. It helps me think through opportunities. It supports coaching conversations. A lot of interactions that used to happen through separate tools, documents, or conversations now happen through one environment.

Because I see it every day, I stopped noticing how different it looks.

The people in that room were seeing it for the first time.

What looked useful and familiar to me apparently looked overwhelming to them.

That became one of the strongest pieces of feedback afterwards.

Their employees already deal with plenty of information. Adding another stream of messages was not something that immediately felt attractive.

When I heard that feedback, I understood it.

The funny thing is that I probably would have reacted similarly a few years ago.

The challenge wasn’t that they misunderstood what they saw.

The challenge was that I assumed they would see what I saw.

Those are not the same thing.

Looking back, I think I demonstrated the product from the perspective of somebody who has already lived with it for years.

The people in the room were trying to imagine what adoption would look like on day one.

Those are completely different perspectives.

The Conversation Afterwards

A few hours later, my champion and I had another call.

I appreciated that more than he probably realised.

Most prospects simply disappear after a disappointing meeting. They thank you for your time, tell you they will discuss internally, and slowly fade away.

He did the opposite.

He spent half an hour explaining what happened.

The introductions took too long.

The discussion around their current state and future state took too long.

The product appeared too late in the meeting.

The Slack environment created concerns that I hadn’t anticipated.

None of the feedback was particularly dramatic.

What made it valuable was that it described the experience people had in the room.

That is different from feedback about features.

Nobody was telling me the product couldn’t solve the problem.

Nobody was questioning whether the use cases mattered.

The discussion centred around how the meeting felt.

The more I reflected on it afterwards, the more one thought kept coming back.

I had demonstrated my reality rather than theirs.

The distinction sounds subtle, but I think it matters.

I showed how somebody uses the product after it has become embedded into daily work.

What I should have shown was the first step.

The first interaction.

The first use case.

The first moment where somebody experiences value.

That would have been a very different demo.

Looking Back

I still think about this opportunity because it is one of the few deals where I walked away convinced that we could genuinely have helped.

Not every lost deal leaves that feeling behind.

Many losses make sense once you look at them honestly.

This one felt different.

The challenge was real.

The initiative was real.

The stakeholders were engaged.

The champion did everything a salesperson could reasonably hope for.

When I look back at the entire process, I don’t think the preparation was the problem.

I don’t think qualification was the problem.

I don’t think the use cases were the problem either.

The mistake happened in the translation between understanding the prospect’s world and helping them imagine themselves inside the solution.

That sounds simple when written down.

In practice, it turned out to be much harder than I expected.

The next time I walk into a meeting like that, I will almost certainly run the demo with the champion beforehand. I will get into the product much earlier. I will probably create dedicated demo environments rather than navigating through my own daily workflow.

Whether those changes would have won this specific deal, I genuinely don’t know.

What I do know is that I learned more from this loss than from many of the deals we closed successfully.

Thank you for reading

Patrick

The first customers came through the network. Through referrals. Through former colleagues. Through investors. Through luck. Through reputation. Through people who already trusted you.

And then suddenly that slows down.

The inbound pipeline is not large enough yet. Referrals are inconsistent. Marketing is not mature enough to generate predictable pipeline. And now the uncomfortable realization starts to kick in:

You actually have to go out and create demand yourself.

You need outbound.

Not theoretical outbound. Real outbound. Emails. LinkedIn. Cold calls. Prospecting lists. Rejection. All of it.

And that is usually the moment where founders discover there are a thousand opinions online about how outbound “works.”

Most of them are disconnected from reality.

Especially in B2B software.

My own experience sits mostly in the world between roughly 5K and 500K ACV deals. There are obviously huge differences between a 10K deal and a 300K enterprise motion, but there is still one thing they have in common:

Outbound can absolutely make economic sense.

If the deal size is large enough, picking up the phone is rational. Sending emails is rational. Building outbound infrastructure is rational.

The important question is not whether outbound works.

The important question is whether your customer acquisition cost makes sense relative to your contract value.

That is the actual game.

The Mistake Many Founders Make

Most founders think outbound starts with tools.

It does not.

It starts with clarity.

Before scaling anything, I would first ask:

• Did we already sell roughly 10 deals into the same ICP?

• Are these customers using the product for similar use cases?

• Are we solving roughly the same problem repeatedly?

• Can I explain clearly why customers buy from us?

Because if the answer is no, scaling outbound is dangerous.

You will simply scale confusion.

The first milestone is not “hire SDRs.”

The first milestone is repeatability.

Once you repeatedly win similar customers for similar reasons, you can start scaling prospecting.

And then the next question becomes:

Where is the bottleneck?

If leads are the bottleneck, you scale prospecting.

If meetings are flowing already, but deals are not closing, you scale sales capability.

A surprising number of founders hire salespeople too early when the real problem is simply not enough pipeline.

The Biggest Shift in Outbound

One of the biggest changes I have seen in the last years is this:

I no longer think about LinkedIn and email primarily as meeting-booking channels.

I think about them as signal-generation channels.

That distinction matters a lot.

For years, the goal of outbound emails was straightforward:

Send enough emails and directly book meetings from them.

The problem is that this has become dramatically harder.

Especially once companies started fully automating outreach with AI.

In many cases, fully AI-generated sequences barely work at all anymore.

It is not unusual today to send hundreds of emails and generate almost nothing meaningful from them.

Reply rates below 2%.
Positive replies close to zero.
Sometimes not a single meeting from 700 to 800 contacts.

At that point, the problem is no longer efficiency.

The problem becomes whether the outreach is even worth doing in the first place.

Because if thousands of people receive low-quality automated outreach from your company and almost nobody responds, you are not creating pipeline. You are mostly creating noise.

Now obviously, hyper-personalized outreach still works.

Very well, actually.

But it only works economically if the account itself is valuable enough.

If you are trying to land a seven-figure account, spending one hour researching and crafting an outreach message is completely rational.

If you sell 5K deals into a market of 50,000 companies, it is not.

That is where founders need to stop thinking emotionally about outreach and start thinking economically.

Why I Would Use Email and LinkedIn Differently

Instead of trying to force meetings directly from email, I would use email and LinkedIn to identify interest signals.

That changes the entire outbound strategy.

The goal becomes:

Who is interacting with our messaging right now?

Who opened the email?
Who clicked the article?
Who visited the website?
Who engaged multiple times?
Who viewed the product?
Who downloaded something?
Who came back again?

Because those interactions mean something.

Not certainty.
Not intent.
But signal.

And signal matters.

If somebody receives an email mentioning a challenge they actually recognize internally and then clicks into your article, there is clearly more interest than from somebody who ignored the message entirely.

That sounds obvious, but most outbound systems still behave as if every prospect has equal priority.

They do not.

The Outbound Structure I Would Use

If I were building outbound today, I would combine LinkedIn, email, and cold calling together.

Not separately.

Together.

For example:

Day 1:
LinkedIn connection request.

If accepted, the person enters a combined LinkedIn + email sequence.

If not accepted, they stay in email only.

Then over roughly two to three weeks:

• Email

• LinkedIn message

• Another email

• Another LinkedIn touchpoint

Nothing too aggressive.
Nothing desperate.
Nothing like:

“Do you have time tomorrow at 4:30?”

That style of outreach is dying quickly.

Instead, I would focus on relevance.

Each message should mention a specific challenge your ICP struggles with.

And ideally, some of the emails should contain a link to a genuinely useful article you wrote around that challenge.

Not a brochure disguised as content.

Actual insight.

This is one reason content matters so much in outbound now.

Good outbound increasingly depends on having something valuable to point people toward.

At the same time, these interactions generate signals.

Email opens.
Link clicks.
Website visits.
Product logins.
Content downloads.

All of that can be tracked.

And once you track it properly, something interesting happens.

You can build a dynamic call list every single day.

Why Cold Calling Is Becoming Important Again

Cold calling is having a revival.

Not because people suddenly love cold calls again.

But because written outreach became too easy.

AI made writing scalable.
Which means everybody now writes outbound messages.

The result is predictable:
inboxes are flooded.

Spam filters became more aggressive.
LinkedIn became overcrowded.
Everybody automates.

And ironically, that increases the value of human conversation again.

Especially in Europe, cold calling never reached the same automation insanity as in the US.

And mobile numbers are widely available now.

Fifteen years ago, you often had to go through assistants and switchboards.

Today you can often reach decision-makers directly.

At the same time, many younger salespeople are uncomfortable calling.

Which creates an opportunity for the people willing to do it well.

And importantly, AI still does not call convincingly enough in most B2B environments.

Maybe that changes eventually.

But right now, human conversation still matters enormously in enterprise buying.

Especially with the generations currently running companies.

The Real Power Is Prioritization

The mistake most outbound teams make is this:

They call everybody equally.

That makes no sense.

If somebody never opened a single email, never clicked anything, never visited your website, and never interacted with your company at all, why should they have equal priority to somebody who opened three emails and clicked two articles yesterday?

They should not.

That is why I would use outbound systems primarily to surface active interest.

Every morning, I would want a ranked list of people who interacted most with our outreach recently.

The signals decay over time.

A person who clicked something today matters more than somebody who opened an email three weeks ago.

That list changes every day.

And those are the people I would call first.

Not random contacts.

Not stale CRM tasks.

Not “Step 4 in sequence.”

Actual active signals.

This also solves one of the biggest operational problems in outbound teams.

Most sequence-based call tasks are never completed properly anyway.

Reps fall behind.
Tasks pile up.
The CRM becomes cluttered.
And eventually nobody even trusts the sequence logic anymore.

But signal-based prioritization is dynamic.

It reflects actual market behavior in real time.

The Difference Between Large Accounts and Large Markets

The outbound strategy also changes massively depending on deal size and market size.

If I were targeting a very small number of extremely valuable accounts, I would personalize heavily.

Voice notes on LinkedIn.
Personal videos.
Physical packages.
Highly tailored messaging.

One tactic I used in the past was sending only one shoe to a prospect with a note saying:

“Now that I already have one foot in the door, do you mind if I bring the second one over as well?”

Ridiculous?
A little.

Memorable?
Absolutely.

And importantly:
AI does not do things like that.

That matters.

The easier AI makes written outreach, the more valuable human creativity becomes.

Now on the opposite side, if I had a TAM of 100,000 potential contacts and sold smaller contracts, I would absolutely still use scaled email infrastructure.

But the expectation must be realistic.

At scale, outbound email becomes partly a statistical game.

You may send 10,000 emails and only generate 10 meetings.

That sounds terrible.

But if the infrastructure runs continuously and economically, it can still work.

Especially because large-scale outbound teaches you something extremely valuable:

Which problems actually resonate.

You quickly learn which messaging generates replies and which does not.

And that feedback loop is incredibly valuable for founders.

The Most Important Thing

If I had to summarize modern outbound in one sentence, it would probably be this:

Stop treating outbound like a sequence problem and start treating it like a prioritization problem.

The goal is not blasting enough people.

The goal is identifying who is showing signs of interest right now and speaking to them while the timing exists.

That is the real game.

And ironically, that makes outbound feel much more human again.

Thanks for reading,

Patrick

People say things like:
“The SDR can prospect, but the AE closes.”

And honestly, I think that idea creates a completely wrong picture of what sales actually is.

Because when I look at really strong SDRs, especially SDRs who do real outbound and real discovery work, I often think they already have almost all the core skills needed to become good AEs. The thing they are already doing all day long is actually much closer to closing than many people think.

What people call “closing” is usually just the continuation of discovery.

The questions simply become more direct over time.

A good SDR already needs to discover pain, understand whether the problem matters, understand who cares about it, understand whether something is realistically going to happen, and create enough urgency and interest for somebody to invest additional time into another meeting. That already requires difficult questions.

The problem is that many people only recognize sales as “real sales” once contracts and pricing enter the conversation.

Then suddenly everybody talks about closing.

But the uncomfortable part of sales usually starts much earlier.

For me personally, that was actually obvious long before I worked in sales. Even in school I noticed this about myself. I was never one of those students who confidently raised their hand and asked questions in front of everybody. There are always these people in seminars, conferences, workshops, schools, wherever, who just ask whatever they want to know. They are curious enough that they care more about getting the answer than about how they look asking the question.

I was usually the opposite.

A lot of the time I cared more about whether the question would sound stupid than about actually getting clarity. And I think many reps carry exactly that same behavior into sales conversations without realizing it.

A prospect says:
“We want to improve efficiency.”

And many reps simply continue talking.

But a better rep usually stops there and asks:
“What do you mean exactly by efficiency?”

That sounds like a simple question, but in reality many people hesitate to ask it. Internally they think:
“Well, I probably should already know what they mean.”
Or:
“That’s maybe too obvious.”

But once you ask, you often realize the situation is much more nuanced than you expected.

