How to Sell More by Boosting Customer Confidence - Outside Sales Talk with Brent Adamson and Karl Schmidt

Summary

Podcast Summary: Outside Sales Talk

Episode: How to Sell More by Boosting Customer Confidence
Host: Steve Benson
Guests: Brent Adamson & Karl Schmidt
Date: March 19, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on actionable strategies for boosting customer confidence in complex B2B sales, based on Brent Adamson and Karl Schmidt's latest book, The Frame Making Sale: Sell More by Boosting Customer Confidence. The authors delve into why modern sales has shifted from “challenging” customers’ thinking to “framing” decisions, providing customers confidence not just in the seller or solution, but in their own ability to navigate complex purchases. The discussion is heavy on practical examples, decision psychology, and frameworks that can immediately improve sales effectiveness for outside sales reps.

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Main Themes & Key Discussion Points

1. What Is “Frame Making” and How Does It Differ from Challenger/Consultative Selling?

Timestamps: 01:35–04:13

• Frame breaking (Challenger Sale style): Seller disrupts customer thinking, introduces new insights.
• Frame making: Seller provides guidance, structure, and reassurance to help customers navigate overwhelming, complex decisions.
• B2B buyers today are “completely overwhelmed”: Too much info, conflicting objectives, fear of negative outcomes.
• Frame making is akin to being a “decision coach”—making the complex manageable:

  “I haven’t told you what to do. I haven’t given you the answer, but I’ve put a frame around it… I’ve given you confidence… in yourself.”
  —Brent Adamson, 03:23

2. Real-Life Example: The “Tara Story”

Timestamps: 06:00–10:15

• Tara, a star seller, proactively invites procurement into a deal early—having seen too many deals fall apart at the end due to their late involvement.
• Bringing procurement in early saves time and prevents wasted effort.
• This is a “light version” of frame making: Not a formal framework, but a simple, evidence-based nudge that builds buying confidence.

  “All this is is a simple suggestion, a nudge of what Tara observed… That’s classic to frame making: making something hard feel a little bit more manageable.”
  —Karl Schmidt, 09:09

3. The “Why” – The Critical Importance of Customer Decision Confidence

Timestamps: 10:18–14:24

• Data: Buyers who report high decision confidence are 10x more likely to make a high-quality, low-regret purchase.
• Key drivers are not belief in your product or brand, but:
  • “Are we asking the right questions?”
  • “Have we done enough research?”
  • “Have we examined alternatives?”
• These are “supplier-agnostic” and reflect customers’ own process, not their perception of the seller.

  “The biggest driver of B2B buying isn’t what you know; it’s what you feel… It’s not whether I feel confident in you, but whether I feel confident in us.”
  —Brent Adamson, 12:26

4. Frame-Making Mindset and Techniques

Timestamps: 17:08–19:52

• The frame making mindset: Help the customer make the best decision in the least time.
• Provide resources (even those mentioning competitors) and third-party research to overcome analysis paralysis.
• Sellers should help customers focus on what truly differentiates solutions and “lose fast” if it’s not a fit.

5. Diagnosing and Addressing the Four Customer Struggles

Timestamps: 26:17–31:55

• Four Paralyzing Challenges:
  1. Decision Complexity
  2. Information Overload
  3. Objective Misalignment
  4. Outcome Uncertainty
• Which is most paralyzing depends on the customer and buying stage. Use diagnostic conversations early:
  • “Have you bought something like this before?”
  • “Who was involved? What did you learn?”
• Proactively surface potential snags—don’t avoid difficult internal politics.

  “What I learned… is like, that’s probably the first thing you want to bring up, right? You’ve got to run right at this.”
  —Brent Adamson, 33:08

6. Tactical Skills: Three E’s of Frame Making

Timestamps: 38:45–43:09

• Establish: Identify where customers get stuck, based on others’ journeys (“What advice would you give a peer undertaking this now?”).
• Engage: Don’t play the expert; be a “co-learner.” Use social proof via “the phrase that frames”:

  “In working with other customers like you, one of the things we’ve been surprised to learn is…”
  —Brent Adamson, 41:04

• Execute: Maintain customers’ confidence through the process, with tactics like alignment workshops and customer-verified outcomes.

7. Avoiding the “Number One Choice, Number Three Priority” Trap

Timestamps: 48:36–52:12

• Deals die not because customers don’t see value, but because the purchase doesn’t align with higher strategic priorities.
• Help buyers “ladder up” the value to connect your solution with bigger organizational objectives.

  “We agree you guys are going to save us a ton of money, but we’ve decided to go in a different direction. What happens when you wind up being your customer’s number one choice to their number three problem?”
  —Brent Adamson, 48:36

8. Information Overload and the Paradox of Choice

Timestamps: 63:17–67:23

• Abundant information (AI, reviews, etc.) often increases confusion, not clarity.
• Customers “drown in details,” perpetually postponing (“save for later” instead of deciding).
• Sellers’ über-role is to filter, focus, and coach.

  “You scale that up to B2B… and this is why 40–60% of deals end in no decision.”
  —Brent Adamson, 66:15

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Modern Buyer Overwhelm:
  “B2B buyers are just completely overwhelmed with too many… just really the complexity of decision-making, information overload, objective misalignment across their colleagues, outcome uncertainty.”
  —Brent Adamson, 01:56

• On Driving Customer Agency:
  “One of the traps sellers can fall into… you’re doing it for them rather than you creating the structure, the framing that allows them… to create their own confidence.”
  —Karl Schmidt, 36:21

• On “It Turns Out That…”
  “The four worst words you can hear in sales… any sales conversation starts with the words: ‘It turns out that…’ you know it’s going south.”
  —Brent Adamson, 60:09

• On Amazon Paralysis as a Metaphor:
  “And the button says, save for later. You don’t get a dongle, but the pain stops. And you can get your life back… 582 times relatively simple consumer purchases just stalled out because she just didn’t feel completely confident.” —Brent Adamson, 66:15

• On Helping Customers Align Internally:
  “I can show you a spreadsheet that proves ROI, but if your priorities don’t match, you’ll say: ‘We agree, but we’re going another direction.’”
  —Brent Adamson, 48:36

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Practical Tips & Takeaways

• Early Diagnostics:
  Ask customers early if they’ve made this type of purchase before; surface potential blockers, stakeholders, and process steps.
• Use Social Proof:
  Reference “other customers like you” transparently. Package lessons learned not just as wins, but also about pitfalls and how to avoid them (chapter 5).
• Coach, Don’t Prescribe:
  Provide frameworks and guidance so customers retain agency in the decision, building their self-confidence rather than dependence.
• Align on Priorities, Not Just Value:
  Help stakeholders connect your solution to their upstream, strategic organizational objectives.
• Empathize with Overwhelm:
  Understand and name the emotional barriers (overwhelm, fear of regret, past failures).
• Lose Fast:
  If it’s not a fit, help customers (and yourself) disqualify quickly to free up resources.

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Lightning Round Highlights

• Sign You’re Adding Confusion:
  If customers are asking the same questions repeatedly or new questions keep coming up, you’re likely spinning their wheels not helping them move forward. (62:51)
• AI’s Impact:
  AI and abundant info can paradoxically reduce confidence as decisions feel harder, not easier. (63:27)
• Paralysis Metaphor:
  “Save for later” is the consumer version of B2B decision paralysis—tons of options, no clear path, so the decision never gets made. (66:12)

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Closing Thoughts & Recommended Resources

• The seller’s new job is NOT to persuade on value or differentiate products alone, but to coach customers through their own “mess,” giving them the confidence to move forward.
• Best salespeople aren’t challengers, but framers—empowering, empathetic guides.
• Key phrase to implement now:
  “In working with other customers like you, one of the things we’ve been surprised to learn is…”

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Further Reading & Contact

• Book: The Frame Making Sale — www.theframingsale.com (audio version coming soon)
• LinkedIn: Brent Adamson is very active.
• YouTube: The Framing Sale channel and weekly “Frame Making Foundational” series

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For those in outside sales:
This episode is a masterclass in evolving your approach to focus on the critical lever of customer confidence. If you want more wins, fewer stalls—and happier customers—start applying these frame making strategies now.

Transcript

[A]

We agree you guys are going to save us a ton of money, but we've decided to go in a different direction. What happens when you wind up being your customer's number one choice to their number three? Problem is a painful place to be. Because when you find that out, you always find it out late.

[B]

This is Outside Sales Talk, the best podcast for outside salespeople. I'm your host, Steve Benson and we're here to chat with the world's top sales experts so that you can get their best sales tactics to level up your game. Welcome back to Outside Sales Talk. Today I have Brent Adamson and Carl Schmidt with us. They are co authors of the Frame Making sale. Sell More by Boosting Customer Confidence. Just came out in September 2025 and it's a groundbreaking, groundbreaking guide to boosting customer confidence in complex B2B sales, which most of us that listen to this podcast are in. B2B sales, outside sales in particular. They are renowned business strategists and researchers known for shaping modern sales thinking through data driven insights and practical frameworks. Former CEB and Gartner leaders who have advised Fortune 500 teams on commercial strategy, buyer enablement and decision confidence. Today we'll be discussing practices from Brent and Carl's new book. So first question, kind of a softball. How do you define frame making and how does it differ from traditional consultative or solution selling?

