People Buy Movement, Not More Logic.

Sales is somewhat magical!

Or at least we perceive that sales is one essential skill. More than that we know that Sales is about Connection and we crave for connection as humans. It’s hardwired into our DNA.

I started learning sales function in the modern (currently it’s AI-native) world. I started researching on the most important parts of sales shifting. The once static sales motions are now more dynamic in nature. This took me in a lot of directions, all at once, of which most of it is noise. So, finding the signal through the noise is quintessential for me to succeed.

Sales is simple and complex at the same time. The more nuanced and complex you perceive sales; it becomes an elusive challenge for you to master it. So I sticked to a simple principle.

I am limiting the context of my Sales learning to a niche that I want to master.

Is it that hard? Yes, it’s quite challenging. So one step at a time. How?

In Sales, ICPs are a great way to clean the noise from your pipeline. It’s a screening mechanism to find the right people and test if opportunity exists or it’s all an illusion.

My goal is to master a narrow field of sales. It is complex solutions and emerging tech sales. My learning and curation of sources are few in number but each are olympian in their quality.

The foundational sales principles did not change for a long time. But the way the process got molded and shaped to sell in this niche gave it a new identity.

Also I included the challenge of technologies like Artificial Intelligence reshaping the ecosystem.

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TLDR;

How do you sell disruptive technologies?

The whole modern sales environment needs a complete pivot from the sales professional.

Is this shortcut to mastering those sophisticated, high-reward customer conversations.?

No! Why?

You can’t be the person pushing the product anymore. It doesn’t work!

You have to become an intelligent facilitator. Someone that uncovers problems that the customers yet do not realize that they have.

And creating an effortless buying journey all it supported by predictive data systems.

1. The Psychological Foundation of Selling - Change, Risk and the Status Quo

All great sales strategy start at psychology. The first concept to internalize within ourselves is this “All Selling is Change”

It sounds obvious to some of us. The implication here is huge. Every interaction towards closing a deal, doesn’t matter if you’re selling stocks or a multi million dollar software.

It involves changing their current situation. So your job, defined by one core task.

“Getting the prospect to see their situation changing from buying your solution, is far less risky than doing nothing.”

Convincing the prospect that you are less risky than staying anchored to their existing status quo.

This is exactly where we immediately run into our human nature.

Why is that status quo such a powerful enemy?

We are wired for consistency and for familiarity. We dislike change. Not because we don’t like things getting better but because change always brings uncertainty. And with uncertainty, it feels like we are at risk.

This is the status quo bias. It’s deep in cognitive psychology.

This is an irony but it says the pain of losing a familiar inefficiency feels worse than the possibility of gaining something better.

WoW! And hence comes the phrase “a known devil is better than an unknown savior.”

Drama at its peak!

Even if the new solution is better on paper, people feel safer dealing with the unknown consequences of a new system.

This is where most sales reps accept their defeat. It’s not wrong. They don’t see through that. That’s their limitation. They become the victims of the status quo.

I became one too.

So if the prospect already has an effect of anchoring to status quo, that means we have to completely reframe what we are actually offering.

What are we selling if it’s not about the change?

Every one of us has to internalize this idea: in sales we are not selling the thing itself. We are not selling the software feature, the new API, the piece of machinery. No!

We are selling the result, the outcomes that thing/feature enables. Think about selling as an advanced logistics software to a shipping company. The product description is full of features but the sales promise is:

“We guarantee you can cut your average dispatch time by 15%. This will lead you to reduce late fees, cut costly penalties, and boost your Q4 Net Promoter Score”

The outcome is what we are selling: emotional security, financial clarity, a competitive edge. But not the feature and definitely not the code. So that’s what you sell—the outcome

So if the real product is the outcome, then the salesperson’s identity has to shift too, right?

We have to move past being a problem solver.

Why?

Because problem-solving happens after the contract is signed, after the client buys, and after the client implements the solution. The fundamental and the most important skill you need to have before the sale is “problem finding”.