Sometimes management thinks productivity is the issue while the reps themselves think the tooling is the issue. Sometimes the company believes reps do not spend enough time with customers, but the real issue is actually poor onboarding of new hires. Sometimes managers spend huge amounts of time manually cleaning CRM data because reps constantly work around processes. Sometimes customer experience suffers because people rush conversations and follow-ups. Sometimes there is enough pipeline already, but conversion rates are weak.

You only discover these things if you keep asking.

And honestly, this is where sales becomes uncomfortable. Not during pricing discussions. Not during procurement. Usually much earlier.

Because discovery itself is uncomfortable.

A prospect says:
“Our reps only spend about three and a half hours a day talking to customers.”

Now many reps already jump mentally to:
“Okay, obviously that means less revenue.”

And yes, maybe that is true. But you still need to ask deeper questions because you do not yet understand what this actually means inside the business.

So you ask:
“What impact does that have operationally?”
Or:
“What becomes difficult because of this?”

One thing that helped me personally over time was learning to openly acknowledge when a question feels obvious.

You can literally say:
“Besides the obvious impact on revenue, what else becomes difficult because of this?”

That small sentence changes the atmosphere of the conversation a lot. You show that you understand the obvious implication already, but you still create room for the prospect to explain the less obvious implications. And very often, those less obvious implications are actually the more important ones.

What’s interesting is that exactly the same thing happens later in deals when people think “closing” starts.

The questions are structurally almost identical.

Early in a sales process, the questions are things like:
“What problem are we solving?”
“What impact does this have?”
“Who internally cares about fixing this?”

Later the questions become:
“When do you realistically want this live?”
“Who else would need to approve this?”
“What steps still need to happen before implementation?”

But psychologically, it is still the same skill.

You are still asking questions that create a little bit of tension. You are still guiding somebody through clarity. You are still uncovering missing information. You are still trying to understand whether there is enough urgency and commitment to move forward.

That is why I honestly don’t separate discovery and closing very much anymore in my own head.

Good closing usually comes from good discovery that continuously progresses throughout the deal.

If a prospect tells you that this problem costs them money every month and they tell you they would ideally want the solution live in September, then naturally the conversation moves toward:
“Okay, realistically we probably need the contract finalized by July so onboarding can happen in August. Does that timing make sense?”

That is already a closing conversation.

But it usually does not feel aggressive because it follows naturally from everything discussed beforehand.

And this is also why I think many reps who struggle with closing are often not actually struggling with closing itself.

They struggle with asking clearly and directly.

Asking for commitment.
Asking for timelines.
Asking for access to decision makers.
Asking to book the next meeting while everybody is still on the current call.

“Okay, then the next logical step is probably reviewing the business case together with your VP. Does that make sense?”

“Good. Then when works for you next week?”

That’s closing.

It’s a question.

And if somebody already learned how to ask difficult questions during discovery as an SDR, especially in outbound sales, then they are often much closer to being a strong AE than many people think.

Because the core skill was already there from the beginning.

Thanks for reading,

Patrick

For most of the last decade, the sales playbook sat in a strange place.

Everyone agreed it mattered. Very few actually used it.

As a CRO, it always felt like the right thing to build. A way to define what good looks like. A way to align a sales organisation. A way to ensure that execution in the field wasn’t random, but intentional.

And yet, in practice, the playbook rarely lived up to that promise.

What a Sales Playbook Was Always Meant to Be

At its core, a sales playbook is simple.

It is the system that defines how a company sells.

It captures everything that matters:

Who the ideal customers are.
Which problems are worth solving.
How outreach should be done.
What good discovery looks like.
How the product is positioned.
How objections are handled.
How competitors are framed.

And much more.

Here is an overview of a complete sales playbook for SaaS and AI Companies:

The playbook is the codification of judgment.

It takes what lives in the heads of the best reps and sales leaders and turns it into something that can scale. Something that can be taught. Something that can be repeated.

That is the idea.

Why Playbooks Quietly Failed

The problem was never the idea. It was the execution.

Maintaining a playbook in a fast-moving company is brutally expensive. Every product change, every new feature, every new market creates ripple effects across the entire system. One update means touching messaging, discovery, objection handling, outbound, positioning, sometimes even ICP definition.

After a few months, most playbooks are already outdated. And once they are outdated, trust erodes quickly.

At the same time, reps never really used them. Not because they didn’t want to, but because the format worked against them. Static documents, Notion pages, PDFs — all of them required time and effort to navigate. In the middle of a real situation, it was simply faster to ask a colleague or message the sales leader directly.

So the system that was supposed to create scale became a bottleneck again.

And even when methodologies like MEDDIC or SPICED were documented, they rarely influenced daily behavior in a meaningful way. There was no continuous reinforcement, no structured feedback loop, no mechanism that ensured reps actually improved.

The playbook described what good looked like. It did not make anyone better.

The First Wave of Change: Making the Playbook Accessible

The first real shift came with large language models.

For the first time, the playbook didn’t have to be read linearly. It could be queried.

Instead of digging through documents, a rep could ask:

“How do we handle this objection?”
“What’s the best way to position against this competitor?”
“How do I build a business case for this use case?”

And the system could respond instantly.

This alone was already a meaningful improvement. It removed friction. It made knowledge more accessible. It reduced dependency on sales leaders answering the same questions over and over again.

But it didn’t go far enough.

Because access to information is useful — but not decisive.

The uncomfortable truth is that most reps won’t change their behavior just because information is easier to find. The perceived value still isn’t high enough. It is often still faster, and more reliable, to ask a human.

And early implementations didn’t help. Answers were inconsistent. Context was missing. Trust was limited.

So while this first wave mattered, it didn’t fundamentally change how playbooks were used.

The Real Shift: From Information to Execution

What is happening now is a much deeper change.

The playbook is no longer just something you query.

It becomes something that acts.

This is where the real leverage sits.

Because once AI can access the playbook, it doesn’t just have to retrieve information. It can execute tasks based on what good looks like.

And the perceived value for reps changes immediately.

When the Playbook Starts Doing the Work

Take something as mundane as a security questionnaire.

In many enterprise deals, this arrives as a long Excel sheet that needs to be filled out manually. Reps or solutions engineers spend hours navigating internal documentation, copying answers, aligning wording, and making sure everything is consistent.

Now imagine a different workflow.

The file is dropped into a shared folder. The rep tells the system which questionnaire to process. The AI pulls the relevant answers from the playbook, from previous questionnaires, from internal knowledge, fills everything out, and flags the few areas that require human review.

What used to take hours is reduced to minutes.

The same applies to follow-up emails.

Generating a summary is not enough. Copy-pasting is not enough. Formatting is not enough.

If the system truly understands the playbook — tone, positioning, priorities — it can draft the email directly in the inbox, ready to send. The rep reviews, adjusts if needed, and moves on.

The difference is small on paper. In reality, it compounds every single day.

Or take business cases.

Reps often spend significant time building them, structuring arguments, quantifying impact, aligning with what has been discussed in calls.

But all of that information already exists. In transcripts. In CRM data. In the playbook itself.

An AI system that has access to all of this can assemble a first version that is far closer to “final” than anything a template ever produced. The rep shifts from writing to reviewing.

Again, the difference is leverage.

And it doesn’t stop there.

Customer handovers can be generated automatically, structured exactly as customer success needs them.

Meeting briefings can be prepared in minutes instead of requiring manual research across LinkedIn, websites, and past calls.

Mutual action plans and project timelines can be created based on deal context and playbook standards.

Across all of these use cases, the pattern is the same:

The playbook stops being passive knowledge.
It becomes the foundation for execution.

Why One Interface Changes Everything

There is another subtle, but critical piece to this.

All of this only works if it happens in one place.

If reps have to switch between tools, between chats, between systems, the perceived value drops again. Friction creeps back in. Adoption suffers.

The bar is not “useful.” The bar is “indispensable.”

The reason tools like search engines became ubiquitous is not just because they work — it is because they are the obvious place to go.

The same principle applies here.

One interface. One system. One place where work happens.

Not just searching. Doing.

Solving the Last Problem: Keeping the Playbook Alive

Even with all of this, one challenge remains.

How do you keep the playbook up to date?

Because the reality hasn’t changed. Products evolve. Markets shift. New competitors emerge. New use cases appear.

This is where the feedback loop closes.

The same system that executes tasks and supports reps can also observe what is happening across the organization.

It sees call transcripts. It sees deal progressions. It sees new objections. It sees new patterns.

From this, it can suggest updates.

A sales leader can take a call recording and ask the system to extract relevant insights for the playbook. New messaging, new positioning, new patterns — all flagged for review.

Ownership remains with humans. But the heavy lifting is reduced.

The playbook starts to evolve continuously instead of being rebuilt periodically.

The Final Layer: Coaching That Actually Works

Once the playbook is alive and connected to execution, something else becomes possible.

Coaching at scale.

Because now, every call can be evaluated against a living definition of what good looks like.

Feedback becomes specific. Contextual. Consistent.

Not based on gut feeling, but on a shared standard.

Reps don’t just receive feedback once in a while. They are continuously nudged, corrected, reinforced.

And over time, that changes behavior.

The Playbook Becomes the System

This is the real shift.

The sales playbook is no longer a document.

It becomes the central system that:

Defines what good looks like
Executes tasks based on that definition
Continuously updates itself
And reinforces behavior across the team

For the first time, the original promise of the playbook is actually achievable.

Not because the idea changed.

But because the tooling finally caught up.

A Closing Thought

For years, the playbook was something sales leaders built to feel in control.

Now it is something that actually creates control.

And that changes the role entirely.

The question is no longer whether to have a playbook.

The question is whether it is alive.

Thank you for reading

Patrick

Doug Leeby is the CEO of Beeline, a global SaaS company in the external workforce space.

He’s been with the company for ~25 years and CEO since 2010.

Doug is a real enterprise buyer—someone who regularly evaluates vendors, gets involved in deals, and ultimately decides whether something gets bought or not.

This conversation is about one thing:

How a CEO like Doug actually buys—and how sales reps should approach him.

Just the reality from the other side of the table.

How Doug wants to be approached (cold outreach)

Doug is very clear on this:

• He doesn’t want generic outreach

• He doesn’t respond to vague value propositions

• He expects relevance immediately

What stands out to him:

• Clear understanding of his business context

• A message that shows you’ve done your homework

• Straightforward communication without fluff

If your outreach feels like it could have been sent to 100 other CEOs, it’s already lost.

What matters to him once he’s in a deal

When Doug gets involved, the bar changes.

He’s not looking for:

• More features

• More slides

• More “vision”

He’s looking for:

1. A real business case

He wants to understand:

• What is the concrete impact?

• Where is the ROI?

• How does this affect the business operationally?

If you can’t make the business case tangible, the deal weakens quickly.

2. Clarity over complexity

Doug values vendors who:

• Get to the point

• Structure their thinking

• Make decisions easier, not harder

Most reps add noise at this stage.
The better ones reduce it.

3. Confidence without overselling

He’s experienced enough to spot:

• Overpromising

• Generic claims

• Sales tactics

What builds trust instead:

• Direct answers

• Honest limitations

• Clear reasoning

A practical example from his buying behavior

Doug references recent deals where his involvement comes down to one core question:

“Does this make sense for the business?”

That sounds simple, but most reps don’t answer it properly.

They talk about:

• Product

• Features

• Vision

While Doug is evaluating:

• Impact

• Risk

• Justification

That gap is where deals get lost.

The takeaway for sales reps

If you listen to Doug carefully, the shift is obvious:

• In outreach → earn attention through relevance

• In the deal → win through a clear business case

Everything else is secondary.

Most reps:

• Try to be interesting

• Try to impress

Doug is filtering for something much simpler:

“Do you understand my world—and can you help me make a sound decision?”

If the answer is no, the deal doesn’t move.

Thanks for listening

Patrick

The public version is simple. Sales is about resilience. It is about discipline. It is about showing up every day and doing the work. If you push hard enough, if you stay consistent, you will succeed.

All of that is true.

But it is not the full truth.

Because there is a category of sales roles that are not just demanding. They are structurally unsustainable. And pretending otherwise does more damage than good, both to the people doing the job and to the organisations designing them.

The hardest job in sales is also the most misunderstood

If someone has never done high-volume outbound, it is easy to underestimate what it actually feels like.

Making 100 to 150 cold calls a day is not just repetitive work. It is sustained exposure to rejection, combined with the requirement to perform at a high level in every single interaction. You have to think on your feet, adjust your messaging, manage your tone, and recover instantly from negative responses.

Then you do it again.

And again.

And again.

The difficulty is not only cognitive. It is emotional. Over time, many people develop a kind of protective detachment. Conversations become more mechanical. Energy drops. Curiosity fades. What started as a challenge turns into something closer to endurance.

