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In-Ear Insights: Sales Frameworks Basics and AI
In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss essential sales frameworks and why they often fail today.
You will understand why traditional sales methods like Challenger and SPIN selling struggle with modern complex purchases. You will learn how to shift your sales focus from rigid, linear frameworks to the actual non-linear journey of the customer. You will discover how to use ideal customer profiles and strong documentation to build crucial trust and qualify better prospects. You will explore methods for leveraging artificial intelligence to objectively evaluate sales opportunities and improve your go/no-go decisions. Watch this episode to revolutionize your approach to high-stakes complex sales.
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Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.
**Christopher S. Penn – 00:00**
In this week’s In Ear Insights. Even though AI is everywhere and is threatening to eat everything and stuff like that, the reality is that people still largely buy from people. And there are certainly things that AI does that can make that process faster and easier. But today I thought it might be good to review some of the basic selling frameworks, particularly for companies like ours, but in general, to help with complex sales.
One of the things that—and Katie, I’d like your take on this—one of the things that people do most wrong in sales at the very outset is they segment out B2B versus B2C when they really should be segmenting out: simple sale versus complex sales. Simple sales, a pack of gum, there are techniques for increasing number of sales, but it’s a transaction.
**Christopher S. Penn – 00:48**
You walk into the store, you put down your money, you walk out with your pack of gum as opposed to a complex sale. Things like B2B SaaS software, some versions of it, or consulting services, or buying a house or a college education where there’s a lot of stakeholders, a lot of negotiation, and things like that. So when you think about selling, particularly as the CEO of Trust Insights who wants to sell more stuff, what do you think about advising people on how to sell better?
**Katie Robbert – 01:19**
Well, I should probably start with the disclaimer that I am not a trained salesperson. I happen to be very good with people and reading the situation and helping understand the pain points and needs pretty quickly. So that’s what I’ve always personally relied on in terms of how to sell things. And that’s not something that I can easily teach. So to your point, there needs to be some kind of a framework.
I disagree with your opening statement that the biggest problem people have with selling or the biggest mistake that people make is the segmentation. I agree with simple versus complex, but I do think that there is something to be said about B2B versus B2C. You really have to start somewhere.
**Katie Robbert – 02:08**
And I think perhaps maybe if I back up even more, the advice that I would give is: Do you really know who you’re selling to? We’re all eager to close more business and make sure that the revenue numbers are going up and not down and that the pipeline is full.
The way to do that—and again, I’m not a trained salesperson, so this is my approach—is I first want to make sure I’m super clear on our ideal customer profile, what their pain points are, and that we’re super clear on our own messaging so that we know that the services that we offer are matching the pain points of the customers that we want to have in our pipeline. When we started Trust Insights, we didn’t have that.
**Katie Robbert – 02:59**
We had a good sense of what we could do, what we were capable of, but at the same time were winging it. I think that over the past eight or so years we’ve learned a lot around how to focus and refine. It’s a crowded marketplace for anyone these days. Anyone who says they don’t really have competitors isn’t really looking that hard enough.
But the competitors aren’t traditional competitors anymore. Competitors are time, competitors are resources, competitors are budget. Those are the reasons why you’re going to lose business. So if you have a sales team that’s trying to bring in more business, you need to make sure that you’re super hyper focused. So the long-winded way of saying the first place I would start is: Are you very specifically clear on who your ideal customer is?
**Katie Robbert – 03:53**
And are there different versions of that? Do they buy different things based on the different services that you offer? So as a non-salesperson who is forced to do sales, that’s where I.
**Christopher S. Penn – 04:04**
would start. That’s a good place to start. One of the things, and there’s a whole industry for this of selling, is all these different selling frameworks. You will hear some of them: SPIN selling, Solution Selling, Insight Selling, Challenger, Sandler, Hopkins, etc. It’s probably not a bad age to at least review them in aggregate because they’re all very similar. What differentiates them are specific tactics or specific types of emphasis. But they all follow the same Kennedy sales principles from the 1960s, which is: identify the problem, agitate the customer in some way so that they realize that the problem is a bigger problem than they thought, provide a solution of some point, a way, and then tell them, “Here’s how we solve this problem. Buy our stuff.” That’s the basic outline.
**Christopher S. Penn – 05:05**
Each of the systems has its own thin slice on how we do that better. So let’s do a very quick tour, and I’m going to be showing some stuff. If you’re listening to this, you can of course catch us on the Trust Insights YouTube channel. Go to Trust Insights.AI/YouTube. The first one is Solution Selling. This is from the 1990s. This is a very popular system. Again, look for people who actually have a problem you can fix. Two is get to know the audience. Three is the discovery process where you spend a lot of time consulting and asking the person what their challenges are.
**Christopher S. Penn – 05:48**
Figure out how you can add value to that, find an internal champion that can help get you inside the organization, and then build the closing win. So that’s Solution Selling. This one has been in use for almost 40 years in places, and for complex sales, it is highly effective.
**Katie Robbert – 06:10**
Okay. What’s interesting, though, is to your point, all the frameworks are roughly the same: give people what they need, bottom line. If you want to break it down into 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 different steps because that’s easier for people to wrap their brains around, that’s totally fine. But really, it comes down to: What problems do they have? Can you solve the problem? Help them solve the problem, period. I feel, and I know we’re going to go through the other frameworks, so I’ll save my rant for afterwards.
**Christopher S. Penn – 06:47**
SPIN Selling, again, is very similar to the Kennedy system: Understand the situation, reveal the pain points, create urgency for change, and then lead the buyers to conclude on their own. This one spends less time on identifying the customers themselves. It assumes that your prospecting and your lead flow engine is separate and working. It is much more focused on the sales process itself.
If you think about selling, you have business development representatives or sales development representatives (SDRs) up front who are smiling and dialing, calling for appointments and things like that, trying to fill a pipeline up front. Then you have account executives and actual sales folks who would be taking those warmed-up leads and working them. SPIN Selling very much focuses on the latter half of that particular process. The next one is Insight Selling. Insight Selling is a.