Okay let me explain that in detail. It means we do not push for answers but we develop an approach that will help us guide the prospect. It will help us discover problems and challenges that they didn’t even realize they had in the first place or helps them confront the sometimes catastrophic consequences of their current inaction.

Yes that sounds provocative. Are we talking about manufacturing a fake pain here or exposing a pain that’s already there but may be hidden and the customer doesn’t know?

We want to definitely expose the gap, not create from thin air. So we start using questions to create that necessary internal tension.

Now let’s go to a classic insurance sales, it’s pure change management. A problem finder doesn’t jump into pitching policy features. No way! The insurance prospect will kick you out of the room.

First you start a dialogue one dialogue that is designed to force the prospect to visualize the real outcome of doing nothing.

It has to be designed in a way that the prospect imagines an urgent situation for example, “if you were to die three days from now,” who actually writes the cheque for the funeral costs or for the outstanding mortgage or for the kid’s tuition.

Can you walk me through that meeting with the funeral director and what does that look like for your spouse?

This question definitely forces you to picture it. The question forces the prospect to see it and to feel the financial impact and the stress, which creates a critical gap between their current state (in vague comfort) and the necessary future state protection Without that generated pain, the urgency needed to overcome the risk of the status quo, it never materializes.

So problem finding is about making the consequence of not buying your thing visible and visceral even.

Some high agency reps understand this. They know that friction is required to generate movement and if you don’t create that friction, the easiest decision for the client and the most comfortable decision is to always be the same and do nothing.

Okay this psychological groundwork is vital for us to become the right salespeople. But how do we actually apply this when the stakes are high? Reading an article like this seems easy but in reality selling disruptive technology is a nightmare.

This is where advanced consultative dialogue comes into play. We need to start by defining what we even mean by disruption here and it has to be more than a new gadget or an extra feature.

Disruptive innovation is different from sustaining innovation. It’s often more than a new product. It can create new markets or shift existing markets into a new direction. It offers simpler and more accessible sometimes completely out-of-the-box solutions. Often to an emerging group of customers who are currently unaware of the big challenges looming on their horizon.

And because the risk profile is so high you’re asking them to change how they operate. You have to create something called a compelling buying vision.

This is not your company vision.

This vision needs to be a cohesive picture. It has to unite:

• The customer’s high-level goals

• Those challenges you helped them uncover

• Their perception of the inherent risk involved in making this fundamental shift

All has to come together.

So how do you build that vision? The first essential skill is to develop an incisive questioning strategy. This can’t be the standard laundry list of discovery questions we always do. We know that they don’t work most of the time. This strategy is designed to highlight those unknown needs and opportunities your competitors missed because they are following the book of the old days. Often because these seem to be too costly or too complex or too difficult to uncover.

So how do you execute that? What is the key?

Prioritization is key.

Any questions that you can answer through quick research, company size, basic org structure, recent news, signals that work for the company before the call. Don’t waste their time. Get all data with you even before you reach out to the client. With AI you can do this at hyper-speed.

And why are we doing this? Because the limited time with a client we have has to be reserved only for detailed high-impact questions that can dig deep.

What does a researchable question and an incisive one look like?

A researchable question is “how many warehouses do you operate?” It’s simple fact-finding which you can use Google or Perplexity to find.

An incisive question, the one which is designed to create the friction we were talking about, it goes something like this:

“If your main competitor manages to shave 30 minutes of their final mile delivery within the next 12 months, what specific internal systems would you use would become your biggest strategic liability?”

This forces them to look towards an uncertain future one they are not sure about. And that’s exactly where disruptive solutions live. The questioning has to explore not the potential for future needs but also those tricky stakeholder dynamics which boil within the company along with them: the fears, their current needs and goals. You have to get to them.

This requires a lot of agility while you are questioning and in high-stakes conversations you need a very high degree of situational awareness to have high agency right there in that moment.

So if a customer mentions something a bit tangential, a pain point in their billing system, when you are there to talk about logistics, you don’t dismiss it but you encourage them to expand on it. You might say something like, “Tell me more about that.”

