🥊   Provocative Selling
🕵️   Sales as Market Research
🧲   Positioning Pulls Demand
🥊 Provocative Selling
Solution selling was built for a kinder, simpler time. Salespeople had time to build customer relationships, and markets didn’t shift every other year.
The way you were trained to sell is out of date. It’s too slow.
The issue is solution selling is reactive. Salespeople respond to customer needs and present solutions that align with budgets. They might ask questions like:
- What is the biggest challenge you’re facing?
- How are these issues impacting the business?
- What is your budget?
It puts the customer in the driver’s seat to compare their options. You’re competing apples-to-apples with everyone else.
Provocative selling flips the sales model by being proactive. Salespeople lead with a hypothesis based on a burning need the customer may have.
There are 3 steps to provoke a customer to buy:
- Burning Need: Identify a critical issue keeping a CEO or decision maker up at night.
- Whole Product Solution: Adapt your products and services to resolve your customers’ burning need.
- Provocative Pitch: Write a compelling pitch that gets a decision maker to respond, “That’s interesting. Tell me more.”
Provocative Selling is a core tenet of CoStrategy. The next cohort starts on July 1st. Message us to learn more.
🕵️ Sales as Market Research
With the rise of technology, from digital marketing to Teams meetings, companies have lost touch with their customers. Sure, we have way more data than ever before, but we’re less connected than ever.
The loss of connection is a real challenge for one primary reason: Trust.
Relationships put deposits in the trust bank. When you have a close, personal connection, a customer will be more forthcoming about their needs and give you opportunities you might not otherwise see.
The irony is those connections were built from the sales process: getting belly-to-belly and knee-to-knee with your customers.
Direct selling is still one of the most effective forms of market research. Your customers will tell you what they want to buy, but you have to listen.
When you lead with provocative selling, track the insights captured from every customer meeting:
- What resonated with the customer
- What questions they asked
- What created objections or concerns
Every sales conversation is an opportunity to learn. Those insights sharpen your messaging, refine your products and services, and adapt your business model to stay relevant to your customers’ shifting needs.
The most relevant signal is a purchase. Do they buy or not? Signed contracts validate your strategy.
đź“ŠÂ One Stat to Watch
$30 Million
The Artemis II crew carried 58 tortillas to the moon because bread disintegrates in zero gravity. John Young learned the hard way when he smuggled a corned beef sandwich aboard the Gemini 3 in 1965. It went everywhere! Congress called it the “$30 million sandwich.”
🧲 Positioning Pulls Demand
Sales shouldn’t be so hard. Does it feel like your sales team is fighting in the street with knives? If so, you may have a positioning problem. Your value proposition has lost relevance.
Even if you had the advantage a few years ago, it can slip away quickly.
As a market becomes more commoditized, customers default to one of three choices. They will go with what they already know, what’s cheapest, or what’s available.
In a booming market, you can grow on relationships, price, and availability. When the market shrinks, you’re fighting it out for every deal.
Salespeople can’t solve this problem. More sales calls and more proposals won’t make you more competitive. The shift is structural: adjust your competitive positioning to a market you can own.
When your business is positioned to win, demand changes. Customers will buy as much as you can deliver.
Instead of relying on sales to drive revenue, growth comes from increasing your organization’s capacity and throughput. As you increase how much your business can deliver, the market absorbs it.
This is the fundamental thesis of mid-market growth strategy: when a business is well positioned you grow by increasing capacity. The constraint isn’t marketing or customer demand. It’s your ability to scale operations to deliver.
In CoStrategy we teach: Position to win, then go all in.
🤔 Thoughts on Today’s Issue?
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