Why Sales Needs Framemakers to Drive Strategic Value

Sales isn’t just revenue. The hidden value of Sales lies in its ability to shape decisions, reduce complexity, and strengthen relationships across the business. Today, buyers are overwhelmed by options, misaligned internally, and hesitant to move forward. What if Sales could solve that not by proving supplier credibility, but by boosting customer self-confidence? This shift turns Sales into a true business driver and a collaborative partner in strategy.

Join us as we address question like -

* How do I shift from a revenue-driving focus to one of providing strategic value?

* Why should Sales be seen as a business partner, not just a deal-maker?

* How do I help customers build confidence in their own decisions?

* What hidden value does Sales create beyond numbers on a spreadsheet?

Brent Adamson is a globally recognized researcher, author, and keynote speaker who has shaped the way Sales leaders think about customer engagement. As co-author of “The Challenger Sale” and “The Challenger Customer,” Brent has spent two decades uncovering what truly drives commercial success. And now with his new book “The Framemaking Sale”, he is redefining Sales as a strategic business partner.

Join us live and be part of the conversation.

This week's Guest was -

• Brent Adamson, globally recognized researcher, author, and keynote speaker. Co-author of “The Challenger Sale”, “The Challenger Customer,” and “The Framemaking Sale”

This week's Host was -

• Rob Durant, CEO of US Operations at The Institute of Sales Professionals

Transcript of SalesTV.live Mid-Day Edition 2025-10-07

Rob Durant [00:00:01]:

Good morning, good afternoon and good day wherever you may be. Joining us from. Welcome to another edition of SalesTV Live. Today we're exploring why sales needs frame makers to drive strategic value. We're joined by Brent Adamson, co author of the Challenger Sale and the Challenger Customer. Brent has spent two decades uncovering what truly drives commercial success. And now with his new book, the Frame Making Sale, he is redefining sales as a strategic business initiative. Brent, welcome.

Brent Adamson [00:00:39]:

Thanks, Rob. It's great to be with you live and everything. So let's hope we don't turn this up. Whatever.

Rob Durant [00:00:45]:

It's not like anybody's watching.

Brent Adamson [00:00:49]:

Threes of people, but whatever happens here, we, we can't fix it in post. So there you go.

Rob Durant [00:00:54]:

That's right.

Brent Adamson [00:00:55]:

It's great to see you.

Rob Durant [00:00:56]:

Good to see you again. So, Brent, let's jump right into it. As a salesperson, how do I shift from a revenue driving focus to one of providing strategic value to my customers?

Brent Adamson [00:01:11]:

So in some ways it's kind of a false dichotomy, isn't it, Rob? Because I don't think you should ever shift focus from driving revenue for your company to sales because that is quite literally your job, right? And that's what we in sales get paid to do. Whether you're a frontline seller, a force line sales manager, all the way up to a CRO, the question becomes not so much whether that should be my goal or not. The question is how do I best achieve that goal, right? So if we are looking to drive more revenue for our company, that means, ergo that we need to drive more sales, which ergo means we need to drive more purchases. And so once you start kind of laying out that sort of logical line, then it becomes really interesting to ask the question, right, so what do I need to do to increase the likelihood of customers buying something and then ultimately specifically buying it from me? But the thing that's really interesting today and let's, you know, I, you, you kind of wound me up so I could just go for 15 minutes, but I'll just stop and let you dive in and ask me like where you want to go, Rob, because I think it's super interesting. But the, the question, because the thing that's really the context of today and much of the book of the frame making sale is a B2B. Buying frankly is broken and customers are really struggling and unless we can help them figure out how to buy more effectively, we're not going to sell, sell more, we're not going to sell more. So I don't see them as. And ultimately where we get there is.

Brent Adamson [00:02:25]:

And the way to help them buy is this idea of a strategic partner sort of thing, which we can unpack a little bit. But I see them as kind of the same question, which I think is a really important point to make. Because at the end of this new book isn't about how do I make the world a better place, although I think as an element to that, it's literally how do I sell more stuff? Which is not to be crass, but that's what we're here for.

Rob Durant [00:02:44]:

As a salesperson, it's absolutely what we're here for. But I love how you framed it. And I'm going off script already.

Brent Adamson [00:02:52]:

It's what I do to people. Sorry, man.

