Journey-First Selling and The Death of Product Pitches

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Want to sell more? Stop pitching.

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That’s counterintuitive advice, isn’t it?  After all, prospects do not become customers and sales are not closed without a pitch.  So let’s clarify.  It’s not that you should never pitch, it’s that you shouldn’t lead with it.

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““You can't force people to buy stuff they don't want to… Our job is to guide the customer, that's our job - to guide them to the right next step in the conversation by leading with what they care about, not our product.” - Brent Keltner

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Too often, business owners and their marketing and sales teams work to craft the perfect pitch and present a flawless demo, only to hear crickets.

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In episode 107 of The How to Sell More Podcast, Mark Drager and guest Brent Keltner explore who really controls the sales process and why it’s time to shift from a pitch-focused approach to a guided approach. 

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You’ll also learn a new way to sell that has you co-create a journey with your customers that leads to the outcome they want (and ideally, what they want is your product or service).

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Brent outlines a simple 15-minute meeting prep process that will help you hone in on what your customer needs and establish your credibility.

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Finally, Brent outlines a no-frills follow-up plan that actually moves deals forward.

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Brent Keltner is the President of Winalytics LLC, where he created a method to help companies grow sales by building better relationships with customers.

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His book, The Revenue Acceleration Playbook, shows businesses how to stop pushing products and start connecting with buyers. Brent's approach helps companies find more opportunities, increase deal sizes, and grow faster.

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Ready to stop burning leads and wasting time?  Ready to start guiding your prospects through a co-created journey so you can sell more?

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Listen to the full conversation now.

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Connect with Brent Keltner

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• Connect on LinkedIn‍
• Get your copy of The Revenue Acceleration Playbook
• Learn more about Winalytics

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More About Today's Guest, Alex McPhail

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Brent Keltner, Ph.D. is President of Winalytics LLC, where he created a method to help companies grow sales by building better relationships with customers.

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His book, The Revenue Acceleration Playbook, shows businesses how to stop pushing products and start connecting with buyers. Brent's approach helps companies find more opportunities, increase deal sizes, and grow faster.

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Before starting Winalytics, Brent led sales teams at both small and large companies. Today, his company works with clients in education, human resources, software, retail, and marketing.

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Brent began his career as a researcher at Stanford University and the RAND Corporation. His ideas about sales and marketing have been published in top business journals like the Sloan Management Review and The Financial Times.

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His message is simple: to make more money, focus less on selling and more on solving customer problems.

A Transcription of The Talk

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‍Mark Drager: So Brent, there is one line in your book that perfectly frames the challenge and problem that those of us in marketing, sales, and business owners face all day, every day, which is: sellers do not close deals - buyers close deals. And the reason why I note that, and I love that line, is because the uncomfortable truth for me as a brand person, as a marketing person, as an entrepreneur. We don't really have any control over any of this. Do we?

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Brent Keltner: No, I mean, you can't force people to buy stuff they don't want to. Maybe once upon a time you could, or you can do it for a short period of time, but it's a losing proposition. You might win a call, you think, and then the deal drifts because you never got them to take co-ownership. This idea that our buyers have to own the deal with us, beginning, middle, and end of every call, and then connecting the conversations - what our buyers and our customers do is 10 times more important than what we do in the call or in the follow-up.

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From reading the book, we say look, every sales conversation is just a great opportunity to get your buyer or your customer to co-own the deal three times. Tell us why they're talking to us. What is it they're trying to solve for that makes it interesting for them to spend their time with us? How big is that pain? What's the benefit of solving that pain? And the second is, do they see us as part of the solution?

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You're on demos or product discussions probably a lot as well, and it's amazing that it's almost never asked: "Do you see how our software, our service, our solution offering could solve that problem? Where's the first place you would want to use it with your team? What problem would it solve for you? How would it make your life easier?" We ask questions like "Hey, what do you think?" or "Isn't it cool software?" So the middle is, we have to get them to say "Yes, I can see how it would solve my problem. I see the value in what you're doing. I see these parts of your solution I like, maybe I'm less engaged by the others."

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And then part three is they have to commit to action to solving that problem together. And so if you just structure a three-part meeting - why are they working with us, do they see us as part of the solution to that problem, will they take action - they'll qualify the deal for themselves. They'll tell us what we need to do as a follow-up. So that's the basic idea - we need to give them opportunities to co-own the conversation and then connect the conversations.

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Mark Drager: This is so interesting because in your book, you admit that you didn't come up through the traditional sales process training channels, and so you found this technique. You found this approach that's laid out in the book The Revenue Acceleration Playbook, but this whole idea of moving away from product pitching to authentic buyer journeys, where you are not across the table from your prospect, but in fact on the same side of the table so when you landed on this, when you developed it, it just made natural sense to you. Isn't that true?