[A]

Cool. All right, well, let's jump in. Thanks, Steve. The word frame making itself came to me while I was out walking the dog. The because I was thinking a lot about how a lot of this stuff relates to the Challenger Sale, which is a book that we wrote back in 2011. So when we were at CB, we did a huge amount of research that led to the Challenger Sale, the Challenger Customer, a bunch of other research made into Harvard Business Review. And that work, of course has come to in many ways dominate what's going on or has gone on in B2B sales for a long time. And in the last, I think particularly Steve, last four or five years, some of the research that we were still doing at CB Gartner and then some of the work that Carl and I have done since then has really kind of indicated just a completely different sort of commercial reality, particularly on the buying side. Just B2B buying is very, very different today than it was 15 years ago when we wrote the Challenger Sale and when I was trying to think like, what's the distinction between what we've done and what we're doing? It's really this distinction between being frame breaking which is all about challengers. So going out and challenging customers thinking, showing new ways to think about their business and frame making. So frame making is this idea of if we. And what we need to circle back to this and unpack it. More detail I think. But if your starting point is customers are frankly just overwhelmed, B2B buyers and B2C buyers really. But we'll focus on B2B today when B2B buyers are just completely overwhelmed with too many just really the complexity of decision making, information overload, objective misalignment across their colleagues, outcome uncertainty. The real question becomes not how do I find another sales rep to show up and kind of tell me their features and benefits or show me yet another insight that's going to blow my mind and just make me even more confused. What customers really need is help. Help me just kind of sort through all this. Help me just someone. I almost need like a buying guide or a decision coach to kind of help me, walk me through this months long process of making these complex decisions with all these different stakeholders. And at the highest level that's what frame making really is. It's taking some of these big and hard and overwhelming and complex and just putting a framework around it. So imagine if I were to say, you know Steve, it's pretty overwhelming to make this decision about the CRM system. But what we found in working with other customers like you, it really comes down to probably three core questions, one of which you may not have about before. And we've learned this from watching other companies like you kind of go through this journey. So what I've just done is I've taken something as big and hard and complex. I've just, I haven't told you what to do. I haven't given you the answer, but I've put a frame around it such that you still have degrees of freedom to make decisions for yourself. Inside that frame we can talk about why that matters so much, but I've just made it feel so much more doable. So I've given you confidence, not so much in me, but confidence in yourself that yeah, maybe we actually can move forward with this decision.

[B]

This is really cool. So can you walk us through an example of what frame making looks like in a live sales conversation on something that we all know about. Like we all, we all have purchased a CRM in the past, for example. So walk me through the. Walk me through what this sounds like. I am a customer who's considering buying a CRM. I'm looking at Salesforce and HubSpot Monday And Zoho. And I'm, there's 72 of them and I'm, you know, I'm, and I'm, you know that, you know, you, maybe you sell one of them, maybe you sell implementation services around them. I'm not sure. But whatever you want but like help. Let's, let's run through a frame making and show people what that looks like.

[A]

Let me. Carl, maybe you do the Terror Story here, an example and just to give a perfect example of this, but the answer at the highest level. Steve. So we'll give you an example in just a minute. It's a really practical one, but two thoughts. First one is the first thing you have to kind of think through and all this is in the book and we walk through this in a lot of detail. But because there are different ways in which customers are struggling to make a decision so they lack self confidence across a number of dimensions. Whether it's just like how do I navigate this decision versus what questions should I even be asking versus how do I get aligned with my colleagues. Carl, I can share you with the story one just around this decision complex, like who do I need to get involved in what are the steps of the process. I think is a perfect example of what this looks like. And then what we'd also tell you is there can be sort of light versions of frame making, which is the one we'll share with you now, or there can be much more complex like think about like a maturity model or a diagnostic exercise. A lot of those take a decision and frame it and give you a structure to it. And that's a more, if you will, robust version of frame making. But Carl, tell us that the Terror Stories is a really good light version, which anybody can do, isn't it?

[C]

Yeah, it is. And it gets into a little bit of what you were talking about of someone, a buyer who's looking to acquire something that they haven't purchased before. Right. So they may not really know how to navigate a purchase in their own organization and certainly not this particular type of purchase. So a lot of questions, just about what questions they should be asking or who needs to be involved or what are the processes and procedures within their organization. And so that, that's all what we kind of roll into. This challenge of decision complexity is one of the really causes deals to stall. But in this particular example of, you know, the, the Terra story, let me just set it up quickly for you. This is a, a star seller off on a, you know, again, classic outside sales, going to see the client and her manager is along for the ride. And so it's.

[A]

We should preface this with. This is. This is a real story. This is just a hypothetical. This actually really happened. Sorry, Carl, I didn't mean to interrupt you.

[C]

Yeah, Brent likes to say, you know, most of his stories are true, and this one is. So I should have emphasized up front, this is what we all experience I don't know how many times in our careers. Right. But it has the added wrinkle of, you know, you're just not out there on your own in the rental car after having landed at the airport, you have your manager long as well. And so the two of them arrive at the client site and this is all again, shared with us from. By the manager and from his perspective. Um, but they get into the room and everything's starting off normally, and then all of a sudden a third person walks in, introduce themselves as being procurements. And the manager's reaction, again, this is a very. Not quite fsi, but very early in the. In the whole process. And the manager's like, holy cow, what's going on? Why is procurement here? But you know, Tara, the star seller who's running the. Running the show on this one, taking the lead, it doesn't miss a beat. Go through the meeting, everything goes smoothly, and by the end, the main point of contact and procurement are like, you know, they're comparing notes, they're talking about what should happen next. It's, it's, you know, it could really not have gone better. And so meeting ends. You know, the procurement is kind of laying out for the customer. Well, and here's how this needs to go again in the case of someone who hasn't tried to buy something similar before. And so they're back in the wrong car on the way to the airport to go home again. And the manager's like, wow, you handled that so well. I was just blown away when procurement walked in. But you literally didn't miss a beat. And Tara goes to her manager. Well, that's because I was expecting them to come because I actually had given a nudge to my main point of contact and encouraged them to invite procurement. And the manager's like, what? Why would you. And then she said, well, hold on a second. I've been on too many of these deals where I've invested months, quarters, even years, only for procurement to blow it up at the end. And so what I've come to realize, recognizing based on working with customers like this, that having procurement get involved early will do two things. One, if there is some pothole to be avoided, that procurement ultimately is going to cause this deal to die. If I'm going to lose, I want to lose early before I invest and waste a lot of time on a particular deal. But also, two, who knows better how to navigate a deal within a given organization than the folks in procurement? And so if someone's buying something new, like our solution that they maybe haven't worked through before, then this is an absolutely key resource that they can tap into. And so the manager's like, wow, that's just brilliant. And so then what came next is, and we're now doing this with every sales interaction is encouraging our customers again, because this is one seller came up with this brilliant idea and you see it wasn't, as Brent mentioned, this isn't some complex framework. This isn't a maturity model. All this is, is a simple suggestion, a nudge of what Tara observed working with customers like them, where she can help that customer buy a little better. And that's classic to frame making. How do you make something that feels hard, difficult, something that they really are going to struggle with, make it feel a little bit more manageable? In this case, it's just a very simple suggestion.

[B]

That's fantastic.

[A]

Okay. It's so simple, right? By the way, Steve, one of the things that really is helpful maybe to your listeners is like, why does any of this matter? So it feels like just, okay, that's a smart technique. But here's the urgency of why these kinds of sort of, if you will, interventions or coaching really helps is the heart and soul of this book. The frame making sale is a piece of data and it's a piece of data that we first generated with the teams at CEB Gartner trying to understand what ultimately are the things that need to happen inside a complex sale or a complex purchase to increase the likelihood of customer buying what we call a high quality, low regret purchase. That is what. So they don't settle for status quo, they don't settle for good enough, they don't settle for the small pilot, but they buy the bigger solution with the broader scope, the higher price point, and they feel good about it at the same time. That's like the holy grail or the unicorn that we're all trying to get after. And in studying this question for years, we kind of ran anything and everything we could. Whatever wasn't nailed down, we kind of stripped apart and ran through this statistical model trying to figure out, figure out what, what are the things needs to happen, increase a high quality, lower credit deal so we took Challenger apart, ran it through there. You know, selling skills, selling attributes, marketing attributes, customer buying configurations, you name it. The thing that popped in all that research, and it popped by far, like everything else, kind of like no effect or a little effect or maybe this is like challenging. I like this effect. And then there was something up here, like completely on a different planet in terms of its impact on this outcome that we all care about. And that was simply the degree to which customers report a high level of confidence in the decision that they're making on behalf of their company. We call this decision confidence. And when customers report a high degree of decision confidence, they're 10 times more likely, 10, not 10%, 10 times more likely to buy a high quality, low rigor purchase. It is like a wormhole to growth that we're all kind of looking for. And the reason why that matters is one we kind of already hinted at. Well, if so it becomes. Because the question becomes right. So what does that even mean? What does it mean to go to market, engage customers out in the field, on the phone, wherever you are, in such a way that we're specifically solving for their confidence. And oftentimes when we show this to CEOs, they'll say, yep, that's why we need to make them confident in our product, confident in our brand, confident in our people as trusted advisors, confident in our value because we're value selling. And yet, when you unpack this bar chart, as we have, and we do in the book, and you look at the sort of the attributes that make up decision confidence, it has nothing to do with any of those attributes at all. So what really makes up this idea of decision confidence? The single biggest driver of a high quality, lower critique is customers asking, how confident are we that we're even asking the right questions in the first place? How confident are we that we've done sufficient research? How confident are we that we thoroughly examined all the different alternatives? And all those things matter because every single one of them is supplier agnostic, not a single one of them is about. So here it is, the single biggest driver of a high quality, low regret deal. Your wormhole to growth. And not only is it not supplier centric, it's actually supplier agnostic. And the second thing is it turns out it's not like none of those are objective, like, which questions are the right ones? I think those are the right ones. You think those are the right ones. And so we debate about it. So you can't know any of these things. It's like, how much research is sufficient? I don't know. So when you pick this apart, you find these two really interesting elements. It turns out that the biggest driver of B2B buying isn't what you know because you can't know it. It's what you feel specifically do you feel confident? And second is not whether I feel confident in you, but feel confident in us. And this is, this is why Carl and I stopped everything to write the book is because it raises this really interesting question which is what does it look like to go to market to engage customers in such a way that we're solving not for their supplier perception, but for their self perception. This is just this massive opportunity that we're all walking past right now. And framemaking is an answer to that question. The Terra story being a perfect example of just like, how do I help this? In this case it was a head of hr. How do I help this head of HR feel more confident that they can navigate their own internal complexity by suggesting them, coaching them that maybe you want to get procurement involved early because we found with other customers that that's what actually will help you make this more effective, thus leaving that head of HR to feel more confident that maybe we actually can get this decision through. Who knew? So that's, that's the, that's the why now? And this is why all this stuff matters in the first place.