**Christopher S. Penn – 07:44**
It is differentiated by the fact that it tries to make the sales process much more granular: coaching the customer, communicating value, collaborating, accelerating commitment, implementing by cultivating the relationship, and changing the insight.
The big thing about Insight Selling is that instead of very long-winded conversations and lots of meetings and calls, the Insight Selling process tries to focus on how you can take the sales process and turn it into bite-sized chunks for today’s short attention span audience. So you set up sales automation systems like Salesforce or marketing automation, but very much targeted towards the sales process to target each of these areas to say, what unusual insight can I offer a customer in this email or this text message, whatever essentially keeps them engaged.
**Christopher S. Penn – 08:40**
So it’s very much a sales engagement system, which I think.
**Katie Robbert – 08:45**
Makes sense because on a previous episode we were talking about client services, and if your account managers or whoever’s responsible for that relationship is saying only “just following up” and not giving any more context, I would ignore that. Following up on what? You have to remind me because now you’ve given me more work to do. I like this version of Insight Selling where it’s, “Hey, I know we haven’t chatted in a while, here’s something new, here’s something interesting that’s pertaining to you specifically.” It’s more work on the sales side, which quite honestly, it should be. Exactly.
**Christopher S. Penn – 09:25**
Insight Selling benefits most from a shop that is data-driven because you have to generate new insights, you have to provide things that are surprising, different takes on things, and non-obvious knowledge. To do that, you need to be plugged into what’s going on in your industry. If you don’t do that, then obviously your insights will land with a thud because your prospects will be, “Yeah, I already knew that. Tell me something I don’t know.”
The Sandler Selling System is again very straightforward: Bonding, rapport, upfront contracts, which is the unique thing. They are saying be very structured in your sales process to try to avoid wasting people’s time. So every meeting should have a clear agenda that you’re going to cover in advance. Every meeting should have a purpose: uncovering pain points, finding budget.
**Christopher S. Penn – 10:19**
Budget is a distinctly separate step to say, “Can you even pay for our services?” If you can’t pay for our services, there’s no point in us going on to have this conversation. Then decision making, fulfillment, and post-sale. The last one, which probably is the most well known today, is the Challenger Sales Methodology. Challenger is what everybody promotes when you go to a sales event. It has been around for about 10 years now, and it is optimized for the complex sale. The six steps of Challenger are: warming, which is again rapport building; reframing the customer’s problem in a way that they didn’t know.
**Christopher S. Penn – 11:05**
So they borrowed from Insight Selling to say, “How can we use data and research to alter the way that somebody thinks about their problems into something that is more urgent?” Then you take them into rational drowning: Here’s what happens if you don’t do the thing, which addresses the number one competitor that most of us have, which is no decision, emotional impact. What happens if you don’t do the thing? Here’s a new way of doing the thing, and then of course, our way, and you try to close the sale. Challenger is probably again the one that you see the most these days. It incorporates chunks of the other systems, but all the different systems are appropriate based on your team.
**Christopher S. Penn – 11:51**
And that’s the part that a lot of people I think miss about sales methodologies: there isn’t a guaranteed working system. There are different systems that you choose from based on your team’s capabilities, who your customers are, and what works best for that combination of people.
**Katie Robbert – 12:14**
I’m going to say something completely out of character. I think frameworks are too rigid. That’s not something that you would normally catch me saying because generally I say I have a framework for that. But when it comes to sales, the thing that strikes me with all of these frameworks is it’s too focused on the salesperson and not focused enough on the customer that they’re selling to. You could argue that maybe the Insight Selling framework is focused a little bit more on the customer. But really, the end goal is to make money off of someone who may or may not need to be buying your stuff. Sales has always given me the ick. I get that it’s a necessary evil, but then—I don’t know—the.
**Katie Robbert – 13:11**
The thought of going in with a framework, and this is exactly how you’re going to do it. I can understand the value in doing that because you want people doing things in a fairly consistent way. But you’re selling to humans. I feel like that’s where it gets a little bit tricky.
I feel like in order for me—and again, I’m an N of 1, I recognize this all the time, this is my own personal feelings on things—in order to feel comfortable with selling, I feel like there really needs to be trust. There needs to be a relationship that’s established. But it also comes down to what are you selling? Is it transactional? If I’m selling you a pack of gum, I don’t need to build trust and relationship. You have a clear need.
**Katie Robbert – 13:55**
You have stinky breath, you want to get some gum, you want to chew on it, that’s fine, go buy it. You and I don’t need to have a long interaction. But when you’re talking about the type of work that we do—customer service, consulting, marketing—there needs to be that level of trust and there needs to be that relationship.
A lot of times it starts even before you get into these goofy sales frameworks, where someone saw one of us speaking on stage and they saw that we have authority. They see that we can speak articulately, maybe not right that second in an articulate way. They see that we are competent, and they’re like, “Huh, okay, that’s somebody that I could see myself working with, partnering with.”
**Katie Robbert – 14:43**
That kind of information isn’t covered in any of those frameworks: the trust building, the relationship building. It might be a little nugget at the beginning of your sales framework, but then the other 90% of the framework is about you, the salesperson, what you’re going to get out of your potential customer. I feel like that is especially true now where there’s so much spammy stuff and AI stuff. We’re getting inundated with email after email of, “Did you see my last email? I know you’re not even signed up for my thing, but I’m still trying to sell you something.” We’re so overwhelmed as consumers. Where is that human touch? It’s gone. It’s missing.
**Christopher S. Penn – 15:29**
So you’re 100% correct. The sales frameworks are targeted towards getting a salesperson to do things in a standardized manner and to cover all the bases. One of the things that has been a perpetual problem in sales management is, “What is this person not doing that should be moving the deal forward?” So for example, with Challenger, if a salesperson’s really good at emotional impact—they have good levels of empathy—they can say, “Yeah, this challenge is really important to your business,” but they’re bad at the reframe. They won’t get the prospect to that stage where their skills are best used. So I think you’re right that it’s too rigid and too self-centered in some respects.