It might be the key to broadening the scope of the sale. It might help you identify the real champion in the room. Or it might uncover a completely separate organizational problem that your solution portfolio can address down the line.

So what does this do? It shows you are listening for the whole picture, the real organizational truth, and not the problem you came in expecting to make them buy whatever you offer. Not a pre-packaged problem that you imagined by doing some data digging.

The second skill flows from this question: the need to assert a point of view and address risks. Now if you are challenged in the status quo, you need to be ready to challenge their current thinking using a contrast. And this contrast has to be your original.

Because the inertia for contrasting and overcoming the current thinking is high. It has to be balanced with professional confidence and detachment.

There are three techniques to do this:

The first is Symptoms vs. root causes. You invite the customer to consider whatever based on what you’ve shared and these organizations treat the symptom like a concept. Increasing over time hours rather than digging into the root cause which often is a real-time inventory visibility issue. Are we focusing too much on the symptom here? This is where you need to shift their focus.

The second is the financial contrast: status quo vs. opportunity costs. This one illuminates often hidden costs of doing nothing. Inaction is not free. For example in the SaaS world, if a company delays adopting a new platform by six months, the opportunity cost isn’t the software price tag. It’s those six months they missed where their data could have been unified, preventing three separate teams from making three costly strategic mistakes because they weren’t seeing the same picture. And you illustrate that choosing no change often carries equal or even greater costs, tangible and intangible, that can actually harm the company than adopting the solution.

The third one is called the “past Fuji contrast.” Yes this is essential when you are selling an innovation that changes the operating environment. You have to help the customer see the challenges and opportunities they will face in the future won’t look like the ones from the past.

And how do you do that? Well if you are selling say AI-driven personalized marketing tools, you can argue that their past challenges may have been around optimizing ad spend. But ads are becoming obsolete because the future challenge is not about reactive AV testing anymore; it’s about leveraging predictive behavior models. And this kind of contrast makes their current status quo obsolete. It forces them to rethink.

What about the risk itself that we mention?

It feels counterintuitive to raise risks early to build momentum.

It does.

Risk is a powerful driver of momentum if you manage it. And high agency reps approach it with that balance.

If you wait for the customer to bring up major implementation risks in the final week, it’s a disaster. Leading to deal derailing objections.

The effective way is to address them early on and say, “based on our experience with companies your size, integrating with your existing legacy ERP system, well, it will likely present challenge X”.

And then, say with a pause “here’s our explicit action plan for addressing that threat head on and ensuring minimal downtime.”

So every identified risk comes paired with a plan. An explicit detailed action plan to counter all threats always builds trust. It shows you have thought through and it keeps the momentum moving forward, rather than letting fear stall the process.

The third big skill is co-creating the future state, which is called complete situational fluency. The emphasis here is focusing the dialogue on diagnosing the challenge, not highlighting solution features.

The sales conversation, should be 80% devoted to exploring the complexity of their challenge. Before you can even begin to paint that vision of the future state, you must have captured the complete details of their current state.

The captured notes has to include both the hard numbers and the softer stuff. The quantitative factors like the measurable pain points like cost overruns, increased customer churn, things you can put a number on, and the vital qualitative factors like the stress on the IT team, the fear of departmental redundancy floating around, or the general morale decay that comes from working with clunky, inefficient systems. Those non-measurable pains are often as powerful.

This situational fluency, has to extend beyond the company’s pain points, it’s about the people involved.

In any complex B2B sale, you’re not selling to some monolithic company. You’re facilitating a complex group consensus towards making a change. Situational fluency is only achieved when your selling process addresses the individual leanings, the specific fears, the unique goals of each key member of that stakeholder group.

Remember that different people care about different things.

The CFO cares about measurable ROI and risk mitigation. The head of operations care about seamless implementation and reducing complexity for their teams. The end user wants something that makes their day-to-day job effortless. You have to be fluent in the language of all three, and more, and integrate all those perspectives into that co-created future vision.