[B]

Yeah, I mean driving decision confidence. There's so much that touches that. Right. And I feel like that's a ton of what we're doing is as sellers is like, like one thing that we, we always do is we provide third party research. Because I, I can tell you that our product is the best product till I'm blue in the face. But like I'm obviously biased. Right. Like so, so you are. We, we, we've got, you know, we've got third party research plastered all over our webpage and you know, we, we're trying to, and, and, and I've actually, people have actually questioned like hey, why are you selling sending people to a resource that all your competitors are mentioned in and like it's a breakdown of the space. Aren't you worried you're creating a leak in the bucket here? And I'm like, yes, sure. Now it's, it's a great, I'm helping them discover everything about the space. But the, this analysis inherently says that we're awesome. And so, and, and, and we have competitors that are also very good in at certain things. And it's going to say that too. But do having them do all this research, I think I didn't, I couldn't have used the good wording that you guys use, but makes them more confident, makes them, it's compresses the sales cycle.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

Helps them understand. Yes, this is the exact area I wanted, I wanted this type of software. Not this slightly different, but kind of sounds the same software. And this, this is how I break them apart. But, and then when I'm looking at the space, these are the ones to look at. And I, I do want to boil it down to just these two and do a bake off and I'm going to pick the best one for me. And like, so I think, I think really what, you know, what I was doing there is driving consumer confidence. And that's one strategy. Just really educating the market and like be. And providing resources that nature. What other, what other things would you recommend to a seller to do? Like, you know, obviously you guys both or you guys are involved. We're involved with Gartner. I mean that's a big, big part of this is what they, they provide consumer confidence. G2, although I struggle with those platforms sometimes because they're just so noisy. Like you go to Gartner and they're like, oh, like, they're like, oh, Badger, that is field sales software. And there are 300 other types of field sales software. And I'm like, well, that's not very, that's not very helpful.

[A]

Like

[B]

really there are, you know, 70 different types of fields of software for field salespeople or more. I don't even know. And they could have broken it down that tightly. But that, that's not how they do it. And so that, I guess those platforms don't especially inspire consumer confidence to me.

[C]

But yeah, absolutely, you're absolutely right about that. And that's where the, the second of these challenges we talk about is this, this aspect of information overload and how we in sales can again help frame the both. How do we know? We've done enough research, how do we know, ask enough questions, when is enough enough? And how to break out of that, that cycle of analysis paralysis. And at the core of all that is something that's absolutely critical to everything we talk about in frame making, which is what we refer to as the frame making mindset, which is this core idea that the role of sales needs to be helping the customer make the best decision they can in as little time as possible. And some of what you were just sharing about making sure the customer sees, hey, here's some independent third party that evaluates the various Options and says some nice things about our competitors, but also highlights our strengths. So again, that differentiation can start happening to help the customer really figure out what actually matters. Amongst these three or four, all very great, successful companies that have a whole bunch of satisfied customers that each are clearly doing some things well, what's the thing that should really drive that decision for them? And the degree that we as sellers can help that customer appreciate that this is the thing that's going to matter for them, then turns the conversation from a oh, this is why I'm the best to this is what you need to think about to make the best choice for you. Right? And the sooner we can get that on the table, and this is where that last part of the, of the mindset is so critical. In as little time as possible, the sooner we all as sellers can help the customer make, ask those right questions and make that determination, then it not only tells the customer what their best answer is, it tells us if we really should be the right answer for them. Because if not, again, that's where we can speed up that disqualification cycle. Because much like Dara, if you're going to lose, we all want to lose faster, right? We don't want to be on the road wasting all those miles and hours, even weeks, months, years, spending time with someone that at the end of the day, you know what their best answer actually might have been? The other guy, or the status quo, or they don't have something in place yet that ultimately would make us the right answer, but they're not quite at the level of maturity to be ready for our solution at this time. Right. And so all that aspect of helping make the best decision to increase that decision confidence, but also make sure if that decision isn't going to go our way, we figure it out before we waste all the time. It's those two aspects make up what we call the frame making mindset, which is the core of everything we talk about in the book.

[B]

So I guess a lot of times people would say, oh, this sale is stalled or didn't close because, you know, we were too expensive or the, yeah, the product wasn't a fit. But I guess you guys are arguing that from the beginning it was just framed wrong. And if you had, if they, if someone had framed it correctly from the beginning, you could change the outcome of their opinion on things like price or product fit.

[A]

Well, yes and no, Steve, because I think a lot of people go there, particularly like leaders in value selling, for example. So you didn't frame your value correctly, you didn't tie it to an outcome they were trying to achieve. I would sort of. I think Carl and I would stipulate to a lot of that stuff right up front. But we're actually solving for a different problem here altogether, which, again, is not A. Because notice how all of those arguments, they still come back to they just don't understand us, they don't get us, they don't get our value. So all of which needs to be true. But we have this tendency, I think, in sales naturally, to think that our number one competitor is our competition. So somehow we've got to get our customers to agree that we're better, that brand A, us is better than brand B. And so we spend all of our time talking about, look, here's what we do, and here's how we're better. Here's how we're different, here's our differentiators. And what do you do when your customers look you in the eye and say, oh, we agree, you guys are absolutely our first choice, but we've decided to go in a different direction altogether? Or if it were just up to me, I'd make this decision. But it's not. And so, you know, it's like, I buy you today, right? So what we find is that many times what we're competing against is just the fact that customers are overwhelmed, they're confused, they're stuck. They don't know how to make progress on a decision, so they just choose not to choose altogether. And so then it becomes, if your number one competitor is status quo and you're losing deals, 40 to 60% of the deals are lost in no decision. Then the bigger question becomes, how do I just get more decisions happening, even if I just keep my share of the piece, but make the pie bigger by just driving effectively more commerce that becomes actually an incredibly powerful tool for driving growth. So then the question becomes, how do I help these customers? Not so much feel confident that we're delivering great value, but how do I help these customers feel confident they're even asking the right questions or headed down the right path or aren't going to just die on the vine? Let me give you an example CRM you mentioned before, we mentioned before. So I often do this exercise and I've done this all over the world over the years with now literally tens of thousands of people. And I'll ask them simply. And usually I'm talking to heads of sales and heads of marketing, but I'll ask them, I want you to take your sales hat off, your marketing hat off, and you'll totally get this given your position as a leader of your company and founder. But I'll say, all right, think about your own company and think about a purchase you've made in your own organization with your colleagues sometime over the last 12 to 18 months. Maybe it was capital equipment, maybe it was software, maybe it was a, I don't know, consulting engagement. But it's a larger scale purchase that you've made with your colleagues. Think about the people involved, the steps that you had to go through, the decisions you had to make, the budgets you had to kind of figure out. Now, if I were to ask you for one word, one adjective to describe that entire experience from end to end, what would that word be? Steve, what do you think they say? What are the words we're hearing when we ask those?

[B]

Complex lot of people hurting the cats. Decision makers in the room. I mean it's.