Rob Durant [00:02:55]:

That's quite all right. What you were saying was, "How do I get them to buy?" But it's not, "How do I get them to buy?" Because I really cannot force somebody to buy if they don't have a need or at least a desire or an interest. Although we think we can.

Brent Adamson [00:03:15]:

Yeah.

Rob Durant [00:03:15]:

What you really put the finer point on it is, "How do I get them to buy from me?" Yeah, they're already in a buying mode, but they're not necessarily in a "buy from me mode". So how do I help customers build confidence in their own decisions such that they will buy from me?

Brent Adamson [00:03:39]:

Yeah. And so maybe we'll back up and take a running start at this. Because one of the punchlines of this work and the frame making sale, I think is super interesting, is that, in fact, you can win the battle that you just described, which is get them to want to buy from me and still lose the war, which is don't get them to buy. So we solve. It's really interesting, which is if I solve for how do I get them to buy from me? In other words, how do I become their. Their first choice? How it'll become their top choice of supplier A versus all the other suppliers B, through whatever out there. And we're in this really weird world today where you can actually win that battle and get customers to look you in the eye and say, I love you, I want you, I want to work with you, I want to be your partner. All the fun things we'd love to hear so that we could put it in the forecast with a 95% guaranteed, we're going to Cancun this year.

Brent Adamson [00:04:23]:

And then you get that phone call. And the phone call is, you know, Rob, is some really. "I'm so frustrated. Got some really bad news. You Know, I got to tell you, we ran this up the flagpole and we've been having some meetings about this internally and things are, we're just kind of stuck." And I got to tell you, the Rob. See if you've ever heard this, Rob. But if, you know, the customer either looks you in the eye or looks you in the eye through the camera and zoom and says, "You know, if it were just up to me, I'd buy this today."

Brent Adamson [00:04:48]:

And it's like, and it's like that's when your heart breaks, right? Because you know what's coming next, which is. And it's not just up to you, is it? Right. So the problem that we're facing is not so much a, customers don't want to buy from you or do want to buy from you, it's a, customers don't know how to actually go through the process of making a complex purchase decision irrespective of who they buy from. And there's a very different and critically important distinction to understand. So if we take that as sort of where we want to land, let's go back to the starting point. And all this comes from a piece of research that we ran at CEB and then ultimately we kind of expanded to Gartner. And I've been playing around with ever since. It's kind of stuck with me for years, Rob, which is for a number of years back at CEB Gartner, across some really talented groups of people, we were studying this high level question of what needs to happen inside of a B2B purchase in order to increase the likelihood of customers buying a high quality, low regret purchase.

Brent Adamson [00:05:44]:

That is, what do we need to do to increase the likelihood of customers buying not settling for status quo, not settling for a pilot, but buying the bigger solution with the broader scope, higher price, and usually those larger, more complex deals come with a certain amount of purchase regrets, right? Remember the first time you bought your home, Rob, your first home, you wake up the next morning, go, I bought what? You're kind of freaked out about it, right? So it's terrifying. I was like, oh my God, with the what are points? I still don't understand this mortgage thing. But anyway, the. So what we're really looking for is what do I need to increase the likelihood of customers buying that bigger, broader solution, but also feeling great about it, having less regret at the same simultaneously. So it's like a unicorn. And in studying that question, increasing likelihood of a high quality, low regret deal, we have run everything you could possibly imagine, at least everything we could possibly imagine through this research model, right? So all sorts of different aspects of Challenger, different selling motions and techniques and practices and tactics. We looked at marketing practices and collateral content, collateral attributes. We looked at buying group configurations and number of people.

Brent Adamson [00:06:43]:

Point is, we looked at a lot of things. When you run all that analysis, what you find is the single biggest factor by far, by an order of magnitude. It completely swamps everything else by a massive distance. The single biggest driver of a high quality, low regret deal is the degree to which customers report a high level of confidence in the decision that they're making on behalf of their company. So we call this decision confidence and it literally is an order of magnitude. It's your 10, not 10%, but 10 times more likely. 10 times. So it's like imagine if I could tell you, like what if I could 10x your likelihood of driving a win in your organization, probably be interested, right? And it turns out the answer is we need to run everything we do and go to market, sales, marketing success, account management.