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Brent Keltner: Yeah, I was trained, as you know from reading the book, as a qualitative researcher, and my research was with busy executives in the banking and insurance industries and the telecom industries, manufacturing companies. It was just interviewing around what training and human resources investments they were making to create differentiation in the market or drive performance. If I would trot out myself as a PhD in the RAND Corporation and our expertise, they just didn't care. But if I led with what's in it for them and why this data could be valuable, how it would be actionable for the team, I got a lot more engagement. So I would always start with what's in it for them, and then I'd name-drop their peers that I was talking to that were in the benchmarking study, and that's what built enthusiasm.

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I got really good at structuring conversations and getting that co-ownership of the conversation. And then I went to the commercial sector, first with Kaplan and Edu ventures, and then a couple of smaller growth companies. I was always just amazed at how people would show up and pitch their product and wonder why they never got any follow-up. So I just taught people to run a very different kind of conversation, where our goal was to be a trusted advisor and guide the conversation forward and get to the right outcome, which might be that we don't have a fit. So as a seller, your time is your most precious commodity. If we're very intentional about whether we're moving forward together, if we're not, that can be a gift of time back.

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Mark Drager: This consultative approach really resonates with me. I developed something similar, but more out of necessity than strategy. Having no formal sales and marketing background, launching my agency at 23, I found myself taking prospects through multiple discovery sessions, strategy meetings, and we'd collaborate throughout the creative planning processes - all because I was terrified of delivering something that missed the mark.

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While others told me, "close on the first call or move on," I found that involving clients in co-creating the solution got buy-in and built trust that led to better outcomes.

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I used to worry I was giving too much away in this process, but what I found reassuring about your book - confirmation bias here, but this co-creation approach isn't just a personal preference - it's actually more effective.

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Brent Keltner: Yeah, and just to test whether we both are suffering from confirmation bias or not, I'll throw out a couple of stats from the industry. Most buyers want a self-enabled journey at this point. They want to guide the journey. And we see that in content and content consumption. One of the most horrendous statistics you see out there is if you survey executives, people that buy from salespeople, usually only like 13 or 15% will say, "Yeah, I think salespeople understand my problems" or "I think they understand me, they understand my business problems."

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The reality is, the world has shifted now in the last 10 or 15 years, where everything is out there. Everything on your product is on your website, it's in little video explainers on YouTube, it's on computer review sites. So this idea that I can command the sale, that I can control the sale without jointly owning it - buyers are overwhelmingly telling us that doesn't work anymore. They want to be in a collaborative mode with us. They want us to guide their journey forward.

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Mark Drager: And that takes though either a salesperson or a marketing team, an advertising team, a business development team - it takes someone with a real understanding of the culture, the industry that you're selling into, the decision-making process, or the seniority of those you're speaking with, the different influencers who might influence the purchasing decision as you move down the line, a real understanding of your product or your service and the different use cases. 

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And this can be from very high-level business goals right down to real specific how you might integrate it, how you're going to deliver, how you're going to work with the engineering team, whatever that might be. The main pushback I get from other business owners when I speak about my own approach, and what you talk about in the book, is just the complexity for scaling, the complexity for finding people who have this unique skill set, or building these teams, and it just is seen as very slow and complicated and expensive. I kind of feel like there's no other choice. But what would you say to that?

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Brent Keltner: Yeah, I think you have just described the Cadillac of doing this well, as you start with a really well-developed product marketing framework that connects your value props to your ideal buying group and your segment value props. As you get bigger, that's worth investing in because it helps build team alignment, helps drive growth, no question. But the starting point, honestly, to implement this approach is just two very simple things any business owner could do, any individual sales rep can do: think about your meetings in three parts and just prep your meeting in three parts. When you get into the meeting, the heat of battle, it's like anything goes.

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So if you just prep your meeting in three parts, spend 10 or 15 minutes thinking: what do I think they might be working on based on what's on their website and their LinkedIn profile? What's my hypothesis and need? Here's the good news - you don't have to get that hypothesis and need right. But just saying "I see this on your website, I see you just had a news release, I see you had a LinkedIn post, I see you have an ebook on this" - is that something you're thinking about or working on? You get a ton of credit compared to others.

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So you can prep what I think they're working on. You can prep what are my most similar clients, your name drops because all buying is social. At the end of the day, we have to leverage other trusted relationships, our personal relationships, to build trust with vendors. That's the way it works, B2B, B2C. So can I show up with here are two or three people, either because they're in the same segment, or they're in the same role, or they have the same problem? What would I say? "Hey, I understand you're working on this, this is how we've solved that problem, and here's an example of somebody we've solved that for."