2. The advance dialogue skills

This is the junction where human expertise meets the accelerating pace of technology, starting with that critical moment of disarming the prospect.

This is where human skill remains paramount.

The first, 7 to 12 seconds of any sales call, they’re decisive. If you come across as too aggressive or too attached to getting the deal, or, too needy, the prospect immediately throws up shields.

They go into a protective fight or flight mode, and that triggers all the surface level resistance. Vague answers, non-committal agreement, and those common stalls like, I need to think it over. You have to drop that sales resistance right away.

The immediate strategy is to put in place the neutral detached approach.

How do you balance that necessary neutrality with the confidence you need for a high stakes deal? Seems tricky.

It’s a paradox, isn’t it?

The amateur reps say, “I know we can help you and here’s why” and that screams desperation.

The detached approach demonstrates collective confidence, but it does it by adopting an unbiased stance. You might start a call with something like, “you know, based on the internal homework we’ve done, I’m actually not yet convinced we’re the right fit here, but I’m hoping these next 15 minutes will help clarify if there’s a genuine opportunity for us to partner.”

That takes the pressure off immediately.

The chance of the prospect dropping their guard is high because you’ve signaled you were willing to walk away. You’re positioning yourself as an aim advisor, not some desperate vendor trying to hit a quota.

This shift in perception, triggers curiosity. The prospect almost starts selling themselves on why they might need to talk to you instead of defending their current situation.

When you appear relaxed, detached, they perceive that you must have something valuable, even provocative, to discuss. Because you’re not acting like every other salesperson who assures them they can solve all their problems. It acts as an immediate filter. It separates the high-value advisor from the basic product pusher.

This isn’t about having a good script, it’s beyond the actual words you use, you need to develop an incredible influence of verbal micro skills.

It’s about the deliberate strategy behind your delivery, your tonality, your use of verbal pausing, your pace, your inflection. These are the skills you use to paint pictures and influence action, especially in what might otherwise be a pretty dull meeting.

For example, think about using a downward inflection when you’re stating a diagnostic observation. It conveys authority, a sense of control. It guides the listener. More rapid, excited speech. That should be reserved for painting the vision of the future state, generating energy and possibility.

The verbal pauses are powerful. When you deliver one of those high-impact, incisive questions we talked about, a deliberate, two-second pause after the question. It forces the prospect to actually confront the visualization you asked them to create. It stops them from giving a quick road answer. This combination of tonality, pacing, pausing, these verbal micro skills, that’s what turns mere words, information transfer, into a powerful evocative force, something that captures their imagination and actually drives them towards taking action.

This mastery of the human element, the delivery, the psychology is what preserves the human seller’s value, even with the rise of AI-guided selling. The seller’s role is shifting, becoming more of a sense-making facilitator.

We’re not competing with AI anymore. We’re learning to pilot it. AI’s central function in the whole go-to-market model is shifting. It’s moving away from increasing sales team efficiency towards making the buying process effortless for the customer and accelerating their realization of impact.

AI handles the complexity. So the human can focus on the high-agency stuff. nuanced decision making, relationship building, dealing with ambiguity.

And we’re seeing tangible examples of this AI in action now, providing real-time contextual guidance, acting like a true co-pilot.

Think about preparing for an important follow-up meeting. The AI scans the client’s public engagement history and pings the rep in real-time. The key decision-maker spent the last 48 hours researching Competitor X’s specific features set online.

That’s immediately actionable intelligence.

It immediately tells you, and the need to include some tailored competitive content in this discussion or consider preparing for a meeting with a new group of stakeholders.

The A.I. can assess their roles, their likely technical depth based on past interactions, historical conversation data, and then it suggests which slides to use or what conversational talking points are likely to resonate best with that specific audience.

It’s collaborative intelligence. But getting these amazing systems actually adopted and scaled, that’s where implementation often hits the hard wall of internal reality.

What are the big blockers?