Brent Adamson [00:07:28]:

We need to run hunting, farming, run everything through this lens of customer confidence. What are we doing to help customers feel more confident in the decisions that they're making on behalf of their company? This, however, is where, and I promise I'll take a breath, but this is just to get this on the table because this is where the story takes this really weird turn. Because in solving for customer confidence, I think the first thing that everyone agrees with is, well, yeah, there's almost like a no duh aspect to it. Like of course, if customers aren't confident, they're going to choose not to choose, duh. So what I find though is where you and I were kind of noodling on this a little bit before we went live is that where people will tend to go is they'll say, exactly, I totally agree with you. And that's why we need to make sure that customers are as confident as possible in our company, in our product, in our brand, in our thought leadership, in our content, in our people. We need to be their trusted advisor. And it's always at that point with hopefully due massive amount of respect and sort of empathy.

Brent Adamson [00:08:24]:

I will suggest to you that that's not what this data is about at all. Because it isn't. What's interesting is when you unpack this data point that says that decision confidence is the single biggest driver of a high quality, lower grit deal, not a single one of the sub attributes of decision confidence have anything to do with the supplier at all. It's not, am I confident you or Your product or your brand or your people. It's more things like, am I confident that I even asked the right questions to begin with? Right. Am I confident that I've done enough research? Which by the way, in today's world, there's no end to the amount of research you can do. Am I confident that I've looked at that I've thoroughly examined all the different alternatives, not just supplier A versus supplier B, but alternatives for solutions to this problem or even alternatives to this problem. Maybe this is even the right problem.

Brent Adamson [00:09:05]:

You see what I'm saying? Somebody like you start getting overwhelmed and this is what's interesting is when you look at all these dimensions of confidence, not a single one of them have anything to do with the supplier. And this is why I dropped everything, literally quit my job, which may be either the smartest or dumbest thing I've ever done in my life to write a book. Because I think the single biggest opportunity we're all walking past right now is not to solve for customers supplier perception, but to solve for customers self perception. How do we engage? So in other words, this goes back. So now I can come full circle to your point, which is I can get them to believe in my value and feel confident that I could deliver value. But what happens when they look at and say no, I believe, I believe that you've had that amazing ROI for those other three raving fan customers of yours. But. But I just don't know if it'll work for us because.

Brent Adamson [00:09:52]:

Not because I don't believe in you, but I don't believe in us. We'll find some way to screw this up because we're just, we're just dysfunctional. We can't get anything right. And we like we've all worked at that company, right? But the, you know, so the reason why all this matters is because customers are struggling with, as we laid out sort of at least four different challenges undermining their confidence. There's decision complexity, just this massive amount of decision making. All the different stakeholders, there's information overload, the fact that we just keep flooding the field with more thought leadership, telling them this is the smart thing to do. There's objective misalignment, which is if it were just up to me, but it's up to these 10 other people and we're not even agreeing on the problem, let alone the solution, let alone the supplier. And then there's outcome uncertainty, which is, yes, you did great for other companies, but we'll screw this up.

Brent Adamson [00:10:32]:

So object. So again, it's Decision complexity, information overload, objective misalignment, outcome uncertainty. And if I feel a certain degree of lack of confidence not in you, but in our own organization to navigate any of that, it's just easier just to say, you know what, we'll just, we better look at this for a little bit longer. Call me back in six months. And they never really want you to call them back in six months, do they? So that's the premise of the whole book. And it gives you a sense, hopefully. I think, Rob, it's like the world stood on its head. Right.

Brent Adamson [00:11:04]:

It's like the other side of confidence, which is not customer supplier confidence, but their self confidence. And it becomes. The book is an exploration of what would it mean to show up in that world as a seller and as a sales organization, as a go to market team in such a way that your entire go to market model and particularly your sales motion is specifically designed to engage customers in such a way that. That, that helps them feel better about making a confident decision irrespective of you, not directly to you. And we can come back and figure out how you get paid for that. But that's, that's where we're at.

Rob Durant [00:11:35]:

That is eye opening in so much as I hear you say GDM go to market has to figure out the trust. Not in me, my company, my product, or even me as the individual seller.

Brent Adamson [00:11:54]:

Yeah.

Rob Durant [00:11:54]:

I have to figure out you and your mindset and your confidence. Yeah, but Brent, I don't know that.