This is where the narrative of “just grind harder” starts to break.

Because the limiting factor is not willingness. It is human capacity.

Why the people who succeed in these roles cannot stay in them

There is a contradiction at the core of these roles that some organisations ignore.

To succeed in high-volume outbound, a person needs two traits: ambition and grit.

Ambition defines what someone wants. Grit defines how long they are willing to endure discomfort to get there.

These two are closely linked. Without ambition, grit has no direction. Without grit, ambition collapses under pressure.

Now consider what happens when someone has both.

A highly ambitious and gritty person will push through the discomfort. They will make the calls. They will improve. They will generate results. They will outperform others.

And then something predictable happens.

They want more.

More responsibility. More learning. More impact. More progress.

Keeping that person in the same role for two or three years is not a sign of strength. It is a structural failure. Either they leave, or they disengage.

This is the paradox. The very traits that make someone successful in a high-intensity SDR role make it impossible for them to remain in that role long term.

The mistake most organisations make

Early in my career, when I built my first SDR organisation, I made this mistake myself.

I created a clear career path. It was structured, logical, and fair on paper. The first promotion came after twelve months. Only then could someone move into a more advanced role. But the next role would also be an SDR role. And then another one. So technically, it would have taken an SDR 3 years to be an AE.

That failed.

Not because the people were weak. Quite the opposite. The strongest people were the ones who struggled with it the most. After three or four months, the initial excitement faded and a different realization set in.

There is no progress here for a long time.

That realization is enough to kill motivation, even in high performers. Some started looking elsewhere. Others reduced effort. A few stayed, but without the same intensity.

The issue was not compensation. It was not culture. It was time.

The gap between effort and visible progression was simply too large.

These roles should exist. But they must have an end.

This is where the discussion usually becomes polarized.

Some argue that these roles are broken and should be removed. Others argue that this is simply what it takes to succeed.

Both views miss the point.

High-volume outbound is one of the most valuable training grounds in sales. It is difficult to replicate the learning that comes from it.

If someone learns how to handle rejection, how to communicate under pressure, how to earn attention from a complete stranger, they carry that skill forever. It translates into closing, into leadership, into entrepreneurship.

There is a reason why many of the strongest sales leaders started in roles like this.

But the value comes from the intensity of the experience, not its duration.

Six to twelve months of focused exposure can be transformative. Two to three years of the same activity often becomes destructive.

The job is not the problem. The absence of an exit is.

The real risk is not burnout. It is stagnation

What makes these roles particularly dangerous is not only the pressure. It is the lack of learning over time.

In the beginning, everything is new. Every call teaches something. Every mistake creates feedback. Progress is visible and motivating.

But after a certain point, the curve flattens.

Calls become similar. Conversations repeat themselves. Improvement slows down. The job turns into execution rather than development.

For people who are driven by growth, this is where frustration begins.

I have felt this myself. Early in my career, there were phases where I questioned everything I was doing. Every year I considered changing direction completely. Going back to academia. Studying something entirely different.

Not because the job was impossible, but because it stopped evolving.

That feeling is normal.

And it is often misinterpreted.

Knowing when to push and when to adjust

There is a difference between temporary discomfort and structural misalignment.

Sales requires periods of pushing through. There are moments where discipline matters more than motivation. Where the right decision is to continue despite resistance.

But there is also a point where pushing blindly becomes counterproductive.

If someone feels consistently disengaged, bored, or stagnant, the answer is not always more effort. Sometimes it is reflection.

What exactly is missing?

Is it learning? Is it progression? Is it ownership?

Ignoring these questions and continuing on autopilot is how burnout develops. Not because the work is hard, but because it becomes meaningless.

What better sales organizations do differently

If these roles are inherently temporary, then the organization has to reflect that.

The most effective structure is not time-based. It is performance-based.

An SDR should know exactly what needs to happen to move forward. Not in twelve months. Not in a vague future. But in concrete terms.

A certain number of qualified opportunities. A certain level of consistency. A certain demonstration of skill.

If that level is reached in six months, progression should happen then. If it takes nine months, then nine months. If it takes longer, that is also fine.

The key is that the path is visible and tied to output, not to tenure.

This does two things.

It keeps ambitious people engaged because progress is within reach.

And it creates clarity for everyone else about what the role actually demands.

The uncomfortable truth about “grind culture”

The idea that someone should spend years doing high-volume cold calling in the name of discipline is appealing on the surface.

It sounds tough. It sounds admirable. It signals resilience.

But in practice, it often hides poor organizational design.

Either the company is unable to develop people fast enough, or it benefits from keeping them in a high-output role without offering progression.

Neither is sustainable.

Because the people you actually want to keep will not accept it.

Why this phase still matters

Despite all of this, avoiding these roles entirely is not the answer.

For someone early in their career, going through a period of intense outbound work can be one of the most valuable experiences available.

It builds confidence. It builds communication skills. It builds emotional resilience.

It also creates a reference point.

After handling hundreds of difficult conversations, most other challenges feel manageable. Closing becomes easier. Leading becomes easier. Starting something from scratch becomes easier.

It is a form of exposure that accelerates development in a way few other roles can.

But its power comes from being a phase.

Not a destination.

Final thought

There is nothing wrong with finding these roles difficult. There is nothing wrong with wanting to move on from them.

In many cases, that instinct is not a weakness. It is a signal that the role has served its purpose.

Sales organizations that understand this build systems that channel ambition and grit into progression.

The ones that do not will keep asking for more effort, while slowly losing the very people they depend on.

And individuals who understand this can approach these roles differently.

Not as something to endure indefinitely.

But as something to master, learn from, and then leave behind at the right time.

Thanks for reading.

Patrick

For a long time, AI in sales lived somewhere in between. It was interesting, occasionally helpful, sometimes even impressive. But it never crossed the line into something I truly relied on. It was something I tested, but not something I depended on.

I even wrote about it a few months ago on this platform. And I didn’t write about it in a very enthusiastic way, basically describing a few more-or-less useful use cases.

But not as a life-changing technology.

That changed completely.

In the last two months, something shifted inside our sales team at Taskbase. Not gradually. Not as part of some planned rollout. It felt more like a break in continuity. One week, AI was something we experimented with. The next, it became something I use every single day without even thinking about it.

And the reason for that shift is surprisingly simple.

Quality caught up.

And what I can do with AI, and how flexibly changed too.

Let’s get to the bottom of it.

The Problem was the Output.

If you have used tools like ChatGPT over the last years, you will recognize the pattern immediately.

You ask for something practical. A cold email. Feedback on a call. Help structuring a discovery. And what you get back is not wrong. It is just not that useful.

It is generic. It is safe. It sounds like advice, but it does not survive contact with reality.

Even when transcription tools like Gong or Fireflies.ai improved dramatically and started to deliver very accurate transcripts, even in languages like Swiss German, the real problem remained unsolved.

The layer on top was still weak.

You could transcribe a call perfectly, but the moment you asked what to improve, you would get answers that looked like this:

“Build more rapport.”

“Ask better questions.”

“Ask fewer questions.”

“Clarify next steps.”

That sounds reasonable. But it does not help anyone get better.

So naturally, I did not use it. Not because I did not believe in AI, but because it simply did not meet the standard of what good sales or coaching actually requires.

What Changed in the Last 60 Days

Then, from one moment to the next, the quality changed with the newest version of our AI Sales Coach.

The same types of requests started producing outputs that were not just better, but fundamentally different. The answers became specific. They became contextual. And most importantly, they became actionable.

Instead of telling me to improve discovery, the AI would point to a specific moment in the call and suggest a better follow-up question. Instead of summarising what happened, it would structure what should happen next. Instead of giving generic advice, it would challenge my behavior in a way that actually made me think.

That is the moment where something flips.

Because once AI behaves like a strong sales coach instead of a content generator, you stop “trying it out” and start relying on it.

The First Big Shift: The Playbook Becomes the System

To understand why this works now, you have to understand the role of the sales playbook.

Every organisation has one, at least in theory. It defines what good looks like. Who your ICP is, what problems you solve, how you run discovery, how you handle objections, how you position against competitors, how your process works across inbound, outbound, expansion, renewals, and so on.

I have built these playbooks myself multiple times and helped many teams build theirs.

And the outcome was almost always the same.

Nobody used them.

Not because they were bad. But because they lived in the wrong place and required the wrong behaviour. They were stored in tools like Notion or Confluence. They needed to be actively maintained. And they required reps to step out of their workflow and go somewhere else to “learn.”

That simply does not happen in reality.

So the playbook became a static document instead of what it was supposed to be. A living system that continuously improves how a team sells.

AI changes that completely.

Because suddenly, the playbook is no longer something people need to read. It becomes something the system uses.

If AI is supposed to write emails, prepare meetings, coach calls, generate leads, or handle objections, it needs to know what good looks like. That knowledge has to come from somewhere. And that somewhere is the playbook.

But here is the important shift.

The rep no longer interacts with the playbook directly.

The rep interacts with AI.

Here is an example you can use to compare.

This is a follow-up email written through a prompt against a transcript:

It is ok. But not mind-blowing. I rarely sent it out, also because I had to copy-paste it into my Gmail. That summarises my experience with AI so far.

Now, here is the follow-up e-mail suggested by our AI Sales Coach, which is connected to the sales playbook, the best practices, as well as to my Gmail account:

Mind-blowing. (If you ask me.) Engaging. Unique.

My tone, my structure, my way to engage.

Exactly how it is written in the playbook.

And it is delivered directly into my Gmail as a draft. I only have to review and click send. No more copy-pasting. Small improvement that makes a HUGE difference.

This is only one of the use cases that actually has a small impact on my work, compared to other use cases that save me hours.

Let’s dive in a bit further.

From Static Knowledge to a Living Feedback Loop

The second major issue with playbooks was always maintenance.

Something new happens in a call. A new competitor appears. A new objection comes up. A new pattern emerges.

Traditionally, this would trigger a slow and manual process. Someone notices it. Someone documents it. Someone updates the playbook. And even then, nobody really consumes the update.

With AI, that loop closes automatically.

The system observes what happens in calls. It captures new information. It updates the underlying knowledge. And it feeds that back into every future interaction.

So the next rep is already equipped with information that did not exist a day before.

That is not just a productivity improvement. That is a fundamentally different way of how knowledge moves inside a sales organisation.

The Second Big Shift: The Interface Disappears

The second thing that changed everything is much more subtle, but just as important.

The interface disappeared.

Think about what a typical sales workflow looks like today. Prospecting alone requires jumping between multiple tools. LinkedIn for research, enrichment tools for data, CRM for storage, and sequencing tools for outreach. The same is true for preparation, for follow-ups, and for reporting.

Each step requires a different user interface. Each interface adds friction.

What AI does is collapse all of that into a single interaction model.

A chat.

In my case, a single Slack channel.

That is where everything happens. I get my prospecting list there. I get my meeting preparation there. I receive coaching there. I generate follow-ups there. I request reports there. I even trigger things like building presentations or filling out documents.

The complexity does not disappear. It just moves behind the interface.

And that is exactly what makes it usable, being connected to all the tools I was supposed to use every day, such as Hubspot, Google Drive, Prospeo, LinkedIn Sales Nav, Calltime, lemlist, Kickscale, etc.

But I am not using many of these interfaces anymore.

Because I have my chat interface that handles requests faster. Definitely most of them. Here is an example of a request it handled in 2 min. that would usually take me 2 hours:

It solves my problem every single time. I am so impressed.

What This Actually Looks Like Day to Day

The easiest way to understand the impact even better is to look at some more concrete situations, in addition to the above examples:

Preparation for meetings used to involve multiple steps. Checking the company, researching the person, going through previous interactions, and understanding the context again. Now, I receive a structured briefing that brings all of this together in one place. It is not just faster. It is better than what I would have done myself.

The most extreme example for me was a security questionnaire. I dropped an Excel file into a folder, pointed the system to the previous questionnaires, and asked it to complete it. It did. Completely. That used to take hours of manual work.

And then there is coaching.

This is where I was most sceptical, because coaching has always been the hardest thing to get right. But this is also where the impact is the biggest. The feedback I receive is specific, contextual, and tailored to my weaknesses. It is not just telling me what good looks like. It is showing me where I deviate from it.

And that is something I have not experienced before at this level of quality.

The Part That Surprised Me the Most

What surprised me the most was not what AI can do.

It was how quickly I started trusting it.

Before, every output required verification. You had to check if it made sense, if it was usable, if it was actually correct. That overhead alone made it inefficient.

Now, the default assumption has flipped.

I assume it is good.

And that changes everything.

Because now, instead of evaluating every output from scratch, I am refining something that is already strong.

What My Work Looks Like Now

If I zoom out, the change is very simple.