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So it's just knowing your client base - any good seller, any good president, entrepreneur knows their top clients - just prepping it for the call. And then the last thing is, who do I want to invite into the conversation at the end of the call? On their side, I'll ask them who they think should join, but I might suggest typically these are other people, based on what we do, that need to join the conversation. Is that somebody we could invite in?

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So you've got three parts of the meeting. You can prep all three of them in 10 or 15 minutes, and then you need to send a follow-up email. Does that email look like the traditional follow-up email with "Hey, thanks so much for your time, here's six attachments on us" or "Here's a pitch on what we do, I'll call you again in two weeks, see if we can set more time"? Or does it look like "Hey, thanks so much. I understand in two sentences this seems like why you were interested in talking with us, what we accomplished. Here's some ways that we can address that. Here's what we agreed to do next. This is our next call. I understand you're going to talk with your boss, I understand you're going to talk with your team. You and I agreed to a 15-minute check-in to see how those internal conversations went and if we can progress to the next one."

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So this is just good conversations. It's you being a trusted advisor, which people want, and you can audit it with: How well am I prepping? How well am I following up? And then your next level is to set time, 30 minutes every week, with a peer, somebody else who's selling, and just check each other. How are they doing my prep? How are they doing my follow-up email? The number one sales enablement investment is an hour a week of skills coaching - far surpasses any other investment you'll ever make. It's 3% of your time. So practice if you want to get good, sell more, practice.

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Mark Drager: You know, I've never regretted over-preparing for a meeting, but I've definitely kicked myself when I thought I was prepared and wasn't.

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Let's talk about this idea of the "authentic buyer journey" that's central to your book. Instead of the traditional product-focused approach where it's all demos and features, you advocate for a more conversational style that focuses on business goals and challenges first.

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What I found fascinating in one of your case studies was how your clients prepare multiple potential paths and stories in advance. While many business owners intuitively understand their customers' challenges, they don't systematize this for their teams. By proactively preparing different case studies and customer stories, salespeople can let prospects "choose their own adventure" rather than pushing them toward a single product.

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Is that the essence of what you mean by a journey-first approach?

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Brent Keltner: Yeah, 100%. And before I respond directly to your question, I talked about an authentic buyer journey, authentic conversations in the first book. We have evolved our language to talk about journey-first marketing and journey-first selling, which seems people get more. It's about your buyer journey or your customer journey first. I don't know if authentic is a term everyone really gets. But this idea that our job is to guide the buyer or customer, that's our job - to guide them to the right next step in the conversation by leading with what they care about, not our product.

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For the entrepreneur, the President, CEO of a growth stage company, all of this stuff is in their head. They've built the value props, they've fulfilled the value props. In many cases, they built the product or the services around it, they built the customer stories. Your instinct is a playbook is just a fancy way of saying, write down our best practices. And if your best practices are in your head, just write them down so that your team can look a little bit more like you.

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What does it mean to be journey-first in that context? Any business and this is true for bigger businesses as well as smaller businesses, probably only has three or four problems, two to four problems you solve well. How do you help either drive revenue or utilize capacity, staff capacity, plan capacity? How do you optimize somebody's cost structure, change a key user experience, generate data insight that leads to some kind of actionable business outcome?

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Your capabilities sit under those because if you think about the work we do, if you have a problem with deal velocity, what it means is you're closing your deals at a lower rate or for a lower value. There's a very clear financial cost to that. Well, why might that be? Do you have a consistent first-call structure that allows your sales team to guide towards the right outcome? Have you armed them with a simple set of discovery questions that gets the buyer to understand their pain and the output? Have you thought about the process? You've got sales stages and sales methodology. Have you thought about the buyer commitments you need to move from one stage to the next in your pipeline, or are you just letting people progress junk?

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We have three gap problem solution statements. In your sales mechanics, you either have those things or you don't - those are my capabilities that help you drive deal velocity in a way that drives measurable outcomes. When we've helped companies like NECI Group here locally raise their deal velocity by 12 percentage points, particularly first to second call progression, because they identified what was the key pain and who needed to be in the second calls. So you just got to write that stuff down.

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We also work on the account management side at Winalytics, or we work on the brand and the brand experience, and are you connecting the content journey across website, demand gen. So depending on who we're talking to, that's another area. I was talking with a CRO the other day, just as an example, and he said, "Oh, I hired a sales enablement resource, so I just put that on hold." I said, "I'm curious with your sales team, is there a shared kind of product marketing framework across the demand gen, the sales, and the account customer service team?"