[A]

Well, I'll tell you, I've asked. It's no exaggeration because I did this on stages all over the world when I was still at Gartner even. But I've asked tens of thousands of people this question. I've yet to hear a positive word. Literally, right? So it's always long, hard, frustrating, awful people. They start dropping the F bomb. Someone said landmine. And I said, well that's not an adjective. And he said landmine, ish. So that became my word for the year. But you know, there's one CMO in Chicago who had recently bought a CRM system. And you know what her word was? Her word was I never want to do that again. It was all one word. It was all packed together. And you could see in her eyes that she legit never wanted to do that again. You could like she was reliving the pain of that, that decision as she, as we were going through this exercise. And it raises this really interesting question, which is what do you do when the first word your customers think about not in buying your solution, but just a solution like yours is, I never want to do that again. And it really raises interesting question, like to what degree are your sellers or you individually as a seller showing up and you are paying the price for your customers past bad decisions and bad decision making. And yet that's where we all are. Because the second thing I always ask these, these in these exercises, two question exercise. I'll ask them, right, how much of that pain, how much of that frustration, how much of that landminishness was specifically a result of the seller selling to you and how much it was just Your own company getting in its own way. And everybody says the same thing. No, it wasn't the seller, they were fine. It was just our own company. It was our decision making processes, it was our, you know, just everything. And because we're all convinced we work at the world's most dysfunctional company, I've become convinced we're all correct. We all do. I've worked at five different companies and every one of them is in the world's most dysfunctional company. They've all been different sizes because we're all human, right? And so the question then becomes, what if my bigger opportunity isn't to help them feel more confident in us, but to help them feel more confident that they can not only survive, but manage that mess that like, figure out which questions matter, figure out who should be involved, figure out the order of operations, make it through. Because here's one more example and this is where I think what you're doing on your website is really interesting. I can show you, I can have all sorts of customer testimonials. Heck, I can have raving fans, right? And I can show you the total. Like here's five different companies that have bought our software and had an incredible return. And then 12 months, they boosted CAGR by 12%. I can have bar charts, you know, graphs, all going up to the right. Say, look at all these other amazing companies that have great results. So you can too. What do you do when your customer looks at you and says, I believe you. And you're thinking, oh, glory be, I'm going to sell this thing. Go to Cancun. Right? But in fact, then they say, but you know, at our company we're just a little different. And while I believe these results for other organizations, I'm really worried about our ability in our context to get this right. Notice that has nothing to do, it's that you can't show them yet another raving fan to get them over the hump. You've got to help them figure out how they can be more confident in their ability to realize value. Not that others have already done it. And so again, that's where frame making can really become this really powerful tool to help coach customers through. Here's how other companies have not realized. Here's not the value other companies realize, but here's the steps other companies have gone on to make sure that they realize that value that will be applicable to you and the lessons that you learn. So again, it's all this idea of decision coaching and framing that helps customers come to their own Conclusions within a much more manageable space.

[B]

So you kind of highlight four major challenges that customers are facing or think about their organizations that like almost lower their organizational self confidence to get value out of things and make it feel like this is going to be a landmine. So decision complexity, information overload, objective misalignment, and just being uncertain that this is going to work? I guess, yeah. Is there one that you think is more paralyzing that you can kind of spend more time working on, or is it kind of all of them across the board that you need to raise someone's confidence in?

[A]

Carl, what would you say? I'd be interested to see if we'd say the same thing. But let's get Carl's thought. Carl, what do you think? Oh, you're on mute. Carl, you're on mute. You muted yourself. There you go.

[C]

Yeah, I'm sorry, my phone there.

[B]

Yeah, we're down one.

[A]

Carl, it's. It's bad mic day. This is what we'll fix in post.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll fix it later.

[A]

Oh, man, did your mic die completely? This is bad mic day. All right, well, let me. Carl, you futz with that. I'll take a stab at the answer. So you know the. So, Steve, you remember the old Jeff Foxworthy, the comedians bit about you might be a redneck if. Right. So the. This is.

[B]

My mother loves that guy.

[A]

It's one of these. Oh, this is so funny. This stuff was great. Particularly I'm from Nebraska, so I could totally relate to all of it. But the. But the point being, there's almost like a set of diagnostic exercises that you might lack confidence across decision complexity. If. So, in other words, in the book, we kind of go through sort of the symptoms or the signs to look for that indicate that customers are struggling across that single dimension or that particular dimension. It'd be easy for me to say all four matter and go after all four. But at the same time, it's like that's just overwhelming. And the workshops we've built, the answers for frame making kind of go from sort of introductory around this decision complexity, like the terror story. That's a relatively straightforward thing to do. Then you get into some of the stuff about outcome uncertainty. It gets into some pretty complex, advanced, sort of very, very powerful tools. So I would start with. Here's where I'd start with. This is actually super simple and it isn't specific to one of the four dimensions of struggle per se. But I would ask you, here's a great thing for any individual seller to do or a marketing or a, you know, sales leadership team to do is think about, think of. So if you, if you identify two or three of your customers, this is great. Something actually Steve, do this for you. This is great for you, for your company. If you think about two or three of your customers that have successfully navigated a purchase decision such that they've now bought your solution, hopefully they're happy with it, hopefully they're relasing value. But the thing that I want you to focus on is literally just who made it to the finish line, who made it to actually the purchase decision. And you sit down and it's almost like a win loss. But what you're asking them is if you think about the last 12, 18 months or whatever long your sales cycle is, if you think about the purchase decision that you had to go on with your colleagues to get you to the place where you managed to finally make this decision, if you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently to make your life a little bit easier? Or if you were to give any, if you were talking to a peer of yours who is about to go on the same journey to make a similar sort of decision, what advice would you give them to make their life a little bit easier? And I think what you're going to find is you're going to get some. You know what, I really wish we'd brought procurement in earlier. I really wish that we had actually calculated this or I really wish I'd looked at, oh, there's this one video that was so helpful and I found it late and if I'd found it sooner, it would have been so much more helpful. Whatever they say is going to be just a great indicator of the kind of support, the tactical framing that you could provide if you package it well against any one of those challenges. So I think what I would want to do is I would want to diagnose from a customer's perspective what are the sources that deteriorate or undermine their confidence the most. And it's going to be a little, there's going to be flavors of each of the four in any given company, in any given go to market model. But you want to identify the biggest point of pain essentially and then go after that first. That's how I think about it. And it might be a little different given the context of what you're selling

[C]

and how you're selling it and also how they're buying and whether they've bought a solution like this before. Right. Because again, the example we Gave from the Tara story or any of these that are such an emphasis on decision complexity are cases where, heck, if this customer hasn't bought something like this before or is new to role or new to the organization, then again, that just navigating who needs to even be involved in this, that can be the real challenge up front. While if it's something that is more of a repeat or renewal or those types of scenarios, then it may be very much more those questions around, well, how confident am I that I'm actually going to realize the outcomes I expect effect, and is there uncertainty around that outcome? So again, it will vary somewhat predictably based on the nature of what the customer has experienced and where they are in their buying journey. And so it's less about where is the single most, you know, most likely bet to play and more the being empathetic to where the customer is and where they're likely to struggle.

[B]

That makes a ton of sense. One question that I'll encourage my reps to ask early in the sales cycle, which I guess it's kind of to get at this sort of thing and solve this sort of problem, is because you can, you can pull it forward almost. Rather than ask people at the end, you can ask them at the beginning, hey, have you bought something like this before? And then with her, like, yes, it's like, okay, well, so in that process, who had to be involved? Did legal have to be involved? Did. Did I t have to be involved? Do you guys have a procurement team, you know, who did what. What did you buy before? Oh, it. And they're like, oh, if. If you sell software and there. And they bring up a, you know, a server, then you know that there you could, you could be barking up the wrong tree, right? It's like, well, that's not exactly the same thing, but the, you know, the. But I think a lot of times you can have a conversation with people and get them to visualize what this sales cycle is going to look like over the next six months and get them to kind of help you see around corners and at the same time help themselves see around corners.

[A]

You know, Steve, you can even have a little fun with. But what we're talking about here is really interesting to me in that, you know, I've sold many things and failed at selling many things. And I've been on even more in my role over the years, been on many, many, many sales calls where I'm sort of the subject matter expert, but I've watched all this unfold in so many different versions and there's this tendency that we have to run away from these kinds of things. Like, don't. I can't tell you how many times I've, like, been on a sales call and the ride along as the subject matter expert, the sales rep in the rented Ford Taurus in the parking lot out front will say, look at me. Say, whatever you do, don't bring this up. Because they don't agree on this thing. So don't bring it up. And what I learned the hard way over years and years of doing this is like, that's probably the first thing you want to bring up, right? It's like, you got to run right at this. So here's a fun way to do this, which is. I'm learning. Carl's never heard this. Kind of make it up as I go, but this is actually kind of. It's like you. I can imagine how fun version is. Maybe it's fun, maybe it's stupid as heck. But if you were to think of a continuum from 1 to 7, where 1 is buying our solution and 7 is poking your eye out with a dull, rusty butter knife, which of these things. Where are you on that scale? Are you closer to a 1? I'd rather buy a solution like this. Or are you more like a 6? Like, I'd rather like to do the I thing because this is like, literally like Carl's. Like Brent's losing his brain again, but which happens a lot. But the. The point is, I think you could run like, just how hard do you think this is going to be? You know, you could actually do some sort of fun assessment of customers confidence right now. You know, hey, I was talking, in working with other customers like you, when they buy software, they literally. Someone told me the other day, I never want to do that again. Is that kind of how you guys are feeling about it? You feel pretty good about this? And how can we help kind of think through the next steps inside your own organization? Those are the kinds of things. Again, maybe not the butter knife thing. That's. I kind of regret saying all that out loud. And we can fix that in post. But the. But the. But I think.