I spend almost my entire day listening and talking.

Roughly ninety percent of my time is spent with customers, prospects, and the team. The remaining ten percent is spent talking with AI.

But that ten percent removes most of the work I never wanted to do in the first place. The repetitive parts. The administrative parts. The things that do not create value but still consume time.

What remains is the core of the job. Using my voice.

Final Thought

I always believed that technology would eventually remove the worst parts of work and allow people to focus on what actually matters.

But belief is abstract.

This is the first time I actually feel it in my own job.

And once you experience that level of support and quality, it becomes very hard to imagine going back.

You might feel that very soon as well (if you don’t already at this level).

And if you want to, reach out to me. I might be able to help.

Thank you for reading.

Patrick

BANT stands for Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline, and it was developed by IBM in 1959.

The historical context is crucial.

IBM had effectively become a dominant force in computing. Organizations were reaching out in large numbers. Demand was strong. The challenge was not pipeline generation. It was capacity management.

IBM needed a way to filter inbound demand quickly. They needed to ensure that their teams were only spending time on companies that were serious, capable of buying, and ready to move.

BANT was born as a filtering mechanism — not as a complex enterprise sales orchestration framework.

Read more

One of the easiest ways to spot a risky SaaS deal is surprisingly simple.

Only one person is involved.

The conversation feels good. The demo went well. The stakeholder seems enthusiastic. Maybe they even say something like “I’ll take this internally.”

And that is exactly where many deals quietly die.

Not because the contact was dishonest. But because no organization buys software through one person alone.

Someone else needs to agree. Someone else needs to see the value. Someone else might block it. Someone else might already be talking to your competitor.

This is where multi-threading becomes one of the most important skills in B2B sales.

Multi-threading simply means building relationships with multiple stakeholders inside the same account. When done well, it turns a single fragile opportunity into an internally supported initiative.

And the difference between those two situations is enormous.

A deal with one supporter can disappear overnight.
A deal with multiple supporters tends to create its own internal momentum.

Multi-Threading Does Not Start With Stakeholders

It Starts With a Champion

Before trying to involve half the organization, the first objective is much simpler: find a champion.

A champion is not just someone who likes the product.

A real champion has three characteristics:

• They have a personal interest in solving the problem.

• They have access to decision makers.

• And most importantly, they actively help bring other people into the process.

That last point is the real test.

If someone likes your product but never helps you involve other stakeholders, the deal is already at risk.

Another important nuance: someone evaluating you and your competitor simultaneously is not necessarily a champion. Often that person is still just exploring options.

Interest is not the same as internal commitment.

Diagnosing the Buying Process

One of the most useful moments to introduce multi-threading is at the end of a discovery or demo conversation.

Instead of simply asking vague questions like “what happens next?”, it helps to show some commercial experience first.

A simple way to frame it is something like:

“In companies your size we usually see a few different people involved in decisions like this. Often IT is involved at some point in the evaluation, and sometimes there’s a small committee or leadership group that reviews technology decisions.”

Then you ask:

“How does that typically work in your organization?”

This does two things at once.

First, it signals that you have seen similar buying processes before.
Second, it makes it easier for the buyer to explain how decisions are actually made.

Once the conversation moves in that direction, the next question becomes critical:

“What are usually the steps you have to go through internally to reach a decision like this?”

Many deals stall because sellers only ask who is involved but never understand how the decision actually happens.

Is there a partner meeting?
A digitalization committee?
A business case that needs to be built?

Without understanding that sequence, a sales process becomes guesswork.

A Simple Question That Reveals a Lot

There is another question that often reveals how much support the buyer might need internally.

It is very simple:

“How often have you introduced something like this in your company before?”

The surprising answer in most cases is: never.

Most buyers are not experienced software buyers. They might be evaluating a tool like yours for the first time.

Which means they will likely need help navigating the internal process.

And that is exactly where good salespeople become more proactive.

Why “I’ll Discuss It Internally” Kills Deals

One of the most common deal killers is the sentence:

“I’ll discuss this internally.”

It sounds like progress, but in reality it often creates friction.

The buyer goes into an internal meeting.
Questions come up that they cannot answer.
The topic loses momentum.

A much stronger approach is to suggest bringing the next stakeholder directly into the conversation.

For example:

“When you bring this topic up internally, there will probably be questions that are hard to answer without us in the room. It’s usually easier for both of us if we involve the next person together. I can quickly recap what we discussed and answer any questions directly.”

Then make the proposal concrete:

“Who would be the most useful person for us to involve next?”

This approach does two things.

It reduces the work for your contact.
And it dramatically reduces the chance of the deal getting lost in internal translation.

In practice, when trust is established, this works surprisingly often. Many buyers appreciate the support because they do not have to carry the entire conversation internally themselves.

Always Lock the Next Step

Sometimes the buyer still wants to speak internally first.

That is completely normal.

But even in that situation, one rule remains important:

Never leave the next step undefined.

A simple way to handle this is:

“That makes sense. Why don’t we already schedule a short follow-up next week? You can speak with them first, and if it makes sense you can simply invite them to the meeting.”

This keeps momentum alive.

Without a scheduled next step, most deals slowly drift into silence.

The Role of IT (and Why Timing Matters)

In many software deals, IT eventually becomes involved.

But involving them too early can create another problem.

IT typically evaluates technology from a technical perspective, not from a business value perspective.

If a deal moves to IT before the business value is clear, the conversation often turns into a purely technical evaluation.

A better sequence is usually:

1. Establish the business value first.

2. Then involve IT to validate the technical fit.

This ensures the conversation remains anchored in the problem the company is trying to solve.

Not Every Friendly Contact Is a Good Champion

Another subtle point many sellers overlook: enthusiasm alone does not make someone influential internally.

In fact, one common warning sign is a contact who talks a lot but asks no critical questions.

Counterintuitively, the strongest champions are often the more critical ones.

They challenge assumptions.
They ask difficult questions.
They push for clarity.

Those people tend to have credibility inside their organization.

And credibility is exactly what you need when the deal starts moving internally.

Multi-Threading Often Starts Before the First Meeting

Many salespeople assume multi-threading only begins after a relationship has been established.

But in reality, it often starts earlier.

When targeting a larger account with several relevant stakeholders, it is completely reasonable to approach multiple people in parallel.

Email. LinkedIn. Cold calls.

If there are ten potential partners in a firm, contacting four of them is perfectly normal.

Before a relationship exists, there is very little trust to damage. The main goal is simply to start a conversation somewhere inside the organization.

Once a champion emerges, the strategy becomes more coordinated.

When Multi-Threading Works at Its Best

One of the most powerful examples of multi-threading comes from a large enterprise deal I once worked on with Daimler.

At the time, I had two parallel conversations running inside the company:

• One with Mercedes-Benz Financial Services

• Another with Mercedes-Benz Cars

For quite a while, those conversations developed independently. Only much later did I connect the two initiatives.

When the two groups realized that another major division inside the company was already moving in the same direction, the dynamic changed completely.

What had started as two separate evaluations suddenly looked like a broader organizational movement.

And that momentum helped turn the opportunity into a much larger deal.

The Real Purpose of Multi-Threading

Multi-threading is not a tactical trick.

It is a way of reducing uncertainty.

It answers questions like:

• Who really cares about this problem?

• Who signs the contract?

• Who might block the decision?

• Who needs to see value first?

• Who should be involved next?

A single-threaded deal depends on one person’s ability to carry the idea internally.

A multi-threaded deal builds internal consensus.

And in complex B2B sales, that difference often determines whether a deal closes or quietly disappears.

Thanks for reading,

Patrick

That’s exactly where my discomfort starts.

Because taken literally, this idea implies that anything can work in sales as long as it feels authentic. And that simply isn’t true. Sales works because humans work in certain ways. Psychology, attention, trust, perception—these aren’t personal preferences. They are shared mechanisms.

This tension between universal sales principles and individual authenticity was at the heart of a long conversation I had with Sabrina Schenardi—one of the most passionate and successful sales operators I know.

What follows is not a tidy framework. It’s the essence of a real debate.

The First 10 Seconds: Where Authenticity Is Not Optional

Sabrina’s starting point is brutally practical.

In cold calling, nobody knows you. Nobody asked for your call. You don’t have trust, attention, or permission. What you have is seconds.

In that moment, tone, voice, energy, and delivery matter more than wording. The prospect isn’t evaluating your offer. They’re asking themselves silently:

• Is this person competent?

• Is this worth my time?

• Do I trust this voice?

This is where Sabrina pushes back against purely tactical thinking. A perfect script delivered without confidence sounds robotic. A flawless structure spoken without energy creates resistance.

And she’s right: people feel uncertainty immediately.

But here’s the crucial nuance—confidence does not replace technique. It emerges from it.

Scripts, Technique, and the Confidence Paradox

One of the most important points in the conversation is also one of the least controversial—and yet often ignored.

At the beginning, everyone sounds inauthentic.

New sales reps read scripts. They sound monotone. They feel stiff. That’s not a personality flaw—it’s a learning phase. Nobody improvises well before they understand what they’re doing.

The paradox is this:

Confidence doesn’t precede structure. It follows it.

Scripts, talk tracks, and tactical rules are not the enemy of authenticity. They are the precondition for it. Once the content is internalized, the voice relaxes. Variation appears. Presence emerges.

Authenticity here is not about starting natural.
It’s about becoming natural through mastery.

Universal Tactics Exist—Whether They Feel Authentic or Not

This is where the real friction appears.

Some things simply work better than others, regardless of personality:

• Speaking with variation instead of monotone delivery

• Giving the other person control early in the conversation

• Acknowledging the reality of a cold call instead of disguising it

• Turning a pitch into a dialogue

These are not stylistic preferences. They are psychological levers.

Take mirroring, for example—matching pace, tone, and rhythm to the other person. Sabrina uses it deliberately, even though it costs her energy because it doesn’t match her natural style.

Is that inauthentic?

Her answer is important: mirroring is adaptation, not faking. Humans naturally synchronize when they connect. Mirroring accelerates that process consciously.

It becomes inauthentic only when it’s exaggerated or mechanical—when it turns into manipulation rather than alignment.

That distinction matters.

Where Authenticity Actually Lives: Values, Not Tactics

As the discussion unfolds, something becomes clear.

Authenticity is not located at the tactical level of sales.

It lives one layer deeper—in values.

Sabrina doesn’t reject tactics. She rejects salesiness. She dislikes exaggerated agreement, artificial enthusiasm, and performative persuasion. Others thrive with that style—and some are very successful with it.

Both can work.

What doesn’t work is pretending to hold values you don’t actually believe in.

That’s why authenticity clashes don’t show up in scripts first. They show up in energy drain, discomfort, and emotional exhaustion. When values don’t align, conversations feel heavy—even if the technique is correct.

Energy: The Constraint Nobody Likes to Admit

Energy became the most uncomfortable topic of the conversation.

High energy creates perceived competence, passion, and credibility. Low energy often signals uncertainty—even when that’s unfair.

Can energy be trained? To a degree, yes. Smiling while speaking, posture, breathing, gestures—all of these help.

But personality traits set real boundaries.

Extroverts can lower their intensity for a while. Introverts can raise theirs temporarily. But forcing the opposite long-term leads to exhaustion—and eventually inauthenticity.

The mature move is not to deny this, but to design roles, handovers, and coaching around it.

So What Is Authenticity in Sales?

After nearly forty minutes of debate, the conclusion isn’t ideological. It’s practical.

Authenticity in sales is not:

• Doing whatever feels good

• Ignoring proven techniques

• Rejecting structure in the name of personality

Authenticity is:

• Applying universal sales principles consciously

• Adapting communication without faking identity

• Operating in alignment with personal values

• Building confidence through mastery, not avoidance

In other words:

Authenticity is not the absence of technique.
It is technique that has been internalized, aligned with values, and expressed through a real human being.

That distinction matters—not just for sales reps, but for anyone coaching them.

Thank you for listening and reading.

Best regards

Patrick

One of the first sales books I ever read was SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham.

Not because I was naturally curious about questioning techniques.
Not because I believed in structured discovery.
And definitely not because I was good at it.

I read it because a CEO gave me a hint.

In my first three years in sales, I did almost nothing that resembled real discovery. No structured curiosity. No active listening. No thoughtful questioning. I was presenting solutions. Showing slides. Talking about features. Explaining technology.

And I was convinced I was doing a decent job.

Then I had a second meeting with the CEO of a manufacturing company with more than 3,000 employees. A serious organization. A serious buyer.

In that meeting, he casually mentioned that they had just implemented SPIN with their sales reps — and that it had a huge impact on their results.

He didn’t criticize me directly.
He didn’t challenge me.
He simply stated it.

But I’m 100% certain he said it for a reason.