Brent Adamson [00:12:03]:

I know. Right.

Rob Durant [00:12:04]:

I know my product, I know my confidence in where we stand in the marketplace. How in the hell am I supposed to get in your head and figure out your problems for you when I can hardly do it for myself?

Brent Adamson [00:12:18]:

There's a whole chapter on empathy in this book, not surprisingly, because it has to be in there. But you know what's interesting, Rob, is it turns out, by the way, this book isn't just for B2B sales. It's a book for like dating. Right. You know, because it's the same sort of. It's all about human relationships. Right. It's like.

Brent Adamson [00:12:32]:

Which is a point you made earlier off air, which is at the end of the day, B2B is just P2P. It's person to person. Right. And so the question becomes, how do I interact with you as a human being such that that interaction leaves you feeling better about yourself. Is a really interesting question. When you're trying to date someone or marry someone or build friendships or turns out, sell multimillion dollar B2B solutions, right? And so the first thing, and this is all unpacked in the book. Not so much the dating side, but the selling side. But we can come back to the human story because I think it's critically important here.

Brent Adamson [00:13:03]:

But the first step. So we take frame making. So frame making is simply the idea of how do I take something as big and hard and overwhelming and just make it feel a little bit more doable. Take a frame and put around, take something that's hard and it's like huge and say it's not all these things you have to worry about, it's just these things. So I put a frame around it, make it feel more manageable while still leaving you degrees of freedom to make your own decision inside that frame. Because it's not your confidence in me, but your confidence yourself that you're solving for. So you have to be the one to make the decision. So.

Brent Adamson [00:13:32]:

And we can unpack that too, if you'd like. But that, that's where the idea of frame making comes from. So when we engage in frame making to your point, we broke it down in three steps. We call it the three E's of frame making, thus making each other easier for your customer. See what we did there? But the. So the three E's are establish, engage and execute. And it's really of these three, it's not like my children, who I all love equally, but rather there's establishes the first among equals which is establishing the framing. Like what if I'm essentially going to take on this role of decision coach or Sherpa buying Sherpa to my customers, I first have to know where.

Brent Adamson [00:14:08]:

If I'm going to help them feel more confident. I got to know what's getting in the way of their confidence in the first place. Where are they likely to mess up? Where are they likely to struggle? Where are they likely to run into obstacles? And so this, it takes this whole. And this way, I think you know, to the classes you're teaching on marketing right now, this is such an interesting opportunity for marketing to go at things like win loss analysis and customer journey mapping and all the things that marketers hopefully are doing to understand customer understanding, to pivot much of that work or a lot of that work towards this view of the to where we apply the lens of where are customers going to struggle that maybe they don't even know they're going to struggle. What are the unanticipated obstacles? What are the things that are going to get in their way, where they're going to wake up one morning and look at their own colleagues and say, oh God, blessed. Why are we, you know, you just get like, I don't know, I feel it viscerally because I've been at these companies. It's like I'm, I'm a founder, I feel like a co founder. There's two of us, this company, and we're dysfunctional.

Brent Adamson [00:15:03]:

You know what I mean, Rob? It's like, it's just like you just get so tight in knots and you just kind of think, I just wish I could call someone, have them just me kind of figure out how to navigate this. And so when that call comes to you, the seller in the frame making world, you kind of have to have some advice to provide. And the advice is not, I've been doing this for 30 years. Here's what you need to do. Showing up as an expert because we find actually that kind of advice backfires and actually decreases customer confidence. Because when I show up as an expert, it turns out kind of crazy. But really interesting is, you know, if I like, oh, Rob, I've been doing this for 30 years. Here's what you need to do.

Brent Adamson [00:15:35]:

Do you feel any more confident yourself? That's like, do you know what I mean? It's like for like who's this guy? And shut up, you know what I mean? It's like, because it's like I tell you to trust me, you trust me less. But either way I don't help you trust you more. Right? So the one thing that all customers want, we find is social proof. They want to know what other customers like them are doing. So in this engage. So there's established figure out what's getting in their way and help them come up with the framing and then engage. Is this idea of how do I engage customers in conversation that provides or establishes that framing and helps them feel more confident. And we call this the phrase that frames.