[B]

Oh, no, we're keeping that.

[A]

You got to keep that. Right. I know, but hopefully you get the broader point right, which is like, let's actually talk openly about, are you confident about your ability to make this decision? And if not, let's. Let's help you feel confident. I said, that's a seller. I want to talk to. I don't want to talk to a Seller who's going to tell me one more time about their total cost of ownership. I already got that off your fricking website.

[B]

Yeah, I think what you're saying super important and true for maybe not all products, but a lot of products and certainly ours. I mean, we, you know, like it's probably most, most technology products. It's like people are talking. The reason people are talking to one of our salespeople is they already know. This is interesting. They already know this pain point. They already know there's efficiencies to be had, etc. Like they, the reason they don't end up doing it is, is because it's too hard. They realize, oh, it's gonna, we're gonna have to talk to it. Oh, I can't stand that. Oh, this is just like that last time. It was torture. Like totally like. So I really think you're on to something. I, I haven't crystallized in my mind. Maybe I have to read a book, but I haven't crystallized in my mind yet. Like, you know, how do I, how do I take someone from who has low confidence and build them up to a higher confidence?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Tell me, how does frame making change the role of the seller? Tell me what new skills or mindsets are needed to do that.

[C]

Yeah. Here it'd be helpful to kind of start as to what are the things that, what are the levers that actually increase decision confidence? And this is where I have to give credit to Daniel Kahneman and especially his last book before he passed Noise, because the research, again from the neuroscience side about what it is that actually increases decision confidence. This is something that the academics in the psych world have been studying for a long time. And there's a number. But there's two that matter to us in sales because there's two that we can actually influence and the one is going to be immediately obvious to everyone and that just making it easier. Right. I don't know what B2B sales leader hasn't at some point run the how do we make it, you know, how do we make the customer's buying journey easier? Right. And often that ends up being more the buying from us journey, not the customer's own buying journey from their perspective. But that aspect of ease is largely appreciated. But it's critical and it's something we all have to be very aware of. It's the second piece that largely hasn't been discussed previously, or at least not as much as it should because of the impact it has, which is this aspect of agency we can't feel confident in a decision. If we don't feel that we have the agency, we don't have the ability to actually do something about it. Right. And that's really critical to all of this because one of the traps sellers can fall into, again with a goal of making it easier, you're saying, oh, don't worry, I've got this, I can take care of this for you. Here's the right answer. It's all those aspects of kind of trying to be prescriptive, taking control of the conversation in a way that again guides the customer to what that right answer should be. Based on my own expertise, right. I've been doing this for 30 years. Let me tell you what you want to do. Right? And all of that misses the point and fails to increase the customer's decision confidence because it's actually undermining their agency. It's you're doing it for them rather than you creating the structure, the framing that allows them to construct the knowledge for themselves, to create their own confidence, to do it on their own. And so that's where core of this mindset and so much of what we talk about in terms of how to actually engage the customer with this framing is all based on how do we structure it, how do we frame it in a way that helps the customer come to the decision on their own and feel confident that they gotten there in the right way.

[A]

In fact, it's kind of crazy, Steve, that actually shows up in the data when you adopt this sort of expert profile. So I've been doing this for 30 years. Here's what you need to do. You actually undermine customer self confidence rather than boost it, because you're solving for customers confidence even not for them. So mechanically, because we've talked about this sort of in the abstract, so very mechanically, what we do in the book is, and we try, by the way, so you can tell the book runs at this sort of high level, sort of of abstraction and big ideas that really we think are going to radically change the world of B2B commerce. And that's why we wrote the book. But we wanted to make sure that every seller out there could read the book or engage in workshops or whatever and say, all right, now I know what to do. So we get really deep into tactics in the book as well. And the way we think about the tactical side of this is sort of three steps. We call it the three E's, as in the letter E. There's establish, engage and execute. Not to get too wonky on this, but the first part is to kind of answer your question from a different perspective. Like how do I begin to engage in frame making is kind of what I was hinting at earlier is just to identify where do customers get stuck now? What are the things that undermine their confidence now? Whether it's around like I don't know how to navigate this decision, I'm just overwhelmed with way too much information or I just don't think we're functional in our organization to realize this value. Whatever it is, it's figuring out, so how have other customers. One of two things, how have other customers struggled with this same challenge? Or how have some customers overcome this challenge and figured out a way to, to make a decision despite that complexity? Because what you can then do is you essentially build out of that. You can build your framing and if you think of framing is a little too wonky, just think, build your coaching or your guidance, right? So and you could package that guidance as a tip like we saw in the Terra story or something much more robust like again a maturity model. But in this established portion, it's all figuring out what are customers missing about their own organization that if they knew would just help them feel more confident in themselves on that dimension in the next step, engage. We spent a lot of time on this and it's both research and school of hard knocks. It goes back to this expert point. What if rather than showing up and saying, I've been doing this for 30 years, here's what you need to do and solve for confidence in you. What if we leaned on the thing that Kahneman and Robert Cialdini, who wrote the book Influence Everyone should read. What if we rely on.

[B]

That's one of my favorites.

[A]

It's literally one of the best books ever written for business, right?

[B]

It's so powerful, particularly sales. I mean it's. I read it in business 100% life changing.

[A]

And what Cialdini talks about, among many other amazing things that are important things, is this idea of social proof, right? And when you think about, we've all experienced this with our customers, the number one thing that customers will say is what they really want is what other companies like them are doing. I imagine you see this with your customers too. And the thing is the reason why they want to know is because they don't know and they want to avoid the pitfalls and they want a short cycle learning. So how have other companies. So I'm not asking Steve, what would you do in this situation? I'm asking Steve, have you talked to other companies that have done this. And what that does is it shows you you have real value. Any seller has massive value they can bring to the table, even if they're relatively new in role, because they have access. It's not your expertise they're looking for, it's your access to other customers. And so that can all be captured in what we call the phrase that frames. And the phrase that frames goes something like this. And you can modify in all sorts of different ways. But, but in working with other customers like you, one of the things that we've been surprised to learn is so imagine in the Terra story and working with other customers like you, one of the things we've been surprised to learn is that actually if you bring in procurement early, it can actually save a huge amount of headaches down the road. And so I'm telling you, here's what you need to do. I'm seeing, here's what we've learned from others. So I'm adopting the role of a co learner rather than an expert. And I'm sort of collaboratively trying to figure this out with you. And I'm giving you the thing that you want, which is access to other customers like you and sort of their lessons learned. And then I'm leaving it up to you to make a decision whether you want to bring, I'm not saying you have to bring in procurement, it's kind of up to you. But here's what we've learned from others and boy, it could be apparently a really huge help. And then there's the I won't get into the execute too much more, but the execute is then how do I then move from one stakeholder to multiple stakeholders and then maintain that confidence over time you can get some really interesting tactics around things like customer verified outcomes and there's workshop alignment workshops and all sorts of things like that we talk about in the book. But, but the neat thing about all this is it starts out sounding very sort of abstract and big idea ish. And then you get in, it's like, oh no, there's like literally just legit brass tax. Just say these words, find these things out, ask these questions, deliver this value in a way that gets really practical

[B]

in this stuff in working with other customers like you is a great way to start a sentence. I mean it's just, it's like whenever you know something and you want to express it, framing it that way would be, would be helpful. One thing that also jumped to my mind, that is kind of a lesson that I wouldn't have necessarily expected was the importance of helping our customers, who are typically sales leadership, sales operations people, communicate with the folks who hold the purse strings, the cio, cp, cfo, etc, the CEO, whoever it is. It's like, because there are thousands of sales tools and like, you know, they, they've already bought 17 of them. And so when they're like, hey, I wanna, I wanna buy this for the sales team, the, the, you know, the people that hold the purse range. Like, what? Why? Another thing like what. We're so helping them. One thing that I've found helpful, and I guess this is an example of what people could also do, but you know, not a perfect parallel, but like things like this is we just have a spreadsheet on our website and it's when you hit the button for pricing, it also shows up like, download, I don't know exactly what it says, download a spreadsheet, an ROI spreadsheet. And literally we've just built a spreadsheet that they can just fill in like the number of sales reps they have and you know, how much the average sales rep costs, etc. And then it just spits up a number and they could change anything they wanted in it, but they, you can give that tool to that person who likes to think in that way and you're like, hey, look, this, this is going to pay for itself with this line item right here, which is a real cost. And that shows up on your, in your cost area right now. It's going to get paid for with that. All this other stuff is, is benefit. It's all, it's more sales, it says it's that. But giving them that tool, even though, I mean, it's not really a tool, it's, it's a stupid spreadsheet, right? It's just adding up the star spreadsheet, right? It adds up the benef. But doing things like that empowers the customer to deal with their own organization, which I think is a lot of what you guys are talking about right now.