Because in our conversation, I hadn’t used a single SPIN question. No structured exploration of his situation. No deep dive into problems. No implications. No real attempt to uncover what actually mattered.

I was talking about my solution.

I took the hint and bought the book.

Looking back, it was one of the first moments in my career where I seriously questioned what I was doing in front of customers. That conversation forced me to reflect. Maybe presenting wasn’t selling. Maybe curiosity was missing.

That CEO probably forgot the moment.

I didn’t.

Sales Methodology vs. Qualification Methodology

Before diving into SPIN itself, there is a distinction that most sales organizations blur: the difference between a sales methodology and a qualification methodology.

Qualification methodologies — such as MEDDIC — exist to de-risk deals. They are built to check whether a deal is structurally sound. Whether you have identified the economic buyer. Whether a champion exists. Whether metrics are defined. Whether you understand the decision process and the competitive landscape.

They function like a compass. Especially in complex B2B deals above 50k or 100k, these risk factors are usually what decide whether a deal closes or collapses.

SPIN does not cover those risks.

SPIN stands for:

• Situation

• Problem

• Implication

• Need-Payoff

It focuses entirely on understanding pain and impact. That is powerful. But it does not address political complexity, decision criteria, champions, or competition. Which means: SPIN is not a complete qualification methodology for complex deals.

It is a sales methodology — a framework for structuring conversations, especially early ones.

And that distinction changes how it should be used.

The Biggest Problem with SPIN: The Order

My biggest struggle with SPIN is not the concept itself. It’s the order.

S-P-I-N.

Situation.
Problem.
Implication.
Need-Payoff.

When you’re new to sales, you tend to interpret this literally. You think you must follow the order exactly as written. Start with Situation. Then move to Problem. Then Implication.

That’s where things go wrong.

Because starting with Situation is often the weakest possible opening — especially in outbound-generated opportunities.

And to understand why, we need to differentiate between two types of questions.

Egocentric vs. Customer-Centric Questions

This distinction is far more important than most people realize.

Egocentric questions

Egocentric questions help the rep more than the buyer.

Examples:

• “How does your process X work?”

• “How do you do this today?”

• “How many reps do you have?”

• “What does your business model look like?”

These questions generate information that helps the rep position their solution. But the buyer does not gain insight by answering them. They are simply giving facts.

Often, these are questions that could have been researched beforehand. And buyers know that.

When you stack too many of these early in a conversation, something subtle happens. Trust decreases. Not dramatically. But incrementally. Every egocentric question withdraws a small credit from what I call the “trust bank.”

If you imagine trust as a bank account capped at 100 credits, egocentric questions cost you credits.

Ask too many too early, and the buyer’s reaction will be:

“Just show me the product.”

That sentence is diagnostic. It tells you that you have overdrawn the trust account by asking too many situational, egocentric questions without creating value.

Customer-centric questions

Customer-centric questions, on the other hand, are designed to make the buyer think.

They often:

• Require longer answers

• Trigger reflection

• Are tied to emotions or priorities

• Create insight for the buyer

For example:

Instead of asking:
“How does process X work?”

You ask:
“Thinking about process X — how do you feel about it today?”

That question changes everything.

If they respond:
“It’s completely fine. We only run 100 cases per year. It’s not a big issue.”

You immediately know it’s not worth diving deeper.

But if you had started with:
“How does the process work?”
“Who is involved?”
“How long does it take?”
“How many people?”

You might spend 15 minutes understanding a process that ultimately doesn’t matter.

That is wasted time — for both sides.

Customer-centric questions help you qualify relevance faster. They protect trust. And they surface emotional attachment. If a buyer doesn’t care about a problem emotionally, the likelihood of closing decreases dramatically — even if the math makes sense.

Open vs. Closed Questions (and Trust)

There’s another layer: open vs. closed questions.

The right to ask broad open questions must be earned.

In an outbound first meeting — where someone took the call because the SDR sounded interesting — starting with:

“Tell me about your challenges.”

is misplaced.

There is no context. No framing. No shared understanding. That question creates cognitive pressure. It forces the buyer to invent a relevant answer without knowing what you actually solve.

A better approach in outbound is to create context first.

For example:

You show a slide with three challenges you typically solve. You briefly explain each one. Then you ask:

“Which of these feels most relevant for you?”

That is still customer-centric. But it is a closed question with context. It reduces cognitive load and increases relevance.

Once trust is built and context is clear, you can move into more open exploration.

Inbound is different.

Inbound leads have already built trust externally — through brand, marketing, reputation. If someone reaches out to a well-known company, they often already know what space you operate in.

In inbound, you can start with a situational framing question like:

“Where are you in your buying process? Are you just exploring, or have you already evaluated solutions?”

Then I almost always move to problems first:

“What problem are you trying to solve?”

Once the emotional anchor is clear, situational follow-ups make sense — especially when they directly reference what the buyer just said. That’s active listening.

If someone says:

“Our coaching process is very tedious.”

Then asking:

“How exactly do you run coaching today?”

is no longer egocentric in a vacuum. It’s a follow-up tied to something they care about. That’s the key difference.

Rethinking the “I” — Implication

SPIN encourages you to explore implications.

That’s correct. Impact matters.

But here’s where I see many reps go wrong: they ask 10 egocentric questions to build a business case instead of asking one good customer-centric question first.

Instead of jumping into:

“How many reps?”
“How many hours?”
“How much does that cost?”

start with:

“Have you ever calculated what this costs you?”

That single question changes the dynamic.

If they say yes, you learn instantly.

If they say no, you can say:

“Would it make sense to calculate it together?”

Now you have permission.

Then you can ask:

• How many reps?

• How many coaching hours?

• Preparation time?

• Additional effort?

• Cost per hour?

Without permission, each of those is a trust withdrawal. With permission, they are collaborative.

In longer sales cycles, you don’t need to fully quantify impact in the first meeting. You can recap in meeting two:

“Last time, we identified that coaching is tedious. We haven’t yet defined the KPI we want to impact. What’s the main KPI that matters most here?”

That question is customer-centric and strategic. It sets up a personalized demo properly.

SPIN assumes you compress everything into one meeting. Modern B2B often doesn’t work that way. Stretching SPIN across two meetings often makes more sense.

Rethinking the “N” — Need-Payoff

Need-Payoff is often interpreted as:

“If I solve this, would you buy?”

That can work — in small, single-decision deals where the decision-maker is in the room and the budget is simple.

But in most B2B environments above 5k, things are more complex. Decision processes matter. Economic buyers matter. That’s where SPIN alone becomes insufficient.

I prefer reframing Need-Payoff into two dimensions:

1. Priority

2. Willingness to invest

For example:

“On a scale from 0 to 10, how important is solving this right now?”

And after showing the solution:

“On a scale from 0 to 10, how well do you think this solves your problem?”

If they say 8:

“What’s missing to make it a 10?”

Then:

“Even at an 8 — would this justify the investment we discussed?”

Clear. Direct. Honest.

And if you’re speaking with the real decision-maker and the deal is small enough to close quickly, the question can be simple:

“What else would you need to feel comfortable signing this?”

No drama. No theatrics.

So, Is SPIN Still Relevant?

Yes.

SPIN is a better starting point than pitching slides without curiosity — as I once did.

But sales has evolved. Especially in complex B2B environments, a methodology that focuses only on pain and impact is incomplete. You still need structural deal qualification alongside it.

Used correctly, SPIN is a mental model for structuring conversations:

• Lead with relevant problems.

• Use situational questions only when they follow buyer context.

• Quantify impact collaboratively.

• Clarify priority before pushing for commitment.

Used incorrectly, it turns into a checklist of situational interrogation — and the buyer will eventually say:

“Just show me the product.”

When that happens, it’s usually not because SPIN is outdated.

It’s because it was used without understanding trust.

And that was exactly the lesson I started learning the day a CEO casually mentioned that his team had implemented SPIN.

It took me years to fully understand what he was really telling me.

Thank you very much for reading.

Patrick

Why I use it in conversations – and why I don’t use it to qualify six-figure deals

There are methodologies that structure conversations.
And there are methodologies that protect deals.

That distinction alone already explains most of my view on Winning by Design’s SPICED framework.

Read more

If you spend five minutes on LinkedIn, you’ll get the impression that every serious B2B sales organization runs on MEDDIC or MEDD(P)ICC.

And technically, many do.

But in practice? A lot of teams are running a CRM checkbox exercise — not a qualification methodology.

Reps are told:

• “You need a metric.”

• “You need a champion.”

• “You need to know the decision process.”

So they fill in the fields.

• Metric: “Customer is inefficient.”

• Champion: “Nice guy who responds quickly.”

• Pain: “They’re not happy with their current setup.”

The boxes are checked, but the deal still dies.

This article is about the gap between knowing the acronym and actually applying it in real deals — especially outbound-generated, larger B2B opportunities.

First: What MEDDICC Was Actually Built For

MEDDICC (or MEDDPICC) was never designed for small, transactional deals.

It was popularized by enterprise sales leaders like John McMahon and built for:

• Complex B2B environments

• Multi-stakeholder buying groups

• High-risk, high-value opportunities

• Typically $100k+ deals (and often much larger)

McMahon himself has referred to $50k deals as “chicken shit deals” — not because they don’t matter, but because MEDDIC in its full form is often over-engineered for that level.

This matters.

If you apply MEDDICC blindly to smaller deals, you’ll overcomplicate things.
If you apply it superficially to larger deals, you’ll lose them.

The methodology is meant to de-risk serious revenue.

The Real Problem: Surface-Level Implementation

What I repeatedly see in organizations is this:

• MEDDICC is “rolled out.”

• Fields are added to the CRM.

• Reps are told what each letter stands for.

But they are not taught:

• How to actually create a metric

• How to test whether someone is truly a champion

• How to reveal pain instead of just documenting complaints

• What a real decision process looks like beyond “Q3 budget”

So MEDDICC becomes:

A reporting framework instead of a thinking framework.

And that is where deals start to rot — slowly and invisibly.

Because a friendly contact is not automatically a champion.
A complaint is not automatically pain.
A vague improvement goal is not a metric.

Deep understanding requires coaching, repetition, and uncomfortable questioning — not just definitions.

Why the Acronym Order Is Misleading

Unlike methodologies such as SPIN Selling, where the sequence mirrors conversational flow (Situation → Problem → Implication → Need-Payoff), MEDDICC’s order is not chronological.

It’s not meant to be.

It’s a compass — not a script.

Depending on:

• Outbound vs inbound motion

• Deal size

• Entry point into the account

• Stakeholder maturity

• Competitive pressure

…the order in which MEDDPICC elements surface will change.

That’s why blindly following the acronym top-to-bottom makes little practical sense.

But: More order can definitely be brought to these acronyms. Because they do matter at different stages of the sales process. Some matter early on, others later. And that is also something I want to shine more light on.

That is why I use a different order in this article altogether. An order of application.

Outbound vs Inbound: Different Risk Profiles

This article will focus primarily on outbound-generated opportunities, because that’s where I’ve won the majority of my deals over the past 15 years.

Why?

Because the qualification risks are different.

In Outbound Deals

Typically, the flow looks something like:

1. Identify Pain

2. Build/validate a Champion

3. Develop Metrics (business case)

4. Understand Decision Process

5. Access the Economic Buyer

6. Clarify Paper Process

7. Address Competition & Decision Criteria along the way

You are creating urgency and are shaping the buying process.

And you introduce the competitive landscape yourself — carefully.

In Inbound Deals

It can look very different.

You may enter at a stage where:

• A competitor already built the champion

• Decision criteria are already defined

• The buying group is solution-aware

• You are one of several vendors in a structured evaluation

In that scenario, competition and decision criteria might become urgent immediately, even before you’ve properly built your own champion.

Different motion. Different risks. Different emphasis.

MEDDICC as a Risk Framework

Here’s the critical lens I use:

Each MEDDICC component represents a risk.

And risk changes over time.

For example:

• After the first meeting, not knowing the paper process is fine.

• After five meetings, not having clear pain is a major red flag.

• After seven meetings, no metric for a $150k deal is dangerous.

• After several calls, no champion? You are exposed.

The earlier elements — Pain, Champion, Metric — carry the highest early-stage risk.

Later elements — Paper Process, Procurement, etc. — become critical only once momentum exists.

That’s why understanding when each letter must be validated is more important than memorising what it stands for.

What This Article Will Do

For the rest of this piece, we will:

• Reorder MEDDPICC the way it typically unfolds in outbound enterprise deals

• Start with the highest early-stage risk: Identify Pain

• Then move to:

  • Champion

  • Metric

  • Decision Process

  • Economic Buyer

  • Paper Process

• And weave in:

  • Decision Criteria

  • Competition
    where they naturally emerge

Not as checkboxes.

But as practical conversations.