Brent Adamson [00:16:07]:

Unless you have an early version of the book in which we called it, cynically, the phrase that pays because it does that. Going back to the first point of we have to sell something, but we now call it the phrase of frames. But anyway, the phrase of frames is very simple. It sounds like this, some version of this. It doesn't have to be exactly this, but in working with other customers like you, one of the things that we've been surprised to learn is. And so what I'm doing is I'm establishing my role not as an authority or an expert, but as a connector. I'm connecting you to the one thing you want more than Anything else, which is to know what other people, people like you were doing, such that you feel more confident that other people like you were doing. You're not crazy.

Brent Adamson [00:16:41]:

Right. So. And give me the advice to do that. And this idea of. In working with other customers like you, one of the things we've been surprised to learn at that surprise bit, I mean, you could pick this apart. I actually do whole masterclasses where we do this word for word, like change the we to I and I change the first person to third person. We change this word to that word. And really cool things happen every time you sort of nudge it.

Brent Adamson [00:17:00]:

But this idea of surprise kind of picks up on this. I'm just learning with you. It's like, hey, Rob, man, this is hard, isn't it? Again, empathy. And you know, one of the things we found a couple companies got this really like they figured this out. It's kind of crazy what they did because it's. See what I'm saying? My posture is not like I'm here to tell you what to do. My posture is. I'm learning with you.

Brent Adamson [00:17:17]:

It's like I'm just. I'm the conduit of learning is really. So. Because the value that you deliver as a seller, just go all the way back to your original questions, like, how do I deliver strategic value in this world? I think the best way to deliver strategic value in this world is not your role as an expert, but you're. But. But it's not your expertise, it's your access. Your real value is your access to other companies like this one that have gone on this journey and run into these challenges that you can channel back to them, thus becoming a source of their self confidence. Just make any.

Brent Adamson [00:17:51]:

Are you buying any of this, Rob?

Rob Durant [00:17:55]:

What? Do you like eating all of this up and. And my mind is racing.

Brent Adamson [00:18:00]:

I love it.

Rob Durant [00:18:02]:

Yeah, exactly. I've got copious notes already.

Brent Adamson [00:18:06]:

Yeah.

Rob Durant [00:18:07]:

You were talking about social proof. I just want to drop this in here and then we'll move on to that.

Brent Adamson [00:18:13]:

Oh, please do. Yeah.

Rob Durant [00:18:14]:

Not only do your prospects and customers appreciate social proof, do you know, I was going to say who. But really, what else? Does tell me AI.

Brent Adamson [00:18:26]:

Yeah.

Rob Durant [00:18:28]:

AI does not really like it when I say I'm the best.

Brent Adamson [00:18:32]:

Yeah.

Rob Durant [00:18:33]:

But when Brent says Rob is the best, AI eats that up.

Brent Adamson [00:18:39]:

Just.

Rob Durant [00:18:41]:

A little nugget.

Brent Adamson [00:18:43]:

Interesting. But you know, by the way, there's a really interesting sort of aspect of AI in this story to me. And what's really. I don't know, it was good, bad, or just Weird. We finished the book, we submitted the manuscript and right about the time AI was really just exploding, of course to the world we live in now. And, and I was talking to Carl Schmidt, my co author, and we were kind of thinking about like we should have. Do we, what do we do with AI? Do we have a chapter on it or it's like one of us asked the question like do we even talk about it? So we did a word search on the full manuscript. I think AI comes up twice in the entire book.

Brent Adamson [00:19:14]:

And we said let's leave it like that. So and the reason why is because we're just trying to solve for something different, right? We're trying. So you know, we opened the book with this really interesting piece of Gartner data, which is the last piece of Gartner research I was involved with before my departure, which is that the statistic is simply 75% of B2B buyers would prefer to buy even complex solutions without ever talking to a sales rep at all. And there's a longer riff on this, but we call this the rep free experience, right? So that we're offering frankly so little value and we're solving for customers perceptions of us so much of the time that customers like well I can get all that online or I can get that through AI, like why am I even talking to you? So at the time at Gartner, right before I left, that led to this really interesting study, like so what do I do about marketing and digital experiences? Non human. If they want to talk to sellers, let's give them what they want and give them a non sales experience. But the question that's been bugging me ever since I left the company and I've been noodling on this and led to the book is the opposite question, which is what would it take to be the one seller the customers do want to talk to? What would that look like? What would that feel like? What would that sound like? And specifically in terms of AI as a. Let's see if I can do this. The short version.