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"Well, no, as a matter of fact, there's not. Would there be value?" Yeah, that's the VP of product, and he's hiring for a product market research - boom, there's a bucket positioning strategy. And I said, "Okay, and I'm curious, on the other end, on the service, how do you work with the services team to surface expansion or renewal?" "Oh, well, they need to up-level." I could connect you with them. And then I came back to him and said, "I'm curious, as the sales enablement team, did they do ongoing skills development, or is it more point in time?" And the research on one hour of skills coaching - I literally just walked him through these buckets, and suddenly we started with "Hey, let's talk again in six months because I got a sales enabler resource" to who knows, we'll close the deal or not. But there are three opportunities there for internal leaders to take hold of, and it's thinking in those sort of buckets of problems that I solve, and how would I ask them questions that guide to capabilities I have to then say, "Oh, that's interesting. You're working on that. Here's how we approach it."

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Mark Drager: In reading your book, one thing that jumped out at me with these user stories, or with these case studies - these, I'll call them user stories because I find it's usually a certain type of company facing a certain type of challenge with a certain type of use case. But what I found interesting is, as I was working through your book, I realized that, yeah, in the back of my head, I have all of these stories.

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I was working on a response to a past client, and they had a very specific challenge. I turned to my team and quickly asked, "Hey, they have this very specific type of challenge. Who else have we done this for?" By asking the question of the team, we realized, "Oh, in 2017 we did this for this company, and in 2019 we did it again, and in 2021 we did it a third time."

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So I looked at the similarities between these use cases and the challenges we had to overcome for them, and what we had to learn by overcoming these challenges, and in fact, why this was a really unique use case. And then one of my team members said, "Oh, we actually have a testimonial from the last project." Suddenly, just in a matter of a few minutes, we identified three other customers who had the same challenges. We laid out in bullet points what we did to help them overcome it, and what we learned and applied to future projects. And then, here's a testimonial of the experience of working with us through this unique challenge.

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Brent Keltner: Yeah, look, I mean you for leaders of growth companies that have the playbook in their mind, but it also comes up with sales teams of bigger companies like, "I don't have a marketing function to do all this" - what you just said is the best content is that tribal knowledge around stories and name drops and Problem Solution statements. Any good seller, any good CEO, they know their best stories. They know the problem-solution statement.

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Just being intentional about collecting a handful of those is a game-changer. Sales teams can - and our early work on building stories was with sales teams, often in the enterprise - they just couldn't get marketing's attention, and we just collect the tribal knowledge around these stories. So the tribal knowledge is 95% of the way, unless you don't have product-market fit, which is a different problem. You have product market fit. Those stories are there. You just have to collect them and be intentional in the way you guys were about collecting them, and what you'll learn is that the problem solution statements and the business outcomes that connect your problem solution statements - it'll get a lot clearer if you ask your customers, or mine your customer stories, than if you hypothesize yourself.

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Mark Drager: If they'll let you, yes. That's one service that we do within our agency at SalesLoop, that our customers don't often think about. And this might be something even that you help others with, but I find has the biggest impact - when a third party interviews customers. Now, it's great if you can do it yourself, if you can call up your customers and have an honest conversation. That's amazing, but many people are uncomfortable giving really direct and honest feedback.

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Being able to have a third party come in and interview a handful of people who just signed with you, a handful of people who've worked with you for a number of years, a handful of people who decided not to move with you, a handful of times where things went wrong, and being able to not necessarily develop personas around this, but understand that someone who's worked with you and loves you for 10 years may have a very different experience. If you've gone through high growth, if you've expanded, if you've spread yourself a little thin, maybe the person working with you for the last year doesn't have the same know, like trust, maybe they're not willing to live with the mistakes that you're making along the way.

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We come in and we just do these types of profiles, these conversations and interviews. And I find it so revealing, so amazing, because you can get the stories, you can get the anecdotes, you can get the words, the very verbiage and what they care about most. And then you can apply this, as you said, to your marketing or advertising, to your sales process, to your account management or onboarding process, to your follow-up process. And I don't know why more companies don't do it. Honestly, I don't know why we don't. I guess maybe we're afraid, maybe we're afraid of what they're going to say. But it is the most revealing, most insightful investment of time or money that I think that a company can do.

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Brent Keltner: Yeah, I mean you're preaching to the choir.

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Mark Drager: That's why I liked your book!

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Brent Keltner: Push back on that. But what's interesting is that everybody knows intuitively that your customer stories are your most important content asset, because stories sell, and peer stories sell the most. If you look at the research from the Content Marketing Institute, they're your fourth or fifth most common type, they're not number one. After blogs and infographics, we default to the things that we can do first.

