If you’ve been in sales for any length of time, you’ve likely experienced this situation. The demo went well. The prospect seemed engaged. They said they’d think about it.
And then… silence.
Or maybe you did close them and then they disappeared. No referrals, no renewal, no comeback. They used it, but it didn’t solve the problem they actually had.
What most salespeople do in this scenario is respond to this by doing more of the same, just harder.
More calls, better pitches, tighter scripts. But what if the problem isn’t your effort?
What if it’s the lens you’re selling through?
When Greg and I wrote Demand-Side Sales, the question that started the whole thing was a strange one: why are there no sales professors?
Think about that. Sales is one of the hardest things any business has to do, and yet nobody is formally teaching the underlying science of how people actually decide to buy. Instead, we get training built on psychology tricks and product scripts and then we wonder why close rates stay low.
The shift I had to make was realizing that: I don’t need to sell my product. I need to help people buy it.
That sounds simple, but i’s not. Because helping someone buy something requires you to understand what they’re actually trying to get done, not what you think they should want.
This article is available as a podcast, reframing the sales process.
The lens most salespeople are looking through
Most salespeople look at the world through their product first.
They understand their features deeply. They can handle objections in their sleep. And then they look outward from all of that and ask: who needs this? Who should buy it?
The problem is that this approach has the lens backwards.
When you lead with the product, you inevitably start presenting features and benefits that your prospect doesn’t actually care about. And every time you name a feature they’re not ready for, you don’t help them, you create a new question mark or hesitation in their head.
Do this, and you’re not moving them forward; you’re pulling them back.I’ve watched salespeople stack feature after feature in a pitch and then wonder why the prospect starts negotiating on price. It’s because they’ve just told that person five things they don’t need, and the prospect is now trying to subtract them out mentally.
That’s not a buying conversation, is it? It’s a stalemate.
What people are actually doing when they decide to buy
There’s a framework for this, and once you see it you can’t unsee it.
When someone buys something – anything – they’re trying to make a specific kind of progress. Not progress in the vague motivational sense. Progress in a very particular way: they’re in a situation that’s not working, or not working well enough, and they’re trying to get to a new state where it does.
That progress is never a single thing. It’s a system.
There’s a push – the frustration or pain that’s making them want to change something.
There’s a pull – the picture they have in their head of what things look like on the other side.
But then there are also the forces working against change: the anxieties about the new thing (what if it doesn’t work? what if it’s complicated? what if I look bad for choosing it?), and the habits that make doing nothing feel easier than doing something.
Learn more about this system and how to sync selling to the way people buy.
Most sales pitches try to amplify the pull while ignoring the anxieties and the habits. That’s why prospects go quiet. Not because they weren’t interested, but because you left their hesitation unaddressed.
You got to yes before they were ready.
Which brings me to something that surprises a lot of salespeople when I say it: the no is more important than the yes.
Learn to love the no
Every salesperson is trained to get to yes as fast as possible. We’re eager, almost like kids wanting approval. But when you really understand how people make decisions, you realize they eliminate things before they choose anything. They’re looking for reasons to say no before they can comfortably say yes.
The no’s are what shape the playing field. They tell you where the real concerns are, where the anxieties live, where the habit of staying put feels safer than moving forward. Once you understand that, you can work with it.
That’s why I say selling, done properly, requires you to be something close to a therapist. You have to understand what progress the buyer actually wants to make – not the progress you’ve decided your product delivers. And often, especially in b2b situations, the buyer and the user aren’t the same person.
They want different things. And part of your job is helping them get aligned.
The framework is real, but it requires real work
There’s a reason I’m reluctant to offer shortcuts on this. Greg and I have tried shortcuts. They don’t work.
The foundation of selling this way is understanding, at a genuine level, what your customer is struggling with, divorced from your product entirely. That is genuinely hard.
Peter Drucker said that what companies think they know about why their customers buy is mostly wrong. In my experience, that’s not an exaggeration.
If you can do that work – really understand the struggling moment your customer is in, the progress they’re trying to make, the tradeoffs they’re weighing – your sales process changes completely. Getting past gatekeepers gets easier, because you’re talking about their problems, not your product.
Pitches land better, because you’re only surfacing the things that matter to this person in this situation. And the customers you close? They actually use what you sold them, get the outcome they were looking for, and come back.
That last part is the real test. Closing a deal is easy compared to closing the right deal. The right deal is one where the customer makes the progress they were hiring you to help them make.
When that happens, you don’t have to chase the next sale nearly as hard. It comes to you.