Brent Adamson [00:20:21]:

But the. It's a really interesting experience I had with AI the other day. So I was. So if this will see if you'll relate to this, Rob. So the. I was, I was on Instagram late at night because that's how what we do now in this world, right? So I'm just scrolling my feed because I'm addicted like everybody else because you know, like you got to have the little hits of dopamine and like all good, all good social media, the algorithms kind of got my number, right? So it knows who I am better than I know myself. And somehow it's figured out that I have a rescue dog. You'll hear barking in the background perhaps, if we're lucky.

Brent Adamson [00:20:52]:

Right? So the end. And like every good owner of a rescue dog, I want the best for my rescue dog, right? Like every rescue dog in the world, she has digestive issues because she's a rescue dog. Oh my God. So, right. So. So AI. So this is going somewhere. I promise.

Brent Adamson [00:21:05]:

So the. So Instagram starts feeding me advertisements late at night about human, human grade dog food. And I'm sitting there looking at these ads thinking, well, I'm just not a very good person because I don't give my dog human grade dog food. I'm just a bad human being. I better look into this. If I want to be a good person, I need to give my dog human. So. So the next day I woke up and I thought, all right, I'm gonna.

Brent Adamson [00:21:23]:

I'm gonna become a better person. I'm gonna give my dog human grade dog food. I don't know how to do it. I don't know where to start. So I said, I know where I'll start. I'll start with AI. So I figured, let's do something that B2B buyers do all the time. I'm going to essentially write an rfp.

Brent Adamson [00:21:33]:

So I went to. I. I was using Copilot three Time. You know, who are the different providers? What are the advantages, disadvantages? Give me the top reviews, give me the pricing structure, you know, model it all out for me. What, you know, the whole thing, Put it and then, and then make a recommendation and then export it. I thought it was being really cool. Put it in a table so that I can export it and print it out because I'm still old. So I print things out, right? So the.

Brent Adamson [00:21:55]:

And so I did it all. I was really, I was kind of proud of myself. I was like, look, I made a table at AI. It's like, yes, I am like, you know, six months behind, which is light years in AI world. But the. But I took this table down to the kitchen where my wife was and I said, hey, honey. I told her the whole story. I just told you.

Brent Adamson [00:22:10]:

I said, let me show you what I did. And here's the table, here's the four providers, and here's the recommendation she looks at. Huh, that's interesting. So what do you think we should do? And I looked her and said, I don't know. And I looked at the table and the recommendation, all the different information, I don't know. What do you think we should do? I said, I don't know. You know, it'd be helpful. And I said, what's that? She said, I wish we could just talk to a couple dog owners and talk to them about their experience and see what they did.

Brent Adamson [00:22:34]:

And we said, yeah, that would actually be so much more helpful than this, wouldn't it? And so we took the piece of paper, we sat on the counter under something, and it's still sitting there, you know, like a month later. And we never made a decision. And I think this is the world of AI, by the way. If I just. The other thing that was really frustrating is I tweak the prompt and I get a different answer, and I tweak the prompt again, get a different answer. Right. So it's like at the end of the day, I think this is the answer to what does it take to be the one person customer, the one sales professional customers do want to talk to, is how do I become that person when my wife says, I wish I could just talk to someone. Let's call Rob and see what he says.

Brent Adamson [00:23:05]:

Because he's probably worked with lots of pet owners and he's probably got some, you know, sort of mass, sort of a take on this. That's your opportunity as a sales professional today when, when it comes to that moment where your. Where your customers are looking for that human connection and a connection to other humans and AI isn't cutting it, and you're trying to differentiate yourself not just from other sellers and other. But from the technology that customers are using today. That's how you show up in a way that's not only valuable, but differentiated. And I think that's what's so powerful about sort of this story in the context of AI.

Rob Durant [00:23:36]:

It's amazing to me how much that has come about. These days we talk about the buyers are 57% through the journey. They're 80% through 90% through the journey, 75% never even want to speak to sales and so on. And time and again these days, what we're hearing about is humanity and empathy.

Brent Adamson [00:23:59]:

Yep.

Rob Durant [00:24:00]:

And that is the, the differentiating factor in so many places.