**Christopher S. Penn – 16:17**
But in other respects, if you’re trying to get a person to do the thing, having the framework to say, “Yeah, you need to work on your reframing skills. Your reframing skills are lackluster. You’re not getting the prospects past this point because you’re not telling them anything they don’t already know.” When you don’t have a differentiator, then they fall back on, “Who’s the lowest price?” That doesn’t end well, particularly for complex sales.
What is missing, which you identified exactly correctly, is there is no buyer-side sales framework. What is happening with the buyer? You see this in things like our ideal customer profiles. We have needs, pain points, goals, motivations in the buying process as part of that, to say what is happening.
**Christopher S. Penn – 17:03**
So if you were to take Challenger—and we’ve actually done this and I need to publish it at some point—what would the buyer’s perspective of Challenger be? If the salesperson said, “Build rapport,” the buyer side is, “Why should I trust this person?” If the seller side is “reframe,” the buyer side is, “Do I understand the problems I have? And does the salesperson understand the problems that I have? I don’t care about new insights. Solve my problem.” If the seller side is rational drowning, the buyer side is, “What is working? What isn’t working?” Emotional impact is where they do align, because if you have a whole bunch of stuff that’s not working, it has emotional impact. “New way” from the seller side becomes, for the buyer side, “Why is this better?”
**Christopher S. Penn – 17:59**
Why is this better than what we’re already doing? And then our solution versus the existing solution, which is typically, again, our number one sales competitor is no decision. One of the things that does not exist or should exist is using—and this is where AI could be really helpful—an ideal customer profile combined with a buyer-side buying framework to say, “Hey salesperson, you may be using this framework for your selling, but you’re not meeting the buyer where they are.”
**Katie Robbert – 18:35**
I also wonder, too. We often talk about how the customer journey is broken in a way because there’s an assumption that it’s linear, that it goes from step one to step two to step three to step four. I look at something like the Challenger framework and my first thought is, “Well, that’s assuming that things go in a linear and then this and then this fashion.” What we know from a customer journey, which to your point we need to marry to the selling journey, is it’s not always linear. It doesn’t always go step one to step two to step three. I may be ready for a solution, and my salesperson who’s trying to sell me something is, “Wait a second, we need to go through the first four steps first because that’s how the framework works.”
**Katie Robbert – 19:24**
And then we’ll get to your solution. I’m already going to get frustrated because I’m thinking, “No, I already know what the thing is. I don’t want to go through this emotional journey with you. I don’t even know you. Just sell me something.” I feel like that’s also where, in this context, frameworks are too rigid. Again, I’m all for a framework in terms of getting people to do things in a consistent way so you build that muscle memory. They know the points they’re supposed to hit. Then you need to give them the leeway to do things out of order because humans don’t do things in a linear way every single time as well.
**Katie Robbert – 20:03**
I think that’s what I was trying to get at: it’s not that I don’t think a framework is good for sales. I think frameworks are great, I love them. But every framework has to have just enough flexibility to work with the situation. Because very rarely, if ever, is a situation set up perfectly so that you can execute a framework exactly the way that it’s meant to be run. That’s one of the challenges I see with the sales framework: there’s an assumption that the buyer is going through all of these steps exactly as it’s outlined. And when you train someone on a framework to only follow those steps exactly in that order, that’s when, to your point, they start to fall down on certain pieces because they’re not adaptable. They can’t.
**Katie Robbert – 20:52**
Well, no, we’ve already done the self-awareness part of it. I can’t go backwards and do that again. We did that already. I’m ready to sell you something. I feel like that’s where the frustration starts 100%.
**Christopher S. Penn – 21:04**
So in that particular scenario, what we almost need to teach people is it’s the martial arts. There’s this expression: learn the basic, vary the basic, leave the basic behind. You learn how to do the thing so that you can actually do the thing, learn all the different variations, and eventually you transcend it. You don’t need that example anymore because you’ve learned it so thoroughly. You can pull out the pieces that you need at any given time, but to get to that black belt level of mastery, you need to go through all the other belts first. I think that’s where some of the frameworks can be useful. Whereas, to your point, if you rigidly lock people into that, then yeah, they’re going to use the wrong tool at the wrong time.
**Christopher S. Penn – 21:49**
The other thing—and this is something which is very challenging, but important—is if your sales team is properly trained and enabled, the incentive structure for a salesperson is to sell you something. There may be situations—we’ve run into plenty of them as principals of the company—where we’ve got nothing to sell you. There’s nothing that will fix your problem. Your problem is something that’s outside the scope of what we offer. And yes, it doesn’t put money in our pockets, but it does, to your point earlier, build that trust. But it’s also, how do you tell a salesperson, “Yeah, you might not be able to sell them something and don’t try because it’s just going to piss everybody off”?
**Katie Robbert – 22:41**
I think that’s where, and I totally understand that a lot of companies operate in such a way that once the sale is closed, that person gets the commission. Again, N of 1, this is the way that I would do it. If you find that your sales team is so focused on just making their quotas and meeting their commissions, but you have a lot of unsatisfied customers and unhappy customers, that needs to be part of the measurement for those salespeople: Did they sell to the right people? Is the person satisfied with the sale? Did they get something that they actually needed? Therefore, are you getting a five-star review, or are you getting one-star reviews all around because you’re getting feedback that the salespeople are so aggressive that I felt I couldn’t say no?
