Ep. 180 - Your SaaS Buyer Doesn’t Need Convincing—They Need Confidence

Guest: Brent Adamson, Co-Author of The Framemaking Sale & Co-Founder of A to B Insight

SaaS sales teams obsess over beating competitors—but the real battle isn’t across the table. It’s in the buyer’s mind.

In this episode, Brent Adamson—co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer and Co-Founder of A to B Insight—joins host Ken Lempit to reveal why most SaaS deals are lost to no decision at all, and how his new book, The Framemaking Sale, helps buyers build the confidence to act. 

Brent explains how the sales playbook has evolved from “teach them what to think” to “help them trust themselves”—and why the future of B2B growth depends on changing how we sell, not what we sell.

Key insights from this episode:

• Why no decision—not competitors—is killing SaaS deals
• How to turn buyer anxiety into deal confidence
• Why “trusted advisor” means helping customers trust themselves
• How marketing and sales can guide smarter, faster SaaS buying
• The mindset shift every B2B sales leader needs now

If you’re a B2B SaaS CRO, CMO, or founder looking to increase close rates, reenergize your go-to-market, and win against the status quo, this conversation will change how you think about selling.

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Transcript

Ken Lempit: Welcome to SaaS Backwards, a podcast that helps SaaS and AI firms, CEOs, and go-to-market leaders, accelerate growth and enhance profitability. My guest today is Brent Adamson, co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer, two of the most influential books ever written about B2B sales and marketing.

Brent's new firm, A to B Insight, and his latest book, The Framemaking Sale, take that thinking to the next level. Instead of teaching customers what to think, Brent argues that the real opportunity lies in helping them build the confidence to make a decision. We'll dig into how his ideas have evolved in the two years since he last appeared on the pod, what Framemaking means in practice, and why your biggest competitor isn't another vendor.

It's no decision at all. So let's get into it. Hey, Brent, welcome to the podcast.

[00:01:00] Brent Adamson: It's good to be back, Ken. How are you, man?

[00:01:03] Ken Lempit: Life is good. Life is good. And before we jump in, though, I'd love you to tell us something we can't learn about you from your LinkedIn profile or the stuff in your books.

[00:01:14] Brent Adamson: Oh, wow. I was going to go something on my LinkedIn profile, so I didn't know this was. So, well, let me tell you where I was going to go because it's on my LinkedIn profile, but it might not, it's probably something one skims over, but I've got 20, 25 years of doing this, which this being researching, studying, talking, writing, speaking about sales, marketing, go to market, buying. Before that, though, I had a whole nother career for about 15 years.

I was an academic at both as training as a grad student and getting a PhD and then teaching on tenure track at Michigan state as a German professor. So, weirdly enough I had this really massive career switch you know, 15, you know, decade and a half into my career, it's mid thirties where I went from learning, studying, talking about, teaching about You know, the accusative case and the dative case and German language and foreign language acquisition and teacher training to sales and marketing, because obviously that makes sense, but funny enough, and what's actually not on the LinkedIn profile is much of what is in the Framemaking Sale, not in terms of data or research or up to date sort of thinking around sales. But some of the core ideas of sort of the spirit of what's there, are based on my lived experience of one is a trainer of teachers, but two is, someone who had to make this crazy career switch from teaching German class one day and helping heads of sales with our key account programs next, which was kind of a wild

transition to go through.

[00:02:28] Ken Lempit: Well, you know, it begs the question, what instigated the change?

[00:02:32] Brent Adamson: Money. There was a lot more to it than that, but you know, as a liberal arts professor and it took me, you know, 10, 11 years of graduate school and halfway to tenure track before me, for me to fully realize the, wow, you can't actually, and not that I was ever trying to get rich and goodness knows I'm certainly not rich today but the, I'll just put numbers to it.

My starting salary offer this is 1999, I guess was the $39000 a year,

and I felt pretty great because I had negotiated them up to 40. And what's interesting is when you're a tenure track professor, you can expect two promotions across a 30 year career. ones from assistant to associate professor, that's when you tenure, and, another one from associate to full, which usually happens somewhere in your late forties, early fifties.

And then you just kind of ride it out and become an 80 year old professor who never stops teaching. there's a longer story, which is not the point of today's podcast about passion, about what you're doing and what gets you excited and all the kinds of things that keep people motivated, but there is the one quick thought though, is for those out there may be pursuing something like this.

 I was a grad student and I started a PhD program. And at some point, Ken, I felt like I had to finish it because I started it. And, and, you know, when you're six years in and you're kind of wondering, I, I'm just, you know, you already are beginning to feel instinctively like, I'm not sure this is the right place for me to go, but gosh, darn it.

[00:03:47] Brent Adamson: You know, it's one of my Midwestern values now is raised. It's like, you start something, you finish it. And so I did, and thus sort of increasing my misery as I went, to the point where it hit a breaking point. So I went to business school and got an MB at the University of Michigan while I was teaching at Michigan State.