Brent Adamson [00:24:05]:

So 100%. Yeah. It goes back to these human relationships, you know, the, the. At the. So when I. Depending on who I'm talking to, I met. I had dinner with a CRO last night who's very, very open to these ideas. And I told him what I tell some people, which is when you read the book, start with chapter 10, which is the last book.

Brent Adamson [00:24:24]:

This is this kind of classic or challenger mentality, right? So heart and soul of challengers don't lead with, but lead to, right? Take your unique strength and your differentiator. Don't put at the beginning. So I put at the end. We did that with this book. So we took. It's funny how the framing scale follows sort of a challenge or pattern, how we lay it out. But the. We took the big idea and put at the back because we had led with the big idea.

Brent Adamson [00:24:42]:

Either people would say, I do that already, or they'd say, this guy's on Mars. I don't. What you know, but here's the big idea. The. The big idea is, well, let me do it this way because I do this on stage sometimes when I'm with. Working with companies. So, Rob, let me. Let me take a moment and ask you to just think for a moment.

Brent Adamson [00:24:58]:

I may weird you out on this. I apologize if that happens. But take a moment and all the. All of our threes and threes of listeners. Take a moment and think about someone that you really care about, someone you really love. And it could be a spouse, it could be a child, it could be a parent, it could be a friend. Friend. It could be someone from your present or past, Someone like, you know, you kind of light up inside when you think of that person and that relationship you have now.

Brent Adamson [00:25:17]:

What's really interesting is when you think about that person, in my mind at least, is more often, at least if you're lucky, when you think of that person that you really love, there's a good chance that you think about them and think to yourself, I don't. I love you because I love you. But I don't just love you because I love you. I love you because I love me when I'm around you, right? And if you have a relationship like that in your life, like someone you look in the mirror and say, I just love this version of me that comes out when I'm around that person. That is a relationship you hold onto for life. Because that is if you can and if you're lucky, right? Because it's a beautiful, beautiful thing. And really what I'm asking in this book with my co author, Carl, is this really interesting? You are smoking something right now. But I think it's a really important question, which is, what would it take to be that kind of sales professional for your customers in the world of B2B commerce? How do I show up and engage with customers such that customers don't feel better about me as a result of that interaction, but they feel better about themselves as a result of that interaction.

Brent Adamson [00:26:18]:

Because I think that ultimately I had a really interesting talk a couple of weeks ago with Charlie Green, who is one of the co authors of the Trusted Advisors, an amazing human being. And we were talking about this, and I said, hey, Charlie, I'm about to go out in the world, talk a lot about trust. And you are the guy that literally wrote the book on this. I just want to. Are we aligned? And we, we, we talk about it slightly different, but we're absolutely aligned. Which is one of the best ways to, to win your trust isn't to kind of come full force like trust me, but rather to help you trust yourself. And, and your trust in me becomes a byproduct of the relationship of you trusting yourself more. That I was the agent of creating.

Brent Adamson [00:26:54]:

It's a really different way of looking at it, and it's absolutely not the way that we think about it in sales, but I think it's the way we could and frankly should be thinking about sales. Not only because it just feels like it makes the world a better place, which is kind of what I, I dig, but I got a bar chart. It's the best way to get paid. So that, so it's like, so, you know, it's like the last thing we say in this book is like, I don't think there's ever been a time where doing what's right for sales and what's doing and doing what's right for humanity have ever been better aligned than they are today. It's. It's kind of this cool story. You get to show up. You get to show up as yourself, Rob.

Brent Adamson [00:27:22]:

You get to show up as a human being, and you get to have real human interaction. And as a result of that, probably sell more effectively. How cool is that?

Rob Durant [00:27:31]:

Fantastic. I want to bring an audience comment on. We have Janet Gerhard.

Brent Adamson [00:27:37]:

Hey, Janet.

Rob Durant [00:27:39]:

Sales is now about building confidence in the buyer. Your value is perspective. Thanks, Robin. Brent. Hashtag stay curious.

Brent Adamson [00:27:49]:

Stay curious.

Rob Durant [00:27:50]:

Thank you, Janet.

Brent Adamson [00:27:51]:

Yeah, Janet's the best.

Rob Durant [00:27:54]:

Brent, if you were to emphasize one thing you would want our audience to take away from today's conversation, what would that one thing be?