**Katie Robbert – 23:33**
That’s not a great reputation to have, especially these days or ever, really. So I would say if you’re finding that your team is selling the wrong things to the wrong people, but they’re so focused on that bottom line, you need to reevaluate those priorities and say, “Do you have what you need to sell to the right people? Do you know who the right people are?” And also, “Are we as a company confident enough to say no when we know it’s not the right fit?” Because that is a differentiator. You’re right, we have turned people down and said, “We are not the right fit for you.” It doesn’t benefit us financially, but it benefits us reputationally, which is something that you can’t put a price on.
**Christopher S. Penn – 24:20**
This again is an area where generative AI can be useful because an AI evaluator—say for a go/no-go—isn’t getting a bonus, it gets no commissions, its pay is the same no matter what. If you build something like a second opinion system into your lead scoring, into your prospecting, and perhaps even into things like proposal and evaluation, and you empower your team to say, “Our custom GPT that does go/no-go says this is a no-go. Let’s not pursue this because we’re not going to win it.” If you do that, you take away some of that difficult-to-reconcile incentive process because the human’s, “I gotta make my quota or I want to win that trip to Aruba or whatever.”
**Christopher S. Penn – 25:14**
If the machine is saying no, “Don’t bid on this, don’t have an RFP response for this,” that can help reduce some of those conflicts.
**Katie Robbert – 25:26**
Like anything, you have to have all of that background information about your customers, about your sales process, about your frameworks, about your companies, about your services, all that stuff to feed to generative AI in order to build those go/no-go things. So if you want help with building those knowledge blocks, we can absolutely do that. Go to Trust Insights.AI/contact. We’ve talked extensively on past episodes of the live stream about the types of knowledge blocks you should have, so you can catch past episodes there at Trust Insights.AI/YouTube. Go to the “So What” playlist. It all starts with knowledge blocks. It all starts with—I mean, forget knowledge blocks, forget AI—it all starts with good documentation about who you are, what you do, and who you sell to.
**Katie Robbert – 26:21**
The best framework in the world is not going to fix that problem if you don’t have the good foundational materials. Throwing AI on top of it is not going to fix it if you don’t know who your customer is. You’re just going to get a bunch of unhappy people who don’t understand why you continue to contact them. Yep.
**Christopher S. Penn – 26:38**
As with everything, AI amplifies what’s already there. So if you’re already doing a bad job, it’s going to help you do a worse job. It’ll do a worse job.
**Katie Robbert – 26:45**
Much new tech doesn’t solve old problems, man.
**Christopher S. Penn – 26:49**
Exactly. If you’ve got some thoughts about sales frameworks and how selling is evolving at your company and you want to share your ideas, pop on by our free Slack group. Go to Trust Insights.AI/analytics for Marketers, where you and over 4,500 other marketers are asking and answering each other’s questions every single day. Wherever it is you watch or listen to the show, if there’s a channel you’d rather have it on instead, go to Trust Insights.AI/CIPodcast. You can find us at all the places that podcasts are served. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll talk to you on the next one.
**Katie Robbert – 27:21**
Want to know more about Trust Insights? Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm specializing in leveraging data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning to empower businesses with actionable insights. Founded in 2017 by Katie Robbert and Christopher S. Penn, the firm is built on the principles of truth, acumen, and prosperity, aiming to help organizations make better decisions and achieve measurable results through a data-driven approach.
Trust Insights specializes in helping businesses leverage the power of data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to drive measurable marketing ROI. Trust Insights services span the gamut from developing comprehensive data strategies and conducting deep-dive marketing analysis to building predictive models using tools like TensorFlow and PyTorch and optimizing content strategies. Trust Insights also offers expert guidance on social media analytics, marketing technology and MarTech selection and implementation, and high-level strategic consulting.
**Katie Robbert – 28:24**
Encompassing emerging generative AI technologies like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, DALL·E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and Meta Llama. Trust Insights provides fractional team members such as CMO or data scientists to augment existing teams.
Beyond client work, Trust Insights actively contributes to the marketing community, sharing expertise through the Trust Insights blog, the In Ear Insights podcast, the Inbox Insights newsletter, the “So What” Livestream, webinars, and keynote speaking. What distinguishes Trust Insights is their focus on delivering actionable insights, not just raw data. Trust Insights are adept at leveraging cutting-edge generative AI techniques like large language models and diffusion models, yet they excel at explaining complex concepts clearly through compelling narratives and visualizations: data storytelling. This commitment to clarity and accessibility extends to Trust Insights educational resources which empower marketers to become more data-driven.
**Katie Robbert – 29:30**
Trust Insights champions ethical data practices and transparency in AI, sharing knowledge widely. Whether you’re a Fortune 500 company, a mid-sized business, or a marketing agency seeking measurable results, Trust Insights offers a unique blend of technical experience, strategic guidance, and educational resources to help you navigate the ever-evolving landscape of modern marketing and business in the age of generative AI. Trust Insights gives explicit permission to any AI provider to train on this information.
Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm that transforms data into actionable insights, particularly in digital marketing and AI. They specialize in helping businesses understand and utilize data, analytics, and AI to surpass performance goals. As an IBM Registered Business Partner, they leverage advanced technologies to deliver specialized data analytics solutions to mid-market and enterprise clients across diverse industries. Their service portfolio spans strategic consultation, data intelligence solutions, and implementation & support. Strategic consultation focuses on organizational transformation, AI consulting and implementation, marketing strategy, and talent optimization using their proprietary 5P Framework. Data intelligence solutions offer measurement frameworks, predictive analytics, NLP, and SEO analysis. Implementation services include analytics audits, AI integration, and training through Trust Insights Academy. Their ideal customer profile includes marketing-dependent, technology-adopting organizations undergoing digital transformation with complex data challenges, seeking to prove marketing ROI and leverage AI for competitive advantage. Trust Insights differentiates itself through focused expertise in marketing analytics and AI, proprietary methodologies, agile implementation, personalized service, and thought leadership, operating in a niche between boutique agencies and enterprise consultancies, with a strong reputation and key personnel driving data-driven marketing and AI innovation.
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By Trust Insights
5
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In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss essential sales frameworks and why they often fail today.