With:

• What to look for

• What to ask

• What meeting does it belong in

• How to test if it’s real

Because knowing the acronym is easy.

Applying it in live, political, multi-stakeholder deals?
That’s the craft.

Next, we start where real qualification begins in outbound enterprise sales:

Identify Pain.

2. I – Identify Pain

If there is no real pain, nothing else matters.

No champion will stick their neck out.
No economic buyer will allocate budget.
No decision process will move.

But “pain” is too simple a word. In practice, I distinguish between three levels.

🔴 Level 1: Personal Pain

This is the lowest level.

It sounds like:

“I lose one hour a day on manual reporting.”
“This workflow is annoying.”
“Our tool is frustrating.”

It’s real. Someone feels it.

But it sits with a person. And personal discomfort alone rarely justifies a six-figure investment.

That said, personal pain is not irrelevant. It can become the emotional engine of a champion — because selfish motivation is powerful. But by itself, it’s rarely enough.

🟡 Level 2: Organizational Problem

Now we move up.

This is tied to company-level metrics: revenue, profitability, risk, efficiency.

For example:

The CRO has a 25% growth target.
The organization is currently trending 10% behind.

Now we are talking about something visible at executive level.

But even here, one thing may still be missing: action.

A problem does not automatically mean willingness to change.

🟢 Level 3: Business Initiative

This is the strongest level.

A business initiative means the organization has already decided to act.

The CRO doesn’t just acknowledge the revenue gap — they launch an initiative to improve lead generation performance.

Now the organization is willing to change.

And willingness to change is everything.

Let’s connect the full chain:

• The CRO is behind on growth targets (🟡 problem).

• A lead-generation initiative is launched (🟢 initiative).

• The Marketing Director is under pressure because paid ads are not generating enough leads (🔴 personal pain).

If your solution helps the Marketing Director improve lead output, supports the initiative, and ultimately contributes to closing the revenue gap, you are perfectly aligned across all three levels.

That is what strong pain qualification looks like.

Identify vs. Implicate

It is not enough for you to assume the problem exists. The prospect must articulate it in their own words.

Not implied.
Not inferred.
Spoken.

When they say:

“We’re missing our lead targets by 15%, and that directly impacts our growth plan.”

Now it’s real.

Practical Discovery in Outbound First Meetings

Outbound is messy. Sometimes the meeting exists because the SDR was persistent. That’s fine.

Early in the call, I introduce myself first. Then I ask:

“I’ve seen your LinkedIn and have a rough idea of your role. But in your own words — what are you currently focused on that would be relevant for us to understand?”

When something interesting comes up, I go deep.

• “You mentioned optimizing lead quality — what exactly does that mean?”

• “You said you’re behind — how far behind?”

• “What’s the gap?”

• “Why is that happening?”

Summarize frequently. Ask “What else?” more often than feels natural.

Toward the end of the exploration:

“Is this mainly a personal frustration, a broader organizational problem, or part of a larger initiative already underway?”

And:

“On a scale from 0 to 10 — how important is solving this?”

For enterprise deals, I want 8, 9, or 10.

Without urgency, there is no momentum.

3. C – Champion

Once pain is real and meaningful, the next risk is the champion.

A champion is not the person who talks the most. In fact, someone who talks endlessly, shares internal details, and enjoys vendor conversations is often a coach — not a driver.

Champions are defined by what they are willing and able to do inside the organization, not by how much they speak to you.

I test champions against four criteria.

a. They Have a Selfish Interest

They must personally win if your solution wins.

Questions I ask:

• “How does solving this personally benefit you?”

• “What is your personal interest in pushing this topic?”

• “On a scale from 0 to 10 — how important is this to you personally?”

You can also differentiate:

• “For you personally, how important is this?”

• “For the company overall, how important is this?”

If there is no personal upside or risk, there is no real champion.

b. They Have Access to the Economic Buyer

A champion without access is a supporter.

You must understand whether they can realistically influence budget authority.

If the economic buyer sits completely outside their influence zone, your deal is fragile.

c. They Actively Push — With You

Real champions act.

They suggest next steps.
They name stakeholders.
They provide introductions.
They are willing to bring you into internal conversations.

If they repeatedly say:

“Let me handle this internally.”

…and you never gain visibility, reassess.

d. They Push You — Not Just the Project

Especially in inbound scenarios, you must clarify where they stand.

To understand their buying awareness, I often ask:

“Typically, when I speak to buyers, some are just exploring, some are very aware of the problem, and some are already evaluating solutions. Where would you say you are right now?”

If they are solution-aware, go deeper:

• “Which solutions have you looked at?”

• “What did you like about them?”

• “Is there anything missing from what you’ve seen so far?”

If a competitor keeps coming up:

“To save both of us time — are you already leaning strongly toward that solution, or do we genuinely have a chance here?”

Clarity saves months.

With real pain and a real champion, the next step becomes natural:

Metric and Decision Process.

4. M & D – Metric and Decision Process

After one or two meetings — depending on deal size — you must move into building a business case and understanding how a decision actually gets made.

And this transition should not feel abrupt. It should feel logical.

At the end of a first meeting, I often say something like:

“Here’s how this typically goes from here. In the next meeting, I’ll summarize what I understood to make sure we’re aligned on the pain and use cases. Then we’ll do a deep dive demo tailored to your situation. And third, I’d like us to think about which key KPIs we would realistically impact — especially the ones that matter to the person who will ultimately allocate budget.”

I sometimes give homework:

“Think about which variables truly matter here. Deal size? Conversion rate? Sales cycle length? Customer acquisition cost? Number of reps hitting quota?”

You must anchor the conversation in business drivers.

Typical high-level KPIs include:

• Average deal size

• Conversion rates

• Sales cycle length

• Customer acquisition cost

• Revenue per rep

• Percentage of reps hitting quota

Underneath that, you might explore:

• Cross-sell and upsell performance

• Activity levels on stalled opportunities

• Efficiency per rep

If you identified a business initiative earlier, tie everything back to it:

“What is the main goal of that initiative?”
“Which KPIs determine whether it’s successful?”

Your solution must connect to at least one KPI that drives that initiative.

The Right Way to Build a Metric

A common mistake is to send an ROI calculator and hope the champion sells it internally.

That rarely works.

An ROI calculator can support the conversation. But the business case must be built together — or at least validated together.

You can prepare a draft. But then ask:

“Is this something you genuinely believe in? Would you feel comfortable defending these assumptions internally?”

Senior buyers see dozens of business cases. They quickly recognize inflated numbers.

For deals below $50k or even below $100k, a detailed ROI model is often unnecessary. Many buyers care more about clarity of pain and implementation risk than about financial modeling.

This is why pricing range should be communicated early. Price influences process complexity.

• €50k might require one signature.

• €100k might require CRO and CFO approval.

• €500k might require executive board or steering committee review.

Deal size shapes the decision architecture.

Understanding the Decision Process

This is where Metric and Decision Process intersect.

Because once you know the financial magnitude, you must ask:

“What are the steps we need to take in order to get to a collaboration?”

When they respond:

“We need to show this to my boss.”

Don’t stop there.

Continue:

“And after that?”
“What happens next?”
“Who else gets involved?”
“At which stage does procurement enter?”

Your goal is to understand at least the next two to three steps early on — and eventually the full path to signature.

Also ask:

“Who typically needs to be involved in a decision of this size?”
“What is each person’s stake in this?”

Titles matter. Names matter. Influence matters.

The larger the deal, the more structured and political the process becomes.

If you identified a steering committee behind an initiative, expect them to play a role.

Bringing It Together

In our process, once the business case is built and validated with the champion, we do not send it off.

We say:

“Let’s book a meeting with the economic buyer together. We built this case jointly — let’s present it jointly. I can help answer detailed questions about the solution and the numbers.”

Because business cases don’t sell themselves. Conversations do.

Metric and Decision Process are not administrative steps. They are the bridge between operational pain and executive approval.

And if done properly, they naturally lead to the next critical element:

The Economic Buyer.

5. E – Economic Buyer

At this stage of the deal, everything you’ve done so far gets tested in one brutal way: can you actually access the economic buyer?

Most reps struggle here. Not because they don’t know they should meet the economic buyer, but because they don’t understand the dynamic behind access.

Access is not a calendar invite.
Access is a reward.

If the champion does not take you with them to the economic buyer, it’s often a sign that somewhere earlier in the process you didn’t earn the right to be in that room.

Because the champion is taking a risk, even if it’s not a career-ending one. Their reputation is still on the line. When they bring a vendor into a meeting with a senior buyer, they are implicitly saying: “This is credible. This is worth attention. This is worth time.”

If they aren’t confident in that statement, they will go alone — or they will delay the meeting altogether.

Why Champions Leave You Behind

There are a few classic behaviors that quietly kill your chances of being invited upward. And they’re all surprisingly common.

If you:

• act like a standard salesperson — more focused on presenting than understanding,

• don’t ask interesting questions that actually trigger thinking in the champion,

• don’t share relevant know-how that makes the champion smarter internally,

• answer questions poorly — vague, hesitant, mumbling, dodging instead of being crisp,

• do a product tour instead of a business conversation,

…then you simply aren’t worth taking anywhere.

A champion might still like you. They might still like the idea. They might even still want to push the initiative. But they won’t bring you into a high-stakes meeting if they suspect you will embarrass them or waste the economic buyer’s time.

This is counterintuitive for a lot of reps: they think access is mainly about insisting harder. In reality, access is mostly about being useful enough that the champion wants you there.

Before you even talk about tactics, that’s the foundation.

The First Requirement: Earn the Right

A good enterprise rep earns economic buyer access by showing, early on, that they are a serious conversation partner.

That means you’re not just showing software. You’re doing the things that build confidence:

• You ask questions that the champion hasn’t considered yet.

• You connect the pain to a larger organizational problem and ideally to a business initiative.

• You help structure thinking — priorities, stakeholders, trade-offs.

• You are clear, direct, and business-oriented when you answer questions.

• You make the champion feel: “This person will make me look good in front of my boss.”

If you do that consistently, the champion starts seeing you as a partner, not as a vendor.

And that is what gets you invited upward.

The Second Requirement: Be Assertive Early

Even if you are excellent, you still need to propose the right path.

Economic buyer access rarely happens accidentally. It happens because you frame it as the natural next step.

I like to do this early, often already at the end of the first meeting, in a very practical way:

“Here’s how this typically goes from here. In the next meeting, we’ll do a deeper dive and I’ll summarize what I understood to make sure we’re aligned. Then we’ll do a personalized demo. And after that, I’d like us to build a business case together — because if we go higher in the organization, we’ll need something concrete.”

Then I make it very easy for the champion:

“I’m the main driver here. I’ll do the heavy lifting, you just sanity-check assumptions. I know you have a real job next to this.”

And then I propose the real step that many reps avoid:

“Once we’ve built that case, let’s book a meeting with your boss so we can present it together. Would that be a good way to do it?”

That phrasing does a few important things at once:

• It makes the economic buyer meeting feel normal and expected.

• It positions you as support, not as extra work.

• It implies that going upward without a case is pointless — which is true.

If you wait until the deal is already messy or political, access becomes much harder. If you normalize it early, it becomes part of the rhythm of the deal.

The Third Requirement: Drive the Right Conversation With the Economic Buyer

When you finally get the meeting, you can’t show up with the wrong agenda.

The economic buyer meeting is not a “big demo moment.” It’s not the time for another product tour.

Your job in that meeting is to drive the key components:

1. Reconfirm the pain and the urgency (in the buyer’s language, not yours).

2. Present the business case you built with the champion, with assumptions the champion actually believes in.

3. Connect it to executive-level priorities — ideally the initiative you uncovered earlier.

4. Answer questions sharply — no mumbling, no vague claims, no hand-waving.

5. Create clarity on next steps — including who else must be involved.

You mentioned a good real-life example yourself: CEO, CTO, and Head of Sales EMEA in the same meeting. That’s exactly what happens when the topic is strategic enough and the business case is credible enough.

But that meeting only works when the people in the room are reasonably aligned in their interests: high-level executives, steering committee members, or leaders tied to the same business initiative.

Multiple Economic Buyers, Multiple Interests

In reality, “the economic buyer” is rarely one human being.

Even when one person owns the budget, contracts often require multiple sign-offs:

• CRO + CFO

• CIO + CFO

• CEO + department head

And depending on the company size, “economic buyer” might not mean C-level at all. In very large organizations, department heads can have enormous budget autonomy. A $500k purchase can be decided several layers below the executive board in a Fortune 500 environment — while the same amount might require board involvement in a smaller company.

Still, regardless of title, the logic stays the same: once people are high enough, their interests become more closely aligned with the organization’s priorities. Lower down, interests tend to be more departmental and personal.

And even at the top, different leaders bring different concerns.