[C]

It is. But I would highlight maybe an addition to that idea, which is often. I don't know how many RI calculators I've now reviewed over the years working with commercial leaders. And so often again, if we try and really be empathetic from the perspective of the customer that's trying to navigate this. The one thing I've heard from almost every customer that I've interviewed or talked to about this is like, well, we never believe the numbers, right? There's always a discount that we're trying to apply either because we don't trust the supplier, or we just, we're going to screw it up ourselves, right? There's something that we, we are the most dysfunctional company. And as such, you know, yeah, sure, a competent company or someone who knows what they're doing or whatever it may be, but we, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna find in some way to mess this up. And so the thing I would suggest, anyone who's, who's got this type of ROI solution is adding to it is a bit of a lens of segmenting the different types of customers that have had these experiences into those. And again, we all love to talk about the company where everything went perfectly and they took that ROI number and they got like 10x returns because they crushed it. We all love to talk about the best case scenarios, right? What we all fear and desperately avoid is where things went a little bit off the rails, right? It's like, where was the company that for whatever reason, the results weren't what we, what we all hoped for, but that's exactly what the customer cares about because it's their neck on the line at the end of the day, right? They're the one who are worried that if this doesn't, if, if I, if I sign off on this stuff, I'm the one advocating for it, it doesn't go well, am I out of a job if this blows up? And so what they want to hear about are the potholes, right? Where did this not go well for someone else? And then not only how do I help avoid those, but what do I do to get past them or how do I mitigate them, right? And so use that type of tool not only as a anchoring mechanism to help them appreciate, here's the value you're likely to receive, but also use it to have the conversation around. But here's where we've had customers that didn't quite get there, but this is why. And so this is what we're going to not only make you aware of where those pedals, where those potholes are, but here's how you avoid them, right? And so it becomes, again, a place where we can help guide and coach to help the customer really feel confident that, oh, yeah, not only are these guys helping me understand what I was involved when it comes to that realization of value and that outcome uncertainty. That fourth challenge we've talked about a few times in that final mile, which often can feel like it's a negotiation stage, this is really where they're fearing the unknown in many cases. And how do we make that unknown known? Through our work with other customers like them. And so again, it's that social proof. It's again, when we interviewed Cialdini years ago, again, this aspect of where it is that we can help a customer look around a corner and see the thing that they'll miss on their own by helping them appreciate what others like them have experienced. Incredibly powerful. So again, ROI calculator. I'm not saying it's a bad idea. What I'm suggesting is you really need to pair it with the second aspect of what are those bad outcomes look like, what causes them and how do we help the customer avoid it?

[A]

Here's a. Can I give you a scenario? Let me throw out a scenario where the ROI calculator maybe actually is a bad idea. So Carl, for what it's worth thinking about keeping track of home, which is maybe nobody, I don't know. But Carl just walked you through chapter six. Let me take you into chapter five. So this is objective misalignment. So I have now got the ROI calculation. I can show this thing pays for itself. I would imagine when your stakeholder, your main contact Steve looks at you and says, oh man, you're right, Steve, this thing pays for itself. It's like, I know, it's like, oh, I'm going to Cancun, man, because this thing's like amazing, right? But what happens is what happens when I take that now ROI calculator, I show it to my boss or maybe my boss's boss and show it it takes care, it pays for itself. Why would we not want to do this? Right? And I say, let me explain why we wouldn't want to do this. Because actually we have a completely different set of objectives that we're trying to shoot for at this company. And what that's going to be is maybe, you know, net positive in terms of return, but it's going to be a massive distraction and the opportunity cost of, to, of the time it takes to make. I'm sure you've had this has happened, right? I mean this has happened to all of us, which is really frustrating. So what you realize when it happens, it's exactly right. And it's so maddening because it's like you've just, they just looked you in the eye and said, I see the value. It was like this is a no brainer. And yet they can't. But if they're actually, if they're smart, frankly, and if they're strategic, they're thinking, I may still not want to show this to my boss. Because if I can't articulate why this is important not just in terms of roi, but why it's important in terms of strategic objectives, it's still me showing up in a way that's saying, I don't get it. So one of the things that we talk about in chapter five is aligning not on the value, but aligning on priorities. So we take this idea and break it into its five sort of components. We try not to give you too much detail because it's all overwhelming. We call this the objectives, tactics, results framework. And the whole idea is like anything that you're trying to do as a tactic, it ladders up to an objective. Why are we doing this? Because we're trying to make this happen. So we're trying to make this happen. Why are we doing that? Because that ladders up to someone else's objective. And you can kind of go up and down the organization in terms of objectives, beget, tactics beget, which become objectives themselves and so on. And so the question becomes, how can a seller work with a stakeholder maybe one or two levels down and help them understand not just the roi, but how this fits in to what the. Whether it's all the way up to CEO or the board, what the organization in a bigger picture is trying to accomplish. How does this objective fit into a higher order objective? Into a higher order objective. And so we talk about laddering a lot in the book and how you can move things up and down. And this becomes a really important point for the seller to essentially play coach, not just on, we're going to make you money. So this becomes a, this is, this is salespeople calling, saying, what's the name of this book again? I gotta buy it. That's what that was. But the, the, but the, this becomes this really practical tool of guiding your, your main point of contact to have the right kind of conversation with their boss or the boss's boss, such that they don't all agree that you've got, here's what'll happen. We agree you guys are gonna save us a ton of money, but we've decided to go in a different direction. Is what happens when you wind up being your customer's number one choice to their number three. Problem is, it becomes painful place to be. Because when you find that out, you always find it out late. You've spent a huge amount of money and put a massive number on this forecast thinking, we're going to win because they love us. It's like, no, they Love us. They're just trying to do something different. So I've got to align not just on our value. We've got to help them align on their objectives. And I think many of your stakeholders instinctively know this, and if you can't help them do that and they're nervous to do it on their own, they're not going to do it. So they'll look you in the eye and say, if it were just up to me, I'd buy it today. God, I hate that line. That's the worst. I can't tell you how many deals I've lost with someone. If we're just up to me,

[B]

or just up to me.

[A]

If we're just up to me.

[B]

So,

[C]

sorry. I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just realized that I actually have a sales call now in two minutes.

[A]

Go make some money.

[C]

So my apologies. Would it. Would it make sense for you and Brent to continue? Is that okay in my absence?

[B]

Yeah, that's just fine. I don't think anyone will cry. It'll be sad if they realize you're not here. But they're.

[C]

Brent's the entertainment half of this duo anyway, so absolutely. You've got. You're winning with. With friends, so apologies. I should have given the heads up.

[A]

Go make the money, Carl. Go make the money.

[B]

Go sell the stuff. Get them.

[C]

Yes. Thank you so much. It was so nice to meet you.

[B]

Nice to meet you, too,

[A]

but we've thrown a lot of ideas at you, Steve. You know, in some ways, it can be ironically overwhelming, which is exactly the point of. Of one of these things. But there's so much information out there, and customers just feel overwhelmed. And so, you know, on a podcast, we're just trying to dump a bunch of ideas on you. It's probably the worst thing you could do. So I think if I had to sum it all up, it just comes down to this very practical but very powerful question of what does it mean? Or what would it look like to engage customers in sales conversations such that our number one priority was solving not for their confidence in us, but instead their confidence in themselves? What would that look like? What would it sound like? Why would it matter? How would I do it? And at the highest level, that's what the book is really all about.

[B]

Yeah, it. I mean, it definitely resonates with me. I think, you know, everyone does think they're the most incompetent company, and. And if you can, if you help them understand and mitigate the risks that they're facing based on, you know, your experience with other customers, and you can help them. If you can map what your product does to their strategic objectives, that. That can really, you know, that it can make it. As you said. I loved your quote. If you. If you don't do these things, you end up being your customer's number one choice to their number three objective. And, yeah, that's. That's the most frustrating thing in the world. But I.

[A]

Well, the opportunity cost of that is huge. Right? Because it always feels so good. And we've all done this deal. I've done this deal. It feels great. Feels great, Feels great, feels amazing. Feels incredible. Oh, my God, they love me. I love them. And then it goes south. It's like, what happened? It's like, you know, it's kind of like dating in high school, right? It's like the one. Sometimes when someone looks at you, says, it's not you, it's me. It's. Sometimes they mean it. It actually is them. Do you know what I mean? And so how do we. How do we.

[B]

How do we help them?

[A]

Right? Makes me think, like, what, should I change my clothes? Should I shower more? Should I. You know, it's like, should I wear a cologne? It's like, you know, we kind of like, want to, like, have you not see my total cost of ownership? Have you not seen my lifetime value? It's like, no, no, it's me. It's like sometimes, like, well, let me help you work on you. Let me give you some guidance on you. I don't know if that will work in dating, but we do know It'll work in B2B commerce.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. And we certainly. I mean, as you. As you say that, like, things jump. Things jump to my mind that, like, you know, we often run into situations where it's just like, well, people are like this. This would be a great problem for us to solve. Our CRM is totally screwed up right now. All the data is messed up. We got to fix this, this, and this. And the same team that should be implementing this, and we think they should. They need to fix that first because that is. It's business that being where it's at right now, you know, to be deployed it wrong and then we used it wrong and then put the data in the wrong places. And fixing that is our number one priority. And then after we fix that, we can.

[A]

We could call me back in six months.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, but circle back. Yeah, let's circle back on that. But I would say that more often than not, it's like you call them again. In six months, they're like, oh, yeah, it's still a disaster. You're like, I think it's always gonna be a disaster.

[A]

Yeah, it's true. 100% true.