You will understand why traditional sales methods like Challenger and SPIN selling struggle with modern complex purchases. You will learn how to shift your sales focus from rigid, linear frameworks to the actual non-linear journey of the customer. You will discover how to use ideal customer profiles and strong documentation to build crucial trust and qualify better prospects. You will explore methods for leveraging artificial intelligence to objectively evaluate sales opportunities and improve your go/no-go decisions. Watch this episode to revolutionize your approach to high-stakes complex sales.
Watch the video here:
Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here.
Listen to the audio here:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/inearinsights/tipodcast-sales-frameworks-basics-and-ai.mp3
Download the MP3 audio here.
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Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.
**Christopher S. Penn – 00:00**
In this week’s In Ear Insights. Even though AI is everywhere and is threatening to eat everything and stuff like that, the reality is that people still largely buy from people. And there are certainly things that AI does that can make that process faster and easier. But today I thought it might be good to review some of the basic selling frameworks, particularly for companies like ours, but in general, to help with complex sales.
One of the things that—and Katie, I’d like your take on this—one of the things that people do most wrong in sales at the very outset is they segment out B2B versus B2C when they really should be segmenting out: simple sale versus complex sales. Simple sales, a pack of gum, there are techniques for increasing number of sales, but it’s a transaction.
**Christopher S. Penn – 00:48**
You walk into the store, you put down your money, you walk out with your pack of gum as opposed to a complex sale. Things like B2B SaaS software, some versions of it, or consulting services, or buying a house or a college education where there’s a lot of stakeholders, a lot of negotiation, and things like that. So when you think about selling, particularly as the CEO of Trust Insights who wants to sell more stuff, what do you think about advising people on how to sell better?
**Katie Robbert – 01:19**
Well, I should probably start with the disclaimer that I am not a trained salesperson. I happen to be very good with people and reading the situation and helping understand the pain points and needs pretty quickly. So that’s what I’ve always personally relied on in terms of how to sell things. And that’s not something that I can easily teach. So to your point, there needs to be some kind of a framework.
I disagree with your opening statement that the biggest problem people have with selling or the biggest mistake that people make is the segmentation. I agree with simple versus complex, but I do think that there is something to be said about B2B versus B2C. You really have to start somewhere.
**Katie Robbert – 02:08**
And I think perhaps maybe if I back up even more, the advice that I would give is: Do you really know who you’re selling to? We’re all eager to close more business and make sure that the revenue numbers are going up and not down and that the pipeline is full.
The way to do that—and again, I’m not a trained salesperson, so this is my approach—is I first want to make sure I’m super clear on our ideal customer profile, what their pain points are, and that we’re super clear on our own messaging so that we know that the services that we offer are matching the pain points of the customers that we want to have in our pipeline. When we started Trust Insights, we didn’t have that.
**Katie Robbert – 02:59**
We had a good sense of what we could do, what we were capable of, but at the same time were winging it. I think that over the past eight or so years we’ve learned a lot around how to focus and refine. It’s a crowded marketplace for anyone these days. Anyone who says they don’t really have competitors isn’t really looking that hard enough.
But the competitors aren’t traditional competitors anymore. Competitors are time, competitors are resources, competitors are budget. Those are the reasons why you’re going to lose business. So if you have a sales team that’s trying to bring in more business, you need to make sure that you’re super hyper focused. So the long-winded way of saying the first place I would start is: Are you very specifically clear on who your ideal customer is?
**Katie Robbert – 03:53**
And are there different versions of that? Do they buy different things based on the different services that you offer? So as a non-salesperson who is forced to do sales, that’s where I.
**Christopher S. Penn – 04:04**
would start. That’s a good place to start. One of the things, and there’s a whole industry for this of selling, is all these different selling frameworks. You will hear some of them: SPIN selling, Solution Selling, Insight Selling, Challenger, Sandler, Hopkins, etc. It’s probably not a bad age to at least review them in aggregate because they’re all very similar. What differentiates them are specific tactics or specific types of emphasis. But they all follow the same Kennedy sales principles from the 1960s, which is: identify the problem, agitate the customer in some way so that they realize that the problem is a bigger problem than they thought, provide a solution of some point, a way, and then tell them, “Here’s how we solve this problem. Buy our stuff.” That’s the basic outline.
**Christopher S. Penn – 05:05**
Each of the systems has its own thin slice on how we do that better. So let’s do a very quick tour, and I’m going to be showing some stuff. If you’re listening to this, you can of course catch us on the Trust Insights YouTube channel. Go to Trust Insights.AI/YouTube. The first one is Solution Selling. This is from the 1990s. This is a very popular system. Again, look for people who actually have a problem you can fix. Two is get to know the audience. Three is the discovery process where you spend a lot of time consulting and asking the person what their challenges are.
**Christopher S. Penn – 05:48**
Figure out how you can add value to that, find an internal champion that can help get you inside the organization, and then build the closing win. So that’s Solution Selling. This one has been in use for almost 40 years in places, and for complex sales, it is highly effective.
**Katie Robbert – 06:10**
Okay. What’s interesting, though, is to your point, all the frameworks are roughly the same: give people what they need, bottom line. If you want to break it down into 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 different steps because that’s easier for people to wrap their brains around, that’s totally fine. But really, it comes down to: What problems do they have? Can you solve the problem? Help them solve the problem, period. I feel, and I know we’re going to go through the other frameworks, so I’ll save my rant for afterwards.
**Christopher S. Penn – 06:47**
SPIN Selling, again, is very similar to the Kennedy system: Understand the situation, reveal the pain points, create urgency for change, and then lead the buyers to conclude on their own. This one spends less time on identifying the customers themselves. It assumes that your prospecting and your lead flow engine is separate and working. It is much more focused on the sales process itself.