If a Chief Compliance Officer is present and you sell something that touches sensitive data — say, call recording — you should expect deep questions about security and data protection. Ideally, you prepare for those questions before the meeting, even if it’s hard to cover everything without direct access.

This is why, before you go up, you ask the champion things like:

“What is this person typically most interested in?”
“What are they usually worried about in projects like this?”
“What would make them skeptical?”

You want to walk into that meeting already speaking their language.

Steering Committees and the Majority Rule

Sometimes the “economic buyer” is effectively a steering committee.

In that case, the game is not “win the meeting.” It’s “win the majority.”

A simple rule of thumb I like:

• If there are 4 people: you want 3, minimum 2 with real weight.

• If there are 5 people: you want 3.

• If there are 7 people: you want 4.

And you win them the same way you win anyone: by understanding their interests, their stakes, and their fears — not by doing a generic demo.

This is also where you broaden the champion concept: you often need more than one. If marketing and sales and IT all have stakes, you may need champions in each.

One-by-One Beats Big Demos

One more practical point that saves deals: avoid big mixed-audience demos.

A demo in front of:

• an IT director,

• a marketing leader,

• and a sales leader,

with one single storyline is a trap. Each one cares about different things, asks different questions, and evaluates value differently. You’ll end up answering half of the room poorly at any given moment.

The better play is almost always:

• win departments one by one,

• understand their specific reasons and priorities,

• build champions in each relevant area,

• then bring aligned leaders together at the top when the conversation is strategic enough.

If you need another stakeholder, you can do it in a natural, non-threatening way with your champion:

“Typically, when I speak to clients about this, marketing also has a stake. Is that true in your case as well?”

If they say yes:

“Who would be the right person to involve?”

And then you win that person separately, with their own story, their own pain, their own risks.

This keeps your process clean, and it keeps your champion safe.

This Chapter: Closing Thoughts

Economic buyer access is not something you “ask for” once and hope for the best.

It’s something you earn by being a strong partner, you create by framing it early, and you capitalise on by driving the right conversation when you finally get in.

Do those three things well, and economic buyer meetings stop feeling like a rare event.

They start feeling like the natural next step in a properly run enterprise deal.

5. Competition & Decision Criteria

This is the part of MEDDICC that behaves very differently depending on how the deal was created.

If I run an outbound motion and I help buyers move from problem-unaware to solution-aware, then in many cases I’m the first serious vendor conversation they have. They like the idea, they like the solution, and for a while, they don’t even think in categories like “alternatives.” They’re simply exploring whether this is worth doing.

At some point, reality catches up. The deal gets bigger. Internal stakeholders get involved. Procurement enters the picture. Someone says: “We need to look at other tools as well.” And then competition appears—not because the champion suddenly lost interest, but because the organization needs to follow a process.

That’s why I intentionally place competition and decision criteria here in the article, and not at the beginning. In outbound, they often come later. In inbound, they can be day one.

And the reason these two topics belong together is simple:

Competition is decided through decision criteria.

Whoever fulfills the criteria best wins.
Whoever shapes the criteria best often wins before the competition even starts.

The Simple Calculation

In the end, deals are won through a list.

Not your product. Not your deck. Not your relationship.

A list.

If the customer has decision criteria, and you meet them better than anyone else, you win. If you manage to get criteria into that list that uniquely match your differentiators, you win even more reliably.

This becomes painfully obvious in RFPs.

When a buyer becomes solution-aware through your process and then needs to “run procurement properly,” they often write an RFP. And they often write it with your help—even if they don’t realize it. The result is a set of must-haves that mirrors your strengths.

Those RFPs are basically launched for you. Your odds are extremely high.

On the other hand, when you receive an RFP cold—especially one you did not influence—your odds are usually terrible. I often say the ceiling is around 10%. Because the more common scenario is that another supplier shaped the criteria first, and the RFP is quietly optimized for them. It may look “perfect for us” on the surface. But it rarely is. If a competitor had a strong influence on the document, the criteria will favor their differentiators, not yours.

There are exceptions. Sometimes an organization becomes solution-aware without speaking to vendors and writes a relatively neutral RFP. Government RFPs can sometimes be closer to that—but government procurement comes with its own dynamics, relationships, and incumbent advantages. In any case, “neutral RFPs” exist, but they’re not the rule.

The larger point stays the same: the vendor that shapes the criteria early has the leverage.

Outbound: When Competition Appears Later

In an outbound-generated opportunity, competition often surfaces when the champion says something like:

“We have to look at other solutions as well.”

When that happens, I don’t resist it. I normalize it:

“Completely normal. I expected that you’d do this.”

And then I move immediately to decision criteria before competitor research starts.

I’ll say something like:

“Before you start looking, can we quickly put together a list of must-haves and nice-to-haves? That way you can evaluate competitors properly.”

That single question is the gateway to shaping the deal.

Because at this point, if I’ve done my job well, I already know:

• what pains matter,

• what initiative exists,

• what KPI the business case is tied to,

• and where my differentiators sit.

So yes, I’ll help them build that list. And obviously, I’m not doing it randomly. I already have a list ready in my head (and often in a document):

• Must-haves include areas where I know we have an edge and where the customer truly needs it.

• Nice-to-haves can include features where others may also be strong, or things that matter but don’t decide the deal.

In practice, it can sound like this:

“Let’s build the list based on what matters to your initiative. And then I can also tell you where competitors are typically strong and where they’re usually weak—using that list as the reference.”

You don’t need to trash competitors. In fact, you shouldn’t. You position yourself as the professional who helps them run a good evaluation.

And you make sure the evaluation criteria reflect reality—and reflect what you’re uniquely good at.

One more tactical point: for larger deals, they will have to do this anyway. So sometimes I bring it up proactively, even before they mention competitors:

“At some point your leadership will ask what other vendors exist in the field. Let’s be ready for that. Besides the business case, we should also prepare a must-have / nice-to-have list so we can evaluate alternatives logically.”

That keeps you in control when the procurement moment arrives.

Inbound: Competition and Criteria Can Be Day One

Inbound flips the timing.

If someone reaches out inbound, there’s a decent chance they are already further along:

• they may be problem-aware,

• they may already be solution-aware,

• they may already have spoken to competitors,

• and they may already have a criteria list—formal or informal.

That’s why, in inbound, I want to uncover buying stage and competitive reality early. We already discussed the “where are you in the process?” question in the champion chapter. Here’s why it matters so much:

If they’re already evaluating competitors, the decision criteria list may already be written—by someone else.

So the question becomes very direct:

“Have you already put together a list of must-haves and nice-to-haves for the solution?”

If they say yes, I want to see it or at least hear it in detail.

If they say no, that’s opportunity.

Because then I can say:

“Before we go too far, let’s define what success looks like. Based on the requirements you have, we can build a must-have / nice-to-have list together and then evaluate if we’re a strong fit.”

And this is where you bring in experience from existing customers:

“I can also share patterns I’ve seen with other customers—what criteria typically matter in practice and what seems important at first but rarely decides the outcome.”

That positions you as a guide, not as a vendor trying to win a bake-off.

The Competitive Discovery Sequence

When a prospect says they’ve already looked at other tools, I take a two-step approach.

First, I go positive:

“Which other solutions have you looked into, and what did you like about them?”

Starting with the positive matters. It signals professionalism. It keeps the conversation open.

Then I ask:

“Is there something missing from what you’ve seen so far?”

And if one competitor name keeps coming up again and again, I get explicit:

“To save both of us time—are you already strongly committed to that solution, or do we genuinely have a chance here?”

Sometimes I’ll add:

“If we have a chance, where do you think that chance lies?”

That one question can save months of polite theatre.

And if they say they did look at one or two tools but didn’t like what they saw, that’s actually helpful. It’s a “fussy” environment, but it gives you raw material for criteria building:

• “What did you like?” → likely must-have

• “What did you not like?” → also likely must-have

• “What felt unnecessary?” → likely nice-to-have or irrelevant

When you help a buyer structure this, they genuinely appreciate it. It’s one of the most value-adding things a rep can do in complex deals: helping the customer make a decision that feels logical and defensible internally.

6. Closing Thoughts on Article

If this article did its job, it should make one thing clearer: MEDDICC isn’t about filling out fields. It’s about reducing risk, at the right moment, based on what kind of deal you’re in.

• If there’s no real pain in the first one or two meetings, the deal is at risk—or it isn’t a deal.

• If you don’t have a real champion early, the whole process becomes fragile.

• Metrics and business case matter more as deal size increases; below certain thresholds, buyers may not need them at all.

• Not meeting the economic buyer in the first meeting isn’t a risk—but not having a plan to reach them is.

• Competition and decision criteria can be late-stage topics in outbound deals, but early-stage deal killers in inbound deals. The key is to de-risk them at the right time.

Thanks for reading — and as always, I appreciate feedback.

Best regards,
Patrick

What matters to me is not the tool itself. It’s the structure, the rhythm, and the shared visibility.

Read more

Some sales leaders and practitioners claim that MEDD(P)ICC — the infamous sales methodology — is dead.

“Outdated.”
“A relic from the past.”
“Not customer-centric, therefore useless.”

At the same time, many of the best B2B enterprise sales organizations at some of the fastest-growing companies in the world — MongoDB, Snowflake, Sprinklr, Lacework — use MEDD(P)ICC very successfully.

Some of these organizations hire only salespeople who are already proficient in the methodology. And there is hardly any environment where enterprise sales reps earn more. Unsurprisingly, these companies employ some of the strongest sales talent in the market.

Other frameworks such as BANT and SPIN suffer a similar fate. Some sales leaders call them outdated. Others still swear by them.

So what should we actually think about sales methodologies today?

First, a Necessary Distinction: Sales vs. Qualification Methodologies

Before we go any further, we need to clean up a conceptual mess that causes a lot of confusion.

Not all methodologies are the same thing.

There is an important difference between:

Qualification methodologies
and
Sales (or execution) methodologies

Qualification methodologies are primarily designed to help sellers assess risk, prioritize opportunities, and decide where to invest time. MEDDICC, MEDDIC, MEDDPICC, NEAT, ANUM — these frameworks exist to answer one core question:

Is this deal real, and is it worth pursuing?

Sales methodologies, on the other hand, are often used to structure conversations, run meetings, or guide a seller’s behavior in a specific interaction. Challenger, Sandler, Solution Selling, Consultative Selling — these approaches are not primarily about qualification, but about how to sell.

To make things more nuanced (and more confusing):
Some frameworks, such as SPIN and BANT, can be used in both ways.

They can be applied:

• as strict qualification tools (e.g. checking whether Budget or Authority exists), or

• as internal mental models to structure a discovery or first call.

The problem is not the frameworks themselves — it’s that we often throw all of them into the same bucket and judge them by the wrong criteria.

This article focuses primarily on qualification methodologies, even though some of the examples overlap.

Why We Love Extremes

One thing is clear: humans love extremes.

Something is either incredibly valuable — or completely useless. Our brains are wired to simplify decision-making, so we quickly decide whether we like or hate something.

Methodologies are no exception.

In this article, I want to take a different approach. Instead of debating whether a framework is “dead” or “alive,” I want to explain:

• where some of these methodologies come from,

• what problem they were originally designed to solve, and

• in which contexts they still make sense today.

Like many sales tools, a methodology is neither good nor bad by default. Used correctly and consistently, it can make sellers better. Used blindly, or broadly, it can do the opposite.

The Origin Story of MEDD(P)ICC

Let’s start with MEDD(P)ICC.

In 1990, MEDDICC (and its later variations MEDDIC, MEDDICC, MEDDPICC) was developed by John McMahon and his sales leadership team at PTC.

At the time, PTC had a problem.

They were losing a lot of deals, their win rate wasn’t great, and they didn’t really know why.

They knew their product wasn’t always the strongest on the market — but John McMahon doubted that product quality alone explained the losses.

So the team analyzed their lost deals and identified seven recurring reasons:

• A competitor won the deal

• No real champion (or the wrong one)

• No access to the economic buyer

• Poor understanding of the decision process

• No influence on decision criteria

• Insufficient understanding of the customer’s pain

• No business case

That analysis became MEDDICC.

From that point on, sellers used MEDDICC as a risk-assessment framework — almost like a GPS throughout the sales process. At any moment, they could ask themselves: Do I really know what’s going on here?

Take the concept of a Champion, for example.

PTC didn’t just assume someone was a champion because they were “nice” or enthusiastic. Sellers actively tested it by asking themselves:

• Does this person have a selfish interest in this deal closing?

• Do they have access to the economic buyer?

• Will they introduce me to them?

• Are they advocating for my solution — and not several others?

Only if all answers were a clear “yes” did they consider someone a real champion.

The result?

Every key sales KPI improved.