[B]

It's a Sisyphean challenge to unscrew the thing that you've already screwed up in that. In that regard.

[A]

Well, I find it endlessly interesting that again, every single day, we are struggling to sell more because of customers past bad decisions. Right? It's just that that is your number one competitor. It's your customer's fear of going down that painful path again, I don't want to do that again.

[B]

Industries and technology is certainly one of those. If you're selling, you know, rolled steel, it's probably less. Less. Less challenging in that regard.

[A]

Maybe, you know, I won't try to prove you wrong by going through industry by industry, but I think every industry has some version to this, Right? Because the reason why is because what we're talking about here is not a sales problem or a buying problem. We're talking about a human problem or at least a challenge, right? Which is in a world where we all feel so incredibly overwhelmed with just change, first of all. And everything's going on irrespective of what's going on in commerce, but even inside of commerce, which is like, all the different stakeholders that are now involved, all the different competing priorities, particularly in a world like AI now, where everything's changing so fast. So what seemed important six months ago feels like it's back burner now because we got to focus on this new thing, right? We've got all, you know, the different steps that we have to go through to make these decisions. And then we go out and like, let me just do a little bit of research. And within five, you know, like, it's so maddening where you just like any sort of, you know, search online gives you just an endless number of leads, and now you say, well, that's okay, I'll use AI. And then you put something in AI and you get an answer and you say, what if I change the prompt just like this, and you get a completely different answer, right? And then. And then you start digging in the answer you find. Half the time it's even not. It's not even correct. And it's like, well, that didn't help. So that's. At what point do you think, you know, I don't know what to do? And so everything just gets back burnered. Well, if someone could just show up in that moment and say, you know what? Let me See if I could just help you out that. As opposed to, let me tell you about my features. Like, imagine in that context, you show up and say, I'd like to tell you about my features and benefits and my lifetime value. It's like, no, no, I don't need that right now. That's not helpful. But if someone said, you know, what kind of. It's a little overwhelming. Let me see if I could help you out. That's a conversation I'd be at least willing to try to have, because show up with a little empathy. And it's like the heart and soul of this book is a very simple but powerful question, which is based on the Gartner data I was involved in right before I left, which is 75% of B2B buyers say they'd prefer to buy without ever talking to a sales rep at all, which is really scary. The question. We could debate that data point I have for years, but. And I think it's a really interesting conversation to have. But for me, the most interesting question is this. What would it take to be the one seller or sales team that customers actually do want to talk to? What would that look like? What would that sound like? How do I show up and be like, I don't like talking to salespeople. They're not helpful. But Steve. Steve's different. I'll talk to Steve. That's your opportunity with framemaking, we think, yeah, well.

[B]

And I am different. I really. Of course, you are a very special flower. I think asking people to make any change can be challenging in any industry. Right. Like, even if it's just the concept of change that is hard. Like in my rolled steel example, it could be something that you would think is kind of the same, whether you get it from company or company B. Something relatively commoditized. It's like, well, yeah, this sounds good, but any change is scary. You know, I could have a difficult time getting you into the procurement system. The product could be slightly different. Not fit in our fit on our machines just right.

[A]

Your delivery schedule's off. You don't have just in time supply chains. The hedging instruments you have on the financial side are different than the ones. So now I've got to realign my financing Again, you think, like, how hard this is why we all get frustrated, because you're literally thinking, like, how hard could this be? And then you're like, oh, actually, it's really hard. I didn't even think about all these things. Right. And so imagine someone said, you know what actually I know you're thinking about making the change. Here's what we've learned from other customers and working with other customers. Like, we found there's actually three things you want to focus on, and here they are. And if you can get these lined up, then, then this probably is a good decision for you. So thank you for the advice. That was so much helpful. More helpful.

[B]

Are there signs that you look for that a deal is going to slip in the future because of indecision as opposed to lack of interest? And what are those signs? What would. What would you look for?

[A]

I think it's, you know, in some ways, the signs are so many and so common that it's like literally every deal we're doing, right? It's like pulling in. Let me just talk to this person and this person and get their thoughts, but I'm not really sure where they stand on this. It's deals slipping in terms of time, customers disappearing on you, cycle times getting longer, which they all are. Customers asking, telling you, like, I was reading something else, and I've got a kind of different take on this now. And so they're kind of. If they seem to just be wandering around thinking about different challenges and different priorities and, like, just bringing up new concepts or issues or objections, that that is maybe not them doubting your. We think, oh, they doubt us. We got to talk more about us. It's like, maybe they're just like, wandering around in this endless learning journey and they can't get out of learning loops, and I just need to kind of help them short circuit that. In the book, we talk about the four worst words you can hear in sales. The four worst words you can hear in sales. This is somewhat tongue in cheek, but it's true, is when your customer calls you with the four worst words. So any sales conversation starts with the words. It turns out that, you know it's going south, right? So it's like a relationship. Conversation starts with we need to talk. It's, like, all downhill from there, right? So it turns out that procurement got involved and they had some questions. Turns out legal wants to look this over. It turns out our new CEO is the list of things it turns out to be are endless. What's interesting to me is when your customer calls and says it turns out that they're almost inevitably or genuinely surprised. Like, oh, we didn't see this coming. There's an obstacle we ran into we didn't anticipate. For me, the thing that's so interesting about that is more often than not, you Know who's not surprised? Is the seller selling to them? Oh, let me guess. Procurement isn't. I bet I can guess the three questions they're asking. And when you start looking at it from that angle, you realize actually there's a real asymmetry of information here. But it doesn't skew in the favor of the customer. It skews in the favor of sales, which is if they've seen this before and they've seen customers get stuck this way, rather than hoping it doesn't happen this time in wishful thinking, what if we ran? Instead of running away from it, run right at it and say, hey, just give you a heads up. Working with other customers like you, we've seen these decisions. You know, I know you and I are like this on value. You see the value, you want it. Here's where this could go south despite that and really frustrate, you know, I hate to see that happening. Work with other customers like you. Here's how they've managed to kind of get around that obstacle. Here's something you might want to consider. Thank you. You've been so helpful to me. That's the kind of thing that we're looking to create here. Is that kind of dynamic.

[B]

Yeah. Well, this is awesome. Next. Next part of the podcast, I'm gonna ask you quick questions, quick answers.

[A]

All right? Lightning round.

[B]

Lightning round. So what is a sign that you, as a seller, should be looking for, that you are adding confusion instead of clarity to a sales cycle?

[A]

It's a customer that comes back and asks the same set of questions over and over again or keeps adding new questions that they just. It feels like you're spinning the wheels. Like, if you find yourself. Here's. How about this? I'm making. By the way, I'm making this up as I go now. It's a really long bolt of lightning, but. But if you're thinking in your head, we talked about this. We talked about this. That would be a good litmus test, that they're at least spinning on information and that they can't seem to move forward and make a decision.

[B]

How do you think AI tools and the world of research at our fingertips is helping or hurting buyer confidence right now?

[A]

I think in a lot of ways it's hurting, but it feels like it's helping, and that's why it's actually particularly interesting. So, oh, I could just go to AI and ask Copilot or ChatGPT or whatever, and I get an answer and you say, ah, but I did this with human grade Dog food. The other day I decided I'm a horrible pet owner and I need to do better by my dog by getting human grade dog food. NAS ChatGPT actually was technically, I guess was co pilot but you know, put together an rfp. Tell me the four brands, tell me what's best, give me a recommendation, tell me the price structure, all of it, put it all on the table for me. I spoke to the table, show it to my wife and said, what do you think we should do? And she looked at I don't know, what do you think we should do? And I said, I don't know, what do you think we should should do? And G said I just wish we could talk to somebody. I wish we could talk to a couple other pet owners. And I think that's where. And it felt like I was making so much progress until by the way, that quite this is a true story and that piece of paper is still sitting on the counter in the kitchen. And it's like a month later and we still haven't either thrown it away or made a decision. Right. And so, but it felt at the moment like I was going to get all this information. I felt so empowered, Steve. Like I, like I was using A.I. look at me. And it's like. But I still don't feel any more confident. In fact, in some ways I feel less confident because now I don't know if I trust me and I don't know if I trust AI so I'm like double not trusting, you know, and

[B]

we are just kind of drowning in the details, right?

[A]

Totally.

[B]

We it. It unearths some of the complexity, whereas we'd almost be better, not better off not knowing. It'd be better if you just ask Google what's the best brand of dog food. And they were like, it's Kibbles and Bits. And you're like, thank you Google. And it's not true.

[A]

But see, but we don't do that. We say, are you sure? You know what I mean? That's what we do. And it's like, tell me more, tell me why did you ever do that thing where we talk about this? The book too, but do you ever go to Amazon to buy something you think is going to be relatively innocuous? I did this recently with a dongle. So I'm upgrading everything here. Now I need a USB C dongle. Okay, I need a dongle. It's like, I don't know, it's like seven, eight bucks. Probably gives a certain length, certain A to B or it's a USB A to USB C, whatever. So you put it in search and Amazon's like, hey, no problem. You're. There's 1500 examples. It's like, I don't need 1500, I need one. So now you feel a little overwhelmed, but that's okay because Amazon's got your back. So they say, well, here's Amazon's top choice, or here's customer's top pick. Okay, thank you. Gave me some guidance that was really helpful. So you go to customers, top pick or whatever, and you look there. It's like, okay, right length, right dimensions. I've never heard of this brand, but I guess it's okay and. All right, let's go. Let me just read the reviews, you know, five, 4.8 stars. Great, great, great, great. Let me just take a look at. Okay, let's buy this. Move on with my life. Actually, before I do, let me just take a.