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I had a really interesting conversation with a CMO, B2B CMO, who was very sales oriented. What was interesting in her approach is she had taken on this problem directly. For her team, she actually created a requirement that every one of their team members has a responsibility for generating a certain number of stories a year. They can build relationships at events, they can work with their CS team to do that, they use - they will sort of be invited into the QBR calls. They also have built an advisory board, and that's a little bit bigger, although we have an advisory board and we're kind of a smaller, boutique consulting firm. Part of being on their advisory board was agreeing to a story. So this idea of just making it easier to source stories on a routine basis, it should be part of the habit of the way you manage accounts, because they are the most important resource, and creating expectations that all your team members are generating those, I think, is a good expectation.

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Mark Drager: And in your experience, is it better to be on the more emotional side of things and allow the story to speak for itself, or do we want to ensure that - in my experience, every claim needs to be backed up with proof? Should we be looking at backing up these stories with numbers, with facts, with figures, with third-party research, with Harvard Business Review says this, or industry X says that? How much do we want to shore up these stories?

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Brent Keltner: Yeah, and I think credit to Todd Caponi's Transparency Sale - buying starts as an emotional thing, but it ends as a rational thing. People have to pay dollars, and they have to take time to do something different. And we know from gym memberships on January 15 that people don't like to spend money to do something different. So there's got to be a rational justification for spending time and money on this, but it starts with an emotional engagement.

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Mark Drager: I wonder if the rational part actually isn't in the middle. I say that because I worked at a franchisor before I started my agency. I was part of the franchise development marketing team, and we generated all these leads, and we sold franchises in 90 countries and territories around the world. A big part of the three to five-week sales process, which was 100% by phone at the time - this is 2004, 2005 - started off very much emotional, emotional content, emotional outcome. Imagine owning your own business, the freedom, replacing your blue-chip salary.

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All of these claims - in the middle, it became very detailed and rational, because people are trying to understand what we're going to do for this change. But then towards the end, you are way back to the emotional side again because we're trying to get the spouse to say yes. We're trying to get you excited again. We're trying to get you to think of what could my life be like. I've worried about all that rational stuff. Now let's get back to the emotional thing. So I almost wonder if we need to return to the emotional.

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Brent Keltner: Look, you're 100% right. You seed them - you need both as you progress. Because what we know in this case, is that was a high-end kind of B2B sale, but there were influencers, right? The wife, or maybe there's a family council, or he or she had to go to the parents to get some of the capital to invest. There are always influencers, except in the most transactional sale.

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And so those new people, they got to get both an emotional excitement and then a sort of business excitement. In a true B2B context, often the people you never meet with, they're thinking about the business result, and the people that are just working the product or the service are thinking about "Hey, how does this change my life or my team's life?" So it's a little bit more emotional down here, business here, but you got to work both through the entire process, for sure.

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But I think it's just important to recognize, we think of good stories that problem, solution, result - start with the pain of the problem, right? That's a negative emotion. Engage with the positive emotion of the things we brought to bear to partner to solve that problem, and as we solved it together, here were some of the results that made it a promising use of everybody's time. And that you're balancing the kind of emotional and the rational. So it's 100% both.

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Mark Drager: I've been speaking with Brent Keltner, who is the author of the book The Revenue Acceleration Playbook. Brent, to end the podcast, I always ask this closing question - it's one of my favorites. If you could give us one tip, one strategy, one piece of advice to help those of us listening to sell more, what would that be?

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Brent Keltner: Yeah, lead with empathy. Get out of your own head and think about the person on the other end and why they're there. It's easy, it feels pleasurable to talk about ourselves - our brains are wired for confirmation bias, which is basically a fancy way of saying we go in with a conclusion. We think we know the answer.

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So if you just flip it to "I'm going to start" - I got my framework, but let's start with a little bit of a blank slate. Build some human rapport. What's the poster on their wall? How are they gonna spend their weekend? Where do they live in the country? What do they do outside of work? Build a level of rapport. But then, why are they interested in talking with you, and how can we spend our time together most productively?

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One thing I'll say on that is, I think - and you did a really nice job of this - the use of an agenda in a meeting is a totally underused tool as a way of just saying, "Hey Mark, I know we got about 30 minutes together. Here are the three or four things I was thinking about doing together today." And usually that's something around exploring their problems, what we could do, who we might bring in a conversation. "Is that aligned with what you're thinking about? And if there was one thing you wanted to get out of the call today, what would it be?" So just demonstrating a lot of empathy at the beginning - it will shift your mind, and it will shift you into a different category in your buyer or customer's mind.