That alone doesn’t mean everyone should use MEDDICC today — but it explains why it exists and what problem it was designed to solve.

BANT: Even Older, Still Misunderstood

Now let’s look at BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline).

IBM developed BANT in the 1950s — which technically makes it the oldest qualification framework in tech. Does that automatically make it obsolete?

Not necessarily. Plenty of Aristotle’s ideas are still valid too (especially his takes in ethics).

Why did IBM invent BANT?

In the 40s and 50s, IBM dominated emerging technology markets. Competition was limited. Demand was massive. The company was flooded with inbound leads.

Sounds great — but there was a problem.

Not all inbound leads were equally valuable.

Some people were just curious.
Others had an active project with urgency.

IBM’s challenge wasn’t creating demand — it was filtering it efficiently.

Most leads came in via telephone, so IBM needed a fast way to qualify them. BANT became the solution. Salespeople were expected to answer four simple questions early:

• Is there a budget?

• Is there authority?

• Is there a real need?

• Is there a timeline?

Based on the answers, leads were either routed to sales or pushed into a different funnel.

BANT was never meant to run an entire sales cycle. It was built to screen inbound demand quickly.

This is fundamentally different from MEDDICC — even though both are often labeled “qualification methodologies.”

Different Frameworks, Different Jobs

This pattern repeats across many frameworks.

Challenger Sales, for example, emerged from research during the financial crisis of 2007–2009. Analysts identified five seller profiles and found that Challengers performed best in complex environments.

Why?

Because they:

• had deep industry knowledge,

• reframed problems customers hadn’t considered, and

• challenged existing thinking.

That approach works well when:

• the product solves a problem in a novel way,

• sellers understand complex industries deeply,

• and insights can be transferred across customers.

That’s not every sales organization — but it can be powerful when the conditions are right. And yes, it can coexist with MEDDICC.

The key point:
You don’t need one methodology. You need clarity on what problem you’re trying to solve.

Filtering leads?
Qualify Pipeline?
Shortening sales cycles?

Different problems require different tools.

What All These Frameworks Have in Common

There are dozens of frameworks in use today: SPIN, NEAT, ANUM, SPICED, Sandler, Value Selling, Solution Selling, Consultative Selling, and many more.

Instead of debating which one is “best,” it’s more useful to ask: What do they all emphasize?

Across almost all qualification-oriented frameworks, four common elements appear:

1. Pain or Gain
   Every framework forces sellers to understand why a customer should care — whether that’s solving a problem or achieving a gain.

2. Impact and Business Case
   Most frameworks push sellers to quantify consequences. In B2B, decisions ultimately need a value-to-cost justification.

3. People and Roles
   Whether called Authority, Economic Buyer, Decision Maker, or Champion — knowing who matters is essential.

4. Process and Timing
   Timeline, Decision Process, Mutual Action Plan — different words, same idea. Sellers need to understand how a deal gets done.

Trust and rapport show up too, but those are harder to codify. They matter — they’re just not easy to standardize.

Building a Practical, Adaptable Methodology

If your methodology helps sellers consistently focus on:

• Pain/Gain

• Impact

• Business case

• Roles

• Process

you significantly reduce deal risk.

That’s how I ended up adjusting frameworks:

For SME & Mid-Market deals:
P/GI(M)EDCC

For Enterprise deals:
P/GIMEDDPCCR

The differences reflect reality:

• Smaller deals don’t always require a formal business case or paper process.

• Enterprise deals almost always do.

What matters most is when information is uncovered. Pain, impact, and urgency need to be clear early — everything else builds on that.

Are Qualification Methodologies Customer-Centric?

Short answer: yes.

Customers need to understand the same things sellers do:

• the impact of a problem,

• who owns the decision,

• how the process works,

• how alternatives compare.

A good qualification methodology doesn’t manipulate buyers — it helps them make better decisions and guides them through the process as well.

Making Methodologies Stick

Implementation is the hardest part.

What helped me most:

1. Agreement based sales stages and meeting types as “tools”

2. Mapping criteria to stages

3. Providing concrete questions

4. Using technology for self-coaching and visibility

No methodology will ever be used perfectly by 100% of the team — and that’s fine.

Final Thought

Sales and qualification methodologies aren’t dead. They’re often misunderstood.

They were created for specific problems, in specific contexts. If you understand those origins — and focus on the common denominators — you can build something that actually works for your team.

Good luck implementing yours.

Thank you for reading.

Patrick

What didn’t change was his patience for irrelevant noise.

Kevin reads more outreach than most executives. He understands sales. He respects the craft. And still, the overwhelming majority of messages never get close to a real conversation. Not because they’re aggressive — but because they’re indistinguishable. Mass-produced language, shallow personalization, and AI-generated text that feels like it was written about a CEO, not for one.

AI itself isn’t the problem. Kevin fully expects it to be part of modern selling. What breaks trust is lazy AI — messages that look polished on the surface but collapse the moment you examine the assumptions behind them. Wrong company context, vague value statements, and personalization that’s technically present but emotionally empty.

And then there are the tactics that actively backfire.

Localized dialers that pretend a call is coming from Boston when it clearly isn’t. Tricks designed to increase pickup rates at the expense of honesty. For an experienced executive, these don’t feel clever — they feel deceptive. And once trust is gone, the conversation is over before it begins.

Time, more than budget, is the real constraint.

Even in important buying processes, attention is fragmented. Meetings stack up. Context switches constantly. This is why Kevin reacts strongly to demos that fail to pull executives into the conversation. “Any questions” or “Does that make sense”, feature walkthroughs detached from reality, and polite pauses that invite silence instead of insight. Sellers leave the call having “presented well,” but having learned nothing.

The vendors that stand out do something different. They show they understand how the business actually works today — not in theory, not in a slide deck, but in lived operational reality. They connect features directly to workflows. They acknowledge constraints. They demonstrate relevance without over-explaining.

In Dealfront’s case, internal ownership mattered too. When Kevin lacks deep domain expertise, he gets involved earlier. When strong leaders exist — RevOps, Product, HR — they drive the evaluation. His role then becomes sponsorship, judgment, and final accountability, not micromanagement.

One of the most telling moments in the conversation comes when ROI enters the discussion.

Kevin is explicit: large, confident ROI numbers rarely drive his decisions. Not because value doesn’t matter — but because most ROI models are fragile. Too many assumptions. Too many variables. Too much false precision.

What matters more is whether a seller can clearly articulate the gap in the business:

• Where the company is today

• Why that state creates friction, errors, or frustration

• What a better future realistically looks like
  And crucially — how the solution helps bridge that gap.

Some pain doesn’t need a perfect euro figure attached to it. Manual errors. Opaque compensation logic. Time-consuming planning cycles. Frustrated teams who don’t understand how decisions affect them. These are operational and human problems. Even if the cost isn’t exactly €27,000 or €152,000, the pain is still real — and often reason enough to act.

Human interaction still matters in these decisions. Professionalism. Thoughtfulness. The feeling that someone genuinely understands the business. All of that builds confidence.

But Kevin is clear about the final arbiter.

In a market full of alternatives, where switching costs are lower than ever, the product ultimately has to deliver. Great selling cannot compensate for weak impact. The human element opens the door — the product decides whether it stays open.

That, in the end, is the CEO’s perspective: less theater, less volume, fewer tricks — and far more clarity about real problems, real constraints, and real outcomes.

Thanks for reading & listening

Patrick

And yes, that’s broadly true. But the more I think about it, the more I realize how incomplete that framing actually is.

Because not every gap is a problem. And not every problem feels like one—at least not yet.

Take the idea of gap selling, for example. What Keenan describes so well is that selling only works if there’s a gap between where someone is today and where they want to be in the future. That gap can be operational, emotional, financial, strategic. It doesn’t matter. Without a gap, nothing moves.

But here’s the subtlety that gets lost: a gap can exist without creating discomfort.

A CRO might say, “Next year, I need to double growth.” There’s clearly a gap there. But that statement alone doesn’t necessarily signal pain. It can just as easily be a goal, an ambition, something aspirational. It becomes a problem only when the gap is experienced as pressure in the present moment—when the numbers are too close, the time horizon too short, or the consequences too real.

The same gap, framed differently, suddenly feels very different.

And that distinction—between knowing a gap exists and feeling that it’s a problem—is where a lot of early-stage selling either works or completely falls apart.

A few months ago, I stumbled into this realization in a very unexpected, very private way. And honestly, it annoyed me more than it helped me.

I love scrambled eggs. I really do. I’ve spent years perfecting them. I watched one of those famous-chef videos a long time ago and internalized the technique so well that friends and family still comment on how good they are. Scrambled eggs are one of those small things I take irrational pride in.

One morning, my wife was eating them when she suddenly picked something out of the eggs and put it on the side of her plate. I asked her what that was.

She looked at me and said, very calmly: “That’s the umbilical cord of the egg.”

She showed it to me. A small, white, cooked string connecting the egg white to the yolk. I had eaten it my entire life without ever noticing it. But the moment she pointed it out, it became impossible to ignore. It looked… disgusting. And once seen, it couldn’t be unseen.

From that day on, I started removing it every single time. I inspect eggs now. I actively look for something I was blissfully unaware of for decades.

And here’s the part that really stuck with me: my life didn’t improve because of this knowledge. If anything, it got slightly worse. Eating scrambled eggs became slightly worse because of a problem that didn’t matter at all until I knew about it.

Yet if someone now invented a tool that automatically removed those egg umbilical cords, I’d probably buy it.

That’s how fast awareness turns into demand.

This is exactly what so many startups experience.

They solve things that technically exist but aren’t emotionally registered yet. Problems that people live with comfortably. Inefficiencies that feel normal. Workarounds that don’t hurt enough to trigger change.

If someone had called me a year ago and said, “A lot of people are disgusted by the umbilical cord in scrambled eggs—do you struggle with that too?” I would have thought they were insane.

But after seeing it once, after being made aware of it, I couldn’t go back.

Problem awareness doesn’t always land immediately. Sometimes it needs time. Sometimes it needs repetition. Sometimes it needs an accidental moment in a kitchen.

You see the same pattern in B2B all the time.

Before AI note-taking tools became widespread, most of us took notes during calls. We wrote things down. We summarized conversations from memory. Sometimes we updated the CRM, sometimes we didn’t. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible either. It was just… how things worked.

I never woke up thinking, “I desperately need a solution for this.” It didn’t feel like a problem. It felt like normal work.

Then someone shows you a demo.
A call gets transcribed automatically.
Action items are extracted.
A clean summary appears instantly in your CRM.

And suddenly the old way feels heavier than it ever did before.

Nothing changed about the task itself. What changed was the comparison.

That’s when you realize something important: sometimes the solution is what creates the problem.

Large language models made things possible that were previously unthinkable or at least implausible. And the moment something becomes plausible, the existing way of working starts to feel inefficient—even if it never bothered you before.

What makes this tricky is that most people are not naturally good at identifying their own problems.

Some founders are. Some entrepreneurs constantly think in terms of friction and optimization. But most people operate on autopilot. If something takes ten minutes a day, it doesn’t even register as something worth questioning.

Until someone shows them another way.

That’s why early-stage selling is so difficult. You’re not just responding to existing pain. You’re often talking to people who genuinely believe they’re fine. Who aren’t lying. Who aren’t resisting. Who simply haven’t seen what’s possible yet.

In those cases, selling is less about convincing and more about revealing. About helping someone notice something they’ve been stepping over for years.

And that doesn’t always happen in one conversation. Sometimes it takes months. Sometimes the first reaction is rejection. Sometimes the seed just sits there quietly until one day it clicks.

What the scrambled egg taught me—against my will—is that awareness is powerful, but it’s not neutral.

Once someone sees something, they can’t unsee it. Once they feel friction, they start wanting relief. And once a better way becomes imaginable, the old way starts to feel wrong.

This is why early-stage sales lives at the intersection of problem awareness and solution awareness. One without the other rarely works. Talking only about problems can fall flat if the pain isn’t felt yet. Talking only about solutions can feel abstract if the problem hasn’t been named.

But together, they change perception.

The problem was always there.
The gap always existed.
The buyer just hadn’t noticed it yet.

And sometimes, that moment of noticing is all it takes.

If you want to learn more on that topic in general, it is worth giving the podcast episode on the sales software formula with Jiri Siklar a listen:

Thank you for reading (and listening).

Patrick

Open and closed questions are often discussed as if they were a matter of personal preference. Some sellers are told they should ask more open questions to sound curious and customer-centric. Others are warned not to interrogate and are encouraged to keep questions tight and controlled.

That framing is misleading.

In sales, questions are never neutral. Every question shifts responsibility, creates psychological pressure, and signals intent. Whether a question works or fails has far less to do with how it is phrased than with when it is asked and what right you have earned at that moment.

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