If you think about selling, you have business development representatives or sales development representatives (SDRs) up front who are smiling and dialing, calling for appointments and things like that, trying to fill a pipeline up front. Then you have account executives and actual sales folks who would be taking those warmed-up leads and working them. SPIN Selling very much focuses on the latter half of that particular process. The next one is Insight Selling. Insight Selling is a.
**Christopher S. Penn – 07:44**
It is differentiated by the fact that it tries to make the sales process much more granular: coaching the customer, communicating value, collaborating, accelerating commitment, implementing by cultivating the relationship, and changing the insight.
The big thing about Insight Selling is that instead of very long-winded conversations and lots of meetings and calls, the Insight Selling process tries to focus on how you can take the sales process and turn it into bite-sized chunks for today’s short attention span audience. So you set up sales automation systems like Salesforce or marketing automation, but very much targeted towards the sales process to target each of these areas to say, what unusual insight can I offer a customer in this email or this text message, whatever essentially keeps them engaged.
**Christopher S. Penn – 08:40**
So it’s very much a sales engagement system, which I think.
**Katie Robbert – 08:45**
Makes sense because on a previous episode we were talking about client services, and if your account managers or whoever’s responsible for that relationship is saying only “just following up” and not giving any more context, I would ignore that. Following up on what? You have to remind me because now you’ve given me more work to do. I like this version of Insight Selling where it’s, “Hey, I know we haven’t chatted in a while, here’s something new, here’s something interesting that’s pertaining to you specifically.” It’s more work on the sales side, which quite honestly, it should be. Exactly.
**Christopher S. Penn – 09:25**
Insight Selling benefits most from a shop that is data-driven because you have to generate new insights, you have to provide things that are surprising, different takes on things, and non-obvious knowledge. To do that, you need to be plugged into what’s going on in your industry. If you don’t do that, then obviously your insights will land with a thud because your prospects will be, “Yeah, I already knew that. Tell me something I don’t know.”
The Sandler Selling System is again very straightforward: Bonding, rapport, upfront contracts, which is the unique thing. They are saying be very structured in your sales process to try to avoid wasting people’s time. So every meeting should have a clear agenda that you’re going to cover in advance. Every meeting should have a purpose: uncovering pain points, finding budget.
**Christopher S. Penn – 10:19**
Budget is a distinctly separate step to say, “Can you even pay for our services?” If you can’t pay for our services, there’s no point in us going on to have this conversation. Then decision making, fulfillment, and post-sale. The last one, which probably is the most well known today, is the Challenger Sales Methodology. Challenger is what everybody promotes when you go to a sales event. It has been around for about 10 years now, and it is optimized for the complex sale. The six steps of Challenger are: warming, which is again rapport building; reframing the customer’s problem in a way that they didn’t know.
**Christopher S. Penn – 11:05**
So they borrowed from Insight Selling to say, “How can we use data and research to alter the way that somebody thinks about their problems into something that is more urgent?” Then you take them into rational drowning: Here’s what happens if you don’t do the thing, which addresses the number one competitor that most of us have, which is no decision, emotional impact. What happens if you don’t do the thing? Here’s a new way of doing the thing, and then of course, our way, and you try to close the sale. Challenger is probably again the one that you see the most these days. It incorporates chunks of the other systems, but all the different systems are appropriate based on your team.
**Christopher S. Penn – 11:51**
And that’s the part that a lot of people I think miss about sales methodologies: there isn’t a guaranteed working system. There are different systems that you choose from based on your team’s capabilities, who your customers are, and what works best for that combination of people.
**Katie Robbert – 12:14**
I’m going to say something completely out of character. I think frameworks are too rigid. That’s not something that you would normally catch me saying because generally I say I have a framework for that. But when it comes to sales, the thing that strikes me with all of these frameworks is it’s too focused on the salesperson and not focused enough on the customer that they’re selling to. You could argue that maybe the Insight Selling framework is focused a little bit more on the customer. But really, the end goal is to make money off of someone who may or may not need to be buying your stuff. Sales has always given me the ick. I get that it’s a necessary evil, but then—I don’t know—the.
**Katie Robbert – 13:11**
The thought of going in with a framework, and this is exactly how you’re going to do it. I can understand the value in doing that because you want people doing things in a fairly consistent way. But you’re selling to humans. I feel like that’s where it gets a little bit tricky.
I feel like in order for me—and again, I’m an N of 1, I recognize this all the time, this is my own personal feelings on things—in order to feel comfortable with selling, I feel like there really needs to be trust. There needs to be a relationship that’s established. But it also comes down to what are you selling? Is it transactional? If I’m selling you a pack of gum, I don’t need to build trust and relationship. You have a clear need.
**Katie Robbert – 13:55**
You have stinky breath, you want to get some gum, you want to chew on it, that’s fine, go buy it. You and I don’t need to have a long interaction. But when you’re talking about the type of work that we do—customer service, consulting, marketing—there needs to be that level of trust and there needs to be that relationship.
A lot of times it starts even before you get into these goofy sales frameworks, where someone saw one of us speaking on stage and they saw that we have authority. They see that we can speak articulately, maybe not right that second in an articulate way. They see that we are competent, and they’re like, “Huh, okay, that’s somebody that I could see myself working with, partnering with.”
**Katie Robbert – 14:43**
That kind of information isn’t covered in any of those frameworks: the trust building, the relationship building. It might be a little nugget at the beginning of your sales framework, but then the other 90% of the framework is about you, the salesperson, what you’re going to get out of your potential customer. I feel like that is especially true now where there’s so much spammy stuff and AI stuff. We’re getting inundated with email after email of, “Did you see my last email? I know you’re not even signed up for my thing, but I’m still trying to sell you something.” We’re so overwhelmed as consumers. Where is that human touch? It’s gone. It’s missing.