And my very first class was economics. And the very first concept in my economics class was sunk cost theory. And I'm sitting there and the professor is teaching about a sunk cost theory. And I'm just sitting here shaking my head saying idiot, idiot. But anyway, so there you go. That's my, that's not on my LinkedIn

[00:04:14] Ken Lempit: I think one of the greatest things we can impart is a life lesson, and Sunk Cost. is a huge life lesson. So,

[00:04:21] Brent Adamson: Yep, it sure is, right? It's like, you just got to let it go. It's like, no, I started this. I'm going to finish it. Gosh darn it. Cause that's how I was raised. And it's like, well, that was a really bad idea.

[00:04:31] Ken Lempit: and I think, you know, whether you're talking about your personal or professional life, right? So in your personal life, some relationships just are meant to, you know, kind of fizzle out or die cataclysmically. And things we do in our business life, whether entrepreneuring or in our career also, you know, sometimes you just need to move on.

[00:04:52] Brent Adamson: Hey, you know, watch me bring this full circle because the same is true. I mean, this sounds tongue in cheek and it kind of is, but it kind of isn't. The same goes for deal qualification, right? I mean, at some point after you've been pursuing, I knew a head, a sales rep at our company who was selling to a great big telecom.

Massive company, multimillion dollar deal. He was two years into it and he just couldn't give up. And there was no way that deal was ever going to close, but he just couldn't stop pouring heart and soul and hours into this deal. And at some point, you know, it, you just have to say, enough.

You got to move on. But it's so hard because it's a lesson we have to learn in relationships, to your point, and careers, and deals.

[00:05:28] Ken Lempit: And, you know, it's interesting, and I want to go a little deeper on the status of a deal and the, you know, being honest with yourself about a deal, and I think this will put us right into the podcast episode, is that, the no decision is almost never tracked by people in their CRMs, right?

So they're, pointing fingers at all kinds of other things besides no decision. And I think your data and others I've read is that like 40 to 60 percent of deals that don't close to status quo, right?

[00:06:00] Brent Adamson: And what's interesting is you could actually break that out and sort of where we talk a lot in Framemaking Sale. we don't get into no decision criteria in detail, but you know, there's no decision because they were happy with the status quo. No decision because they became overwhelmed.

There's no decision because they couldn't align on your solution versus a competitor.

There's No decision because they couldn't align on the problem they were even trying to solve in the first place. I'm sure you and I, if we had to, or wanted to, could brainstorm 20 different root causes of no decision, and each one would actually be distinct, and more importantly, the strategy for addressing each one would probably be a little bit different. And so to your point is we don't even track it at all, let alone at this level of, granularity that would allow us to actually begin to think about what do we do about it?

[00:06:38] Ken Lempit: And I brought it up only because I think that, you know, that's really germane to the conversation I'd like to have with you. You know, so the work at A to B Insight your relatively new company and this Framemaking Sale concept, it builds on, but also departs a bit from the Challenger concepts that a lot of us lean on.

You know, I think we've confessed to you that we use the Challenger customer As a way to communicate with our clients and prospects, how they might approach their messaging and go to market. But I'd love you to start us off by telling us how your thinking has evolved from, you know, the commercial teaching, teaching for differentiation to helping buyers build decision confidence.

Cause I think certainly part of the reason we lose to no decision has to be because we don't feel good about making the decision.

[00:07:25] Brent Adamson: 100%. And we, and that's exactly what we see in the data. So just, I won't do a long version of this but it's, it might be helpful to your listeners to understand. So when we wrote the Challenger work, both Challenger Sale and Challenger Customer, more importantly, the research that led to those books, we were at a company called CEB or Corporate Executive Board, as some will know that CEB was eventually bought by Gartner in about 20, I guess it was 2018, I think 2019, somewhere around in there.

 and at that point. The Challenger IP franchise, that was what we used to call it, sort of this body of work, had become actually a quite successful and large training company. Now, I sat, continue to sit on the research side of things at CB, where we continued to sort of study and find new ideas while my colleagues, and frankly, good friends, were out there

building and running this training company. When Gartner took over CEB, they looked at this challenger training company and said, great business, but that's not the business we want to be in. So they spun it off to PE. And all the IP, everything went with it. I had a choice to make at that point. And I ultimately chose to stay at Gartner because they were doing what I feel is sort of my bread and butter, which is researching the heck out of big, hard problems and trying to understand new answers that no one thought to ask.

Right? So at that point, I officially became almost quote unquote divorced, amicably from the Challenger IP. So it's, and some will know, of course, it was recently then bought by the Richardson sales training company. So, everything Challenger related is now owned by Richardson and I have no official affiliation to Challenger other than my name being on the book, but I still absolutely believe in it.

But, the reason I say all that is because what happened in the interim, Ken is staying on the research team with people like Nick Toman and others who were involved in a lot of these projects. We continue to do more research. We continue to ask really hard questions and find really big answers. And one of the things we began to really study after all the Challenger books were out was this question of what is it that needs to happen inside of a B2B purchase in order to increase the likelihood of