Brent Adamson [00:28:06]:

In some ways, it's that. That point that I just made. But, but, but I'll give you a couple sort of real tactical things to go with it, Rob, because otherwise it starts to sound very sort of abstract. And so we wrote the book at two altitudes simultaneously. One is a sort of abstract sort of Strategic perspective. But in every single chapter, we did our level best to just get really down in the weeds of tactics. Like, what do you do? What do you say? Literally, what words do you choose? And there's some really cool stuff in there. But I think at the high level, the thing I'd love for people to take away from this again is your single biggest opportunity to drive sales.

Brent Adamson [00:28:40]:

Is it to change the way customers think about you, which is what we're all solving for? It's to help them change the way they think about themselves and specifically to feel more confident. The second thing is you remember those dimensions of confidence I mentioned, like, how confident are we that we asked the right questions, that we did enough research that we looked at thoroughly, thoroughly examined alternatives. There's a longer riff on this, Rob, but what's really interesting about that list. So this list represents the single biggest set of drivers for a high quality, lower grade deal. The thing we care about this is your growth engine. What's really interesting about them, Rob, is when you look at them, you think, okay, all right, Brent, fast talking, Adamson dude, right? I'm going to solve for these things that you say I should solve for, right? So I'm going to solve for, like, okay, my customers have to feel confident. They ask the right questions. Great.

Brent Adamson [00:29:20]:

Okay, so which questions are the right questions? And then it's like, well, I think these are the right questions. But, Rob, you think those are the right questions. We got a colleague down the hall who thinks those are the right questions. So which ones are the I don't know, so. Or park? Now that's too hard. So, okay, we need to feel confident. We've done sufficient research. Great.

Brent Adamson [00:29:39]:

What is sufficient? How much is sufficient? Is it a week? Is it a month? Is it a year? Is it another website? All right, that one's hard. But I won't do the whole thing. But the shtick is you go through this whole list of attributes, and what you find, Rob, is there's not an objective finish line to a single one of these things. So here we have the single biggest driver of a high quality, low regret deal. The single biggest driver of growth. And the whole thing's subjective. Like, wait, what? How does that work? It's like, that's just terrifying, right? And what it tells you is, at the end of the day, customers don't make these decisions because they know these things, because they're not knowable. They make these decisions, these purchases, because they feel these things.

Brent Adamson [00:30:17]:

You have to feel that those are the right questions. You have to feel that you've done enough research, you have to feel and specifically feel confident. And so out of that comes this really interesting lesson, which is a thing that we. So much of what we do in sales is specifically designed to get your customers to know something. I want you to know about our products, know about our features, know about our value, know about our customers, know about implementation. But what if we stop and think about what if our biggest differentiator as a human engage in selling isn't to get our customers to know something because they can learn all that online, but as our differentiator, the things that make us uniquely good at what we do is to solve, for getting them to feel something and specifically to feel confident. And that's where things I mentioned, like this phrase that pays and all the other tactics we lay out in the book, really, we hope are going to equip, arm you, if you will, to go engage customers in such a way that you're solving for. For how they feel and specifically feel about themselves.

Rob Durant [00:31:08]:

Fantastic.

Brent Adamson [00:31:09]:

It's pretty different, isn't it?

Rob Durant [00:31:11]:

Yeah, it really is.

Brent Adamson [00:31:13]:

I think a lot of people are going to go, what? I'm so excited to get this book out there because I think I just kind of want to rewrite the rules of selling today because I think we're in need of it and I think this is a great way to think about it.

Rob Durant [00:31:24]:

I think we're on the same page there. That's awesome.

Brent Adamson [00:31:26]:

That's cool. Brent.

Rob Durant [00:31:28]:

This has been great. On behalf of everyone here at Sales TV Live, to you and to our audience, thank you all for being an active part in today's conversation. If you like what you heard today, please take a moment to leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Substack or YouTube. Let us know what you learned and what you'd like to learn more about. Your feedback will help us reach more people like you, fulfill our mission of elevating the profession of sales. Thank you all and we'll see you next time.

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About SalesTV: SalesTV is a weekly talk show created by salespeople, for salespeople. Each episode explores sales, sales training, sales enablement, and social selling, bringing together sales leaders, enablement professionals, and practitioners from across the globe.

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