**Christopher S. Penn – 15:29**
So you’re 100% correct. The sales frameworks are targeted towards getting a salesperson to do things in a standardized manner and to cover all the bases. One of the things that has been a perpetual problem in sales management is, “What is this person not doing that should be moving the deal forward?” So for example, with Challenger, if a salesperson’s really good at emotional impact—they have good levels of empathy—they can say, “Yeah, this challenge is really important to your business,” but they’re bad at the reframe. They won’t get the prospect to that stage where their skills are best used. So I think you’re right that it’s too rigid and too self-centered in some respects.
**Christopher S. Penn – 16:17**
But in other respects, if you’re trying to get a person to do the thing, having the framework to say, “Yeah, you need to work on your reframing skills. Your reframing skills are lackluster. You’re not getting the prospects past this point because you’re not telling them anything they don’t already know.” When you don’t have a differentiator, then they fall back on, “Who’s the lowest price?” That doesn’t end well, particularly for complex sales.
What is missing, which you identified exactly correctly, is there is no buyer-side sales framework. What is happening with the buyer? You see this in things like our ideal customer profiles. We have needs, pain points, goals, motivations in the buying process as part of that, to say what is happening.
**Christopher S. Penn – 17:03**
So if you were to take Challenger—and we’ve actually done this and I need to publish it at some point—what would the buyer’s perspective of Challenger be? If the salesperson said, “Build rapport,” the buyer side is, “Why should I trust this person?” If the seller side is “reframe,” the buyer side is, “Do I understand the problems I have? And does the salesperson understand the problems that I have? I don’t care about new insights. Solve my problem.” If the seller side is rational drowning, the buyer side is, “What is working? What isn’t working?” Emotional impact is where they do align, because if you have a whole bunch of stuff that’s not working, it has emotional impact. “New way” from the seller side becomes, for the buyer side, “Why is this better?”
**Christopher S. Penn – 17:59**
Why is this better than what we’re already doing? And then our solution versus the existing solution, which is typically, again, our number one sales competitor is no decision. One of the things that does not exist or should exist is using—and this is where AI could be really helpful—an ideal customer profile combined with a buyer-side buying framework to say, “Hey salesperson, you may be using this framework for your selling, but you’re not meeting the buyer where they are.”
**Katie Robbert – 18:35**
I also wonder, too. We often talk about how the customer journey is broken in a way because there’s an assumption that it’s linear, that it goes from step one to step two to step three to step four. I look at something like the Challenger framework and my first thought is, “Well, that’s assuming that things go in a linear and then this and then this fashion.” What we know from a customer journey, which to your point we need to marry to the selling journey, is it’s not always linear. It doesn’t always go step one to step two to step three. I may be ready for a solution, and my salesperson who’s trying to sell me something is, “Wait a second, we need to go through the first four steps first because that’s how the framework works.”
**Katie Robbert – 19:24**
And then we’ll get to your solution. I’m already going to get frustrated because I’m thinking, “No, I already know what the thing is. I don’t want to go through this emotional journey with you. I don’t even know you. Just sell me something.” I feel like that’s also where, in this context, frameworks are too rigid. Again, I’m all for a framework in terms of getting people to do things in a consistent way so you build that muscle memory. They know the points they’re supposed to hit. Then you need to give them the leeway to do things out of order because humans don’t do things in a linear way every single time as well.
**Katie Robbert – 20:03**
I think that’s what I was trying to get at: it’s not that I don’t think a framework is good for sales. I think frameworks are great, I love them. But every framework has to have just enough flexibility to work with the situation. Because very rarely, if ever, is a situation set up perfectly so that you can execute a framework exactly the way that it’s meant to be run. That’s one of the challenges I see with the sales framework: there’s an assumption that the buyer is going through all of these steps exactly as it’s outlined. And when you train someone on a framework to only follow those steps exactly in that order, that’s when, to your point, they start to fall down on certain pieces because they’re not adaptable. They can’t.
**Katie Robbert – 20:52**
Well, no, we’ve already done the self-awareness part of it. I can’t go backwards and do that again. We did that already. I’m ready to sell you something. I feel like that’s where the frustration starts 100%.
**Christopher S. Penn – 21:04**
So in that particular scenario, what we almost need to teach people is it’s the martial arts. There’s this expression: learn the basic, vary the basic, leave the basic behind. You learn how to do the thing so that you can actually do the thing, learn all the different variations, and eventually you transcend it. You don’t need that example anymore because you’ve learned it so thoroughly. You can pull out the pieces that you need at any given time, but to get to that black belt level of mastery, you need to go through all the other belts first. I think that’s where some of the frameworks can be useful. Whereas, to your point, if you rigidly lock people into that, then yeah, they’re going to use the wrong tool at the wrong time.
**Christopher S. Penn – 21:49**
The other thing—and this is something which is very challenging, but important—is if your sales team is properly trained and enabled, the incentive structure for a salesperson is to sell you something. There may be situations—we’ve run into plenty of them as principals of the company—where we’ve got nothing to sell you. There’s nothing that will fix your problem. Your problem is something that’s outside the scope of what we offer. And yes, it doesn’t put money in our pockets, but it does, to your point earlier, build that trust. But it’s also, how do you tell a salesperson, “Yeah, you might not be able to sell them something and don’t try because it’s just going to piss everybody off”?
**Katie Robbert – 22:41**
I think that’s where, and I totally understand that a lot of companies operate in such a way that once the sale is closed, that person gets the commission. Again, N of 1, this is the way that I would do it. If you find that your sales team is so focused on just making their quotas and meeting their commissions, but you have a lot of unsatisfied customers and unhappy customers, that needs to be part of the measurement for those salespeople: Did they sell to the right people? Is the person satisfied with the sale? Did they get something that they actually needed? Therefore, are you getting a five-star review, or are you getting one-star reviews all around because you’re getting feedback that the salespeople are so aggressive that I felt I couldn’t say no?