Research highlights significant internal friction points. About 38.5% of surveyed companies say they are scaling AI in sales, The number one biggest internal blocker, cited by almost 35%, 34.6%, is the lack of integrated data.

Data silos!

And following behind that is change resistance within the sales teams themselves at 31%, 30.8%. This confirms it. You can have the best tools in the world, but if they’re operating in separate data silos, they still create operational friction, and that kills velocity.

The resistance among the teams, that links back to something called the technology acceptance model, TAM. We should clarify what TAM means here.

TAM is a critical psychological framework for understanding technology adoption. It dictates that for any sales professional to embrace a new technology like AI, they have to perceive two key things.

First, the AI must be useful. It should enhance their performance. It helps them hit quota faster or increases their average deal size, something tangible.

Second, it has to be perceived as easy to use, effortless. No clunky interfaces or extra steps.

It needs to integrate into their daily workflow. If the AI adds cumbersome steps or requires tons of manual data entry, the sales team will find ways to bypass it. Doesn’t matter how intelligent it is underneath. You know, the high agency rep sees AI as leverage, as a tool. The low agency rep often sees it as surveillance or more busy work.

Which makes sense, the top priorities people see for AI transformation reflect that need for usefulness and ease.

The functions seen as most right for AI transformation are the ones that eat up the most time, but need the least high-agency human intervention. Number one is lead generation and scoring, 30.8%.

Automating the top of the funnel.

And number two is customer engagement and nurturing, 26.9%. automating the middle. This shows a clear focus on using AI to handle the volume and the repetitive tasks, freeing up the human expert for those high stakes, nuanced activities like problem finding and building consensus among stakeholders.

3. The broader strategic movement

Let’s take a case of B2B SaaS market, a logistics case study, as a kind of blueprint for how these complex, high-integration solutions approach their go-to-market.

Analyzing B2B strategy often uses an expanded version of the traditional marketing mix, you know, the four P’s. Well, sometimes it’s extended to eight elements. Product, price, place, promotion, people, process, productivity, and quality, and physical environment.

Physical environment is less relevant for cloud software. When we look at the logistics sector, we see some immediate interesting strategic differences from, say, consumer sauce.

Starting with product and promotion, the emphasis seems to be on functional attributes, easiness, scalability.

The product itself gets sold on its core SaaS advantages, easiness, scalability, flexibility. But the promotion strategy is crucial here. They tend to focus on generating content of general industry subjects, things like advanced logistics concepts, upcoming regulatory changes, supply chain optimization strategies.

Why not talk about their features?

Because they need to promote general expertise first. Build trust. Remember, they’re often selling a complex, multi-year integration project. You don’t buy that off the shelf. You buy it from someone you trust, understands your industry, not their own software.

A major strategic difference compared to typical consumer or even small business SaaS models, especially around product trials.

That’s a critical differentiator. Free trials are actually pretty uncommon in these complex vertical niches like logistic SaaS. Infrastructure. These solutions, they need significant configuration. They need deep integration with adjacent software, especially the company’s ERP system, their Enterprise Resource Planning Platform.

The big core system managing finance HR supply chain.

The centralized nervous system of the business. So handing over a login for a logistics tool that needs to talk with, say, a decade-old, customized ERP instance, it provides zero immediate utility to the potential buyer. It won’t work out of the box.

Manned online demonstrations gets preferred. It allows the vendor to control the narrative, show potential integration capabilities, and tailor the demo to the specific prospect’s environment, rather than hoping a trial works.

Given that complexity, how does the pricing usually work?

Is it big upfront costs?

Pricing generally aligns with the standard SaaS model. Low entry cost and pay-as-you-use. This means a fixed monthly subscription fee that covers the core service, support, etc., combined with a transaction-based fee.

It scales. (Satya Nadella says SaaS is dying, true. But Microsoft still sells SaaS, what a hypocrite.

It scales with the customer’s usage volume. It’s based on the number of shipments managed, the number of active users, something like that. This provides the scalability needed to attract both mid-market companies and large enterprises. And because the solution requires that fundamental integration to even function, the Freemium model offering a free basic tier isn’t applicable in this complex niche.