[C]

At.

[A]

Look, look. Just quick look at a couple of these one star reviews. That's all weird. What's up with that? And you open up the one star reviews, like, do not buy. You'd be a chump to buy this. Broke instantly showed up damage like, oh my God. You kind of freak out and say, well, I can't buy that. Let me look at another one, right? And say, this one's got 4.78 stars. I think it's four hours later, it's

[B]

so easy to walk into a hardware store where they're like, they have one doorknob and you're like, and just buy

[A]

the freaking doorknob, right?

[B]

There were 1500 of them. It's. It's impossible.

[A]

And so now it's seven hours or four hours later on Amazon and you're still shopping for a fricking $7 dongle. And you're thinking like, and you don't hate Amazon, you hate yourself for not making the decision. What's interesting to me is again, it's a true story. So the Amazon has a button, and if you press that button, all the pain stops. And the button says, save for later. And if you press save for later, you don't get a dongle, but the pain stops and you can get your life back, right? And so my wife has 582 items saved for later in her Amazon account. So true story. It's 582 times relatively simple consumer purchases. Just stalled out because she just didn't feel completely confident in herself to just pull the trigger and not get, you know, make a bad decision. And you scale that up to B2B. And that's kind of where we are today. And this is why 40 to 60% deals end in no decision. It's because we're all engaged in something called maximizing, which is trying to get the perfect decision. And we're all effectively letting perfect be the enemy of the good. And we just don't decide. We choose not to choose.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And you just think, I wish, I wish someone could just help me with this. Like someone just freaking tell me what to do. And so then sales reps come and say, well, I'll tell you what to do. Buy my stuff. Right. It's like, well, no, that's not what I meant. And that's not super helpful anyway.

[B]

Well, at least in my industry, I do wonder why the, the G2s and the Gartners of the world don't do a, like a better job of researching it. And just like, because they could just look at the five things that are like me and be like, we looked at all five and like this one and this one are good. And these, this one's especially good at this is especially good at that. And I wouldn't bother with the other three. Like, it surprises me that no one like, because they do that. Like the New York Times bought that company that does that kind of on consumer products. You know, like you want to know how to buy a water bottle or, or a, whatever, you know, they'll, they'll, they'll. What is that company? The, the Cut wire cutter. And they just, they just tell you what headphones to buy. They're like, well, if you want, you know, an over ear headphone that does noise cancellation and has a mic, this is the one. And if you want the cheap one, we would recommend this one. If you want the really expensive one, we would recommend this one. So just kind of, they, they do it. No one's doing that for a lot of B2B products. I guess it's too niche.

[A]

But a seller could, and that's the opportunity. How could every single salesperson become like a little miniature Gartner or like a wire cutter? Right. And by the way, I mean having been at Gartner, I'm. The last thing I'm doing is throw them under the bus because I think it's a really good company in a lot of ways. It's really well run. But, but, but there's, you know, it has its limitations to that model of like the quadrants and like there's all sorts of perception issues that they're constantly battling about. You know, did they use the right framework, did they ask the right questions to determine what's. What does the top right quadrant even mean? Or like did someone. And the scary one, which I don't say the words out loud because we're trained like this whole pay to play thing. Right. Which is that's why those companies are just adamant about not allowing that perception to ever arise. But because that's then their toes most. Right. And yet people still whisper it. By the way, I've been inside this machine. This is absolutely not true. So I could say that with confidence. But, but I'll tell you, that's what keeps them up at night is even the perception of that because then the whole value thing kind of crumbles. But. And so I think that's where sellers also have this challenge with frame making is like, of course you're going to say that because you want to go to Cancun. It seems like I say Cancun a lot because that's where all the presence clubs want to go. Right.

[B]

But do you want to go to Cancun?

[A]

Because I've been to Cancun. You know, I speak at sales meetings a lot and so I've spoken to many sales meetings in Cancun and I'm okay, I'm, you know, it's Orlando, Scottsdale and Cancun and now Nashville is the one. Everyone's going to Nashville.

[B]

Yeah, that I choose Nashville or San Diego over Cancun.

[A]

Someone asked me last week if I want to speak their sales kickoff January something. I think it was like January 7th in Chicago. And I said, wow, do you have any idea how cold it is? And they said, yeah, we know, we're based here. And I said yeah, but they looked at me some. But it's really cheap.

[B]

We, we have, we have our kickoff at our, in our Spain offices and nice. It does make it cheaper because we've already got the offices and you know, the infrastructure and yeah, most people, you know, half the company lives here and so, you know, that does, that does.

[A]

Well, I do, I do birthday parties, sales kickoffs, bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, I'm, I travel. So if you want someone to come speak at your sales guy, just let me know.

[B]

Sales stuff. Seventh grade seven, seven year old birthday parties, whatever. I could do the balloons. I can do PowerPoint.

[A]

I could learn balloon animals. If that's what you need me to do. I will learn balloon animals. That's right.

[B]

All right, well, I'm going, I'm going to try to summarize Good luck. Yeah, right. I'm going to try to summarize what you taught us here. So first to zoom back, you're often not just competing with competitors, you're competing with the status quo and doing nothing. Nothing.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So when customers are overwhelmed with a big and complex decision, you can help them put a frame around it. As a salesperson, ask yourself, how do you make something that feels hard for your prospect a bit more manageable? So decision confidence isn't about their confidence in you, it's about their internal confidence, the confidence their organization and themselves can get this done. Customers often are often lacking confidence that they're asking the right questions, that they're looking at the right competitors, they're approaching the problem the correct way. So one of the roles of salespeople is to help the customer make the best decision in as little time as possible. And to do that, you have to help them understand what actually matters and also speed up their disqualification process. You want to talk openly about your buyer's ability to make these decisions and talk openly about your other customers who have been involved and who have had experiences and what worked, what didn't work. You want to diagnose which areas undermine your buyer's confidence the most. Out of all these. Out of all the areas, and then specifically go after those areas. Right. So you want to be empathetic as well to where your customers are right now in their buying process and their mindset and also where, you know, figure out and see around the corner of where they're going to struggle. So don't just tell customers how they can make a decision, but frame it in a way so that they feel like they have agency to actually do something about it. Work on decision coaching and help show the steps that other companies have gone through to make these decisions or similar decisions. You want to adopt the role of a co learner and use this phrase, this phrase, I love this phrase when you're framing things. So when working with customers like you, one thing we've learned is blah, blah, blah. Ask yourself, what would it look like to solve. What it looked like to solve your for your customers confidence in themselves versus your company, what could you do? What actions could you take to make them more confident in them? And keeping in mind everyone thinks that their company is the most incompetent. You could help them mitigate risks based on your experiences. You could map out your product to their strategic objectives. You could, you can, and this can be with any change. Right? Change is hard and, and you can help them through this, that's a, it's the, the. I have never heard anyone quite frame the challenges, this challenge of doing B2B sales, you know, in terms of customer confidence. But it really makes a lot of sense. This definitely resonates with me in a really cool way. So this has been fantastic. Skills, man.

[A]

That's amazing.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

You nailed it.

[B]

So thanks so much for coming.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

Where can people. Well, first of all, remind us about your book. Where can people buy it? Where can they read more about your work in general and how do they reach out to you?

[A]

So the book is called the Frame Making Sale. Every once in a while people think it's called the Frame Maker Sale, but there's a. That's actually, that's a 20 minute rant I won't go on. But it's frame making because we're talking about what we want you to do, not who we want you to be. But the Frame Making Sale is available@the framingsale.com that's at least there's more information there. It's available wherever you buy books. The audio version, because we get a lot of questions, I'll mention it real briefly, is being produced right now and will be out very, very soon. I am personally Carl, less so, but somewhat active on LinkedIn. I'm extremely active on LinkedIn. I kind of sleep there these days. We post a semi regular series on YouTube under the framing sale channel on YouTube where Carl and I unpack a lot of these ideas that we've mentioned here. And then I also do a weekly video series on both YouTube and LinkedIn called Framemaking Foundational where I unpack sort of five minute snippets of this kind of stuff. So LinkedIn, YouTube, the framing sale.com and just that's probably the easiest way to find us and get a hold of us, full stop. I give my email address and there's just one more thing for people to confuse me. So just, just send me a note on LinkedIn. It's probably the easiest thing to do.

[B]

Yeah. Awesome. Well, cool, Brent. This has been fantastic. If, if you work in the field, you'll love Badger Maps, the field sales and service app that helps you sell 20% more, drive 20% less. We have free [e-mail] I do really appreciate you coming on the show today, Brent. I really. These are some really cool, crazy great insights that I have. I've never heard anyone articulate before. This is, this is awesome. So if anyone can really appreciate it, any sales reps that would also benefit from learning these skills. Definitely forward this podcast to them so they can get exposed to these ideas, too. And awesome. Yeah, it's been great. Take care. Until. Till next time, everybody.