The wrong question

It is a question I have heard from sales leaders more times than I can count: how do we get our sellers to perform better? It is a reasonable question. It is also, in most cases, the wrong one.

Not because performance does not matter. It does. But because performance is an outcome, not a starting point. Before you can improve how your sellers operate, you need to answer something more fundamental: why would a customer in their position actually want to change anything at all?

That question is harder. It requires real knowledge of the customer's world. It requires preparation. Most organisations never ask it. And so their commercial conversations stall, not because their sellers lack technique, but because nobody has created a reason for the customer to move.

01

A model most people misapply

The Golden Circle is one of the most widely referenced frameworks in business. The idea is elegant: great organisations and great leaders communicate from the inside out. They start with Why, move to How, and arrive at What. Most organisations do the opposite, leading with product and hoping meaning follows.

It is a useful model. It is also almost universally misapplied in commercial contexts.

When sales and marketing teams encounter the Golden Circle, they typically use it to clarify their own positioning. "Our Why is to simplify complexity." "Our Why is to create lasting partnerships." That exercise has value. But it addresses the wrong circle entirely.

In the commercial conversation, the circle that matters most is the customer's. Not your Why, but theirs. Why would they change the way they currently operate? Why is the status quo not good enough? Why should they act now, rather than wait, or do nothing at all?

If you cannot answer those questions before you walk into the room, you are not ready to have the conversation.

02

What customers actually decide

Customers do not change because you described your product well. They change because something shifted in their understanding of their own situation. The best commercial conversations do not begin with "let me tell you about what we do." They begin with something the customer had not fully considered about where they are.

This is not a technique. It is a different purpose for the commercial conversation entirely. The seller who leads with product is trying to create interest. The seller who leads with insight is trying to create movement. Those are not the same thing, and they require very different preparation.

This is the core of the Challenger approach: the most effective sellers in complex B2B environments are not those with the best relationships or the most persistence. They are the ones who teach the customer something genuinely new about their own world. They enter every significant conversation with a perspective, not just a presentation.

03

The preparation gap

Most sellers know what they sell. That knowledge is well developed, rehearsed, and easy to deploy. What is far less developed is knowledge of the customer's world at a depth that makes genuine insight possible.

To teach a customer something they have not considered, you need to understand their industry better than they expected you to. You need to know what the forward-looking pressures in their market are. You need to have formed a view about how those pressures will affect their specific position, and you need to be able to articulate that view in a way that is relevant to the person sitting across from you.

That requires three distinct capabilities, all of which must be present before the conversation begins.

Most organisations invest heavily in the first and ignore the second and third entirely. The result is sellers who are well-informed but unable to create movement, because information without relevance and tension is just presentation.

04

Where conversations actually stall

When a commercial conversation ends in a price negotiation, or in a polite "we'll be in touch," the most common diagnosis is poor closing technique. That diagnosis is almost always wrong.

Conversations stall because the customer's Why was never established. The seller presented a What. The customer evaluated it against alternatives. Without a clear understanding of why their current situation is insufficient, they have no internal pressure to act. And so they compare, delay, or default to whoever they already know.

This is where the value equation matters most. Price becomes the battleground when value has not been established upstream. And value cannot be established upstream if the seller has not first helped the customer articulate their own reason to change.

The customer's Why is not just a sales concept. It is the precondition for the entire commercial conversation to have meaning.

05

The question worth asking

If you want your commercial conversations to move differently, the starting point is not "how do we get our sellers to perform better?" It is this: what does a customer need to understand about their own situation before our solution becomes genuinely relevant to them?

That is a harder question. It requires real knowledge of the customer's world. It requires preparation that most organisations do not build into their commercial processes. It requires the confidence to bring a perspective into a conversation before the relationship gives you permission.

But it is the only question that leads to a conversation worth having.

Because when the customer's Why is clear, the rest follows. How you solve it, what you specifically offer, the price you charge. These become details in service of a decision that has already, in the customer's mind, been made.

That is not the end of the commercial conversation. It is where the real one begins.