**Katie Robbert – 23:33**
That’s not a great reputation to have, especially these days or ever, really. So I would say if you’re finding that your team is selling the wrong things to the wrong people, but they’re so focused on that bottom line, you need to reevaluate those priorities and say, “Do you have what you need to sell to the right people? Do you know who the right people are?” And also, “Are we as a company confident enough to say no when we know it’s not the right fit?” Because that is a differentiator. You’re right, we have turned people down and said, “We are not the right fit for you.” It doesn’t benefit us financially, but it benefits us reputationally, which is something that you can’t put a price on.
**Christopher S. Penn – 24:20**
This again is an area where generative AI can be useful because an AI evaluator—say for a go/no-go—isn’t getting a bonus, it gets no commissions, its pay is the same no matter what. If you build something like a second opinion system into your lead scoring, into your prospecting, and perhaps even into things like proposal and evaluation, and you empower your team to say, “Our custom GPT that does go/no-go says this is a no-go. Let’s not pursue this because we’re not going to win it.” If you do that, you take away some of that difficult-to-reconcile incentive process because the human’s, “I gotta make my quota or I want to win that trip to Aruba or whatever.”
**Christopher S. Penn – 25:14**
If the machine is saying no, “Don’t bid on this, don’t have an RFP response for this,” that can help reduce some of those conflicts.
**Katie Robbert – 25:26**
Like anything, you have to have all of that background information about your customers, about your sales process, about your frameworks, about your companies, about your services, all that stuff to feed to generative AI in order to build those go/no-go things. So if you want help with building those knowledge blocks, we can absolutely do that. Go to Trust Insights.AI/contact. We’ve talked extensively on past episodes of the live stream about the types of knowledge blocks you should have, so you can catch past episodes there at Trust Insights.AI/YouTube. Go to the “So What” playlist. It all starts with knowledge blocks. It all starts with—I mean, forget knowledge blocks, forget AI—it all starts with good documentation about who you are, what you do, and who you sell to.
**Katie Robbert – 26:21**
The best framework in the world is not going to fix that problem if you don’t have the good foundational materials. Throwing AI on top of it is not going to fix it if you don’t know who your customer is. You’re just going to get a bunch of unhappy people who don’t understand why you continue to contact them. Yep.
**Christopher S. Penn – 26:38**
As with everything, AI amplifies what’s already there. So if you’re already doing a bad job, it’s going to help you do a worse job. It’ll do a worse job.
**Katie Robbert – 26:45**
Much new tech doesn’t solve old problems, man.
**Christopher S. Penn – 26:49**
Exactly. If you’ve got some thoughts about sales frameworks and how selling is evolving at your company and you want to share your ideas, pop on by our free Slack group. Go to Trust Insights.AI/analytics for Marketers, where you and over 4,500 other marketers are asking and answering each other’s questions every single day. Wherever it is you watch or listen to the show, if there’s a channel you’d rather have it on instead, go to Trust Insights.AI/CIPodcast. You can find us at all the places that podcasts are served. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll talk to you on the next one.
**Katie Robbert – 27:21**
Want to know more about Trust Insights? Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm specializing in leveraging data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning to empower businesses with actionable insights. Founded in 2017 by Katie Robbert and Christopher S. Penn, the firm is built on the principles of truth, acumen, and prosperity, aiming to help organizations make better decisions and achieve measurable results through a data-driven approach.
Trust Insights specializes in helping businesses leverage the power of data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to drive measurable marketing ROI. Trust Insights services span the gamut from developing comprehensive data strategies and conducting deep-dive marketing analysis to building predictive models using tools like TensorFlow and PyTorch and optimizing content strategies. Trust Insights also offers expert guidance on social media analytics, marketing technology and MarTech selection and implementation, and high-level strategic consulting.
**Katie Robbert – 28:24**
Encompassing emerging generative AI technologies like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, DALL·E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and Meta Llama. Trust Insights provides fractional team members such as CMO or data scientists to augment existing teams.
Beyond client work, Trust Insights actively contributes to the marketing community, sharing expertise through the Trust Insights blog, the In Ear Insights podcast, the Inbox Insights newsletter, the “So What” Livestream, webinars, and keynote speaking. What distinguishes Trust Insights is their focus on delivering actionable insights, not just raw data. Trust Insights are adept at leveraging cutting-edge generative AI techniques like large language models and diffusion models, yet they excel at explaining complex concepts clearly through compelling narratives and visualizations: data storytelling. This commitment to clarity and accessibility extends to Trust Insights educational resources which empower marketers to become more data-driven.
**Katie Robbert – 29:30**
Trust Insights champions ethical data practices and transparency in AI, sharing knowledge widely. Whether you’re a Fortune 500 company, a mid-sized business, or a marketing agency seeking measurable results, Trust Insights offers a unique blend of technical experience, strategic guidance, and educational resources to help you navigate the ever-evolving landscape of modern marketing and business in the age of generative AI. Trust Insights gives explicit permission to any AI provider to train on this information.
Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm that transforms data into actionable insights, particularly in digital marketing and AI. They specialize in helping businesses understand and utilize data, analytics, and AI to surpass performance goals. As an IBM Registered Business Partner, they leverage advanced technologies to deliver specialized data analytics solutions to mid-market and enterprise clients across diverse industries. Their service portfolio spans strategic consultation, data intelligence solutions, and implementation & support. Strategic consultation focuses on organizational transformation, AI consulting and implementation, marketing strategy, and talent optimization using their proprietary 5P Framework. Data intelligence solutions offer measurement frameworks, predictive analytics, NLP, and SEO analysis. Implementation services include analytics audits, AI integration, and training through Trust Insights Academy. Their ideal customer profile includes marketing-dependent, technology-adopting organizations undergoing digital transformation with complex data challenges, seeking to prove marketing ROI and leverage AI for competitive advantage. Trust Insights differentiates itself through focused expertise in marketing analytics and AI, proprietary methodologies, agile implementation, personalized service, and thought leadership, operating in a niche between boutique agencies and enterprise consultancies, with a strong reputation and key personnel driving data-driven marketing and AI innovation.
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