Now, the cloud models suggest global reach, but the strategic reality involves geographical constraints limiting the actual market.

This is where infrastructure kind of overrides the theoretical market reach. Sure, the cloud gives you the potential place for global distribution, but your actual market reach is often constrained by the network of required integrations.

How so? Well, if your SaaS product helps manage shipping, let’s say, it has to connect with countless local ERP systems, different local custom systems, thousands of distinct local carriers in every single country you want to operate in.

That sounds like a nightmare to maintain?

It’s a huge operational burden. Maintaining and updating those thousands of unique APIs, staying on top of local regulatory compliance. It limits market entry far more than the core technology itself. You can’t launch globally. You have to build out that local connectivity market by market.

This heavy emphasis on integration brings us right back to that internal data challenge we discussed. The data and integration imperative. The sources argue that sophisticated organizations have to move beyond having good tools in silos.

Yeah, the critical realization here is that even great tools operating in silos are, well, they’re still silos. When your CRM system, your analytics dashboards, your sales engagement platforms, your customer service system, When they don’t talk to each other in real time, sales velocity stalls.

And the customer feels it.

The customer journey becomes disjointed. They end up repeating information or they experience inconsistencies between what sales promised and what service delivers. This was started by 27 percent of organizations as a top challenge, that inconsistent experience.

The solution isn’t buying yet another AI tool, but focusing on orchestration.

What’s needed is what you might call an intelligent glue layer. It’s a custom integration architecture, but it’s designed not to shuttle data back and forth, but to actually structure it, make it actionable across different departments in real time.

Everyone’s working from the same playbook.

This architecture allows sales, marketing, and customer experience, CX teams, to all draw from a unified structured data layer. It’s about operationalizing those data flows. So for example, as soon as a deal closes, the implementation team is notified of that client’s biggest documented quantitative pain points and their qualitative fears that came up during the sales process.

That allows for a coordinated seamless handoff.

This integrated infrastructure, it transforms customer experience CX into a genuine revenue enabler, right? Not a cost center.

That’s the strategic lever. CX is no longer a post sales cost center focused on closing support tickets. It’s a strategic element that determines recurring revenue and customer lifetime value. Loyalty gets built when those ambitious promises made by the sales team are actually delivered with operational clarity and consistency post sale.

The metrics need to change too.

Revenue teams must demand metrics that measure trust and actual outcomes. Things like average onboarding time, future adoption rates, leading indicators of renewal risk, not internal activity volumes like number of calls made or response times. When that entire GTM engine gets orchestrated, the customer doesn’t stay. They grow with you. They become advocates. And that proves the long-term value of the solution.

It’s definitely a complex environment out there. It demands high skill levels, advanced tools, sophisticated data infrastructure. Yet, there’s one central human element that we kind of keep circling back to, don’t we? The multiplier. The thing that determines the success of every strategy, the adoption of every tool.

And that final critical ingredient is the high agency mindset.

It means viewing life as something you do that you are the protagonist, you know, the hero, the author of your own story. You believe you have great control and responsibility over what happens. It’s the polar opposite of the low agency mindset, which sees itself as a victim, a victim of circumstances or market conditions or bad luck. Always externalizing.

And this high agency mindset, it’s the ultimate differentiator for the modern sales professional. It governs how they react to all the inevitable friction and setbacks in the role.

A high agency rep, they seek out difficult feedback. They treat a lost deal not as a personal failure, but as structured data, something to analyze, to learn from, to improve their incisive questioning strategy next time. They don’t rationalize the failure away, blaming the customer or the product.

It clarifies their role and responsibility. And that clarity reduces procrastination, indecision. It makes them the master of these sophisticated systems and strategies we’ve been talking about, not some reactive supporting character stuck within them.

Take this idea and apply it. Consider everything we’ve discussed today, challenging the status quo, the incisive questioning, using AI as a co-pilot, the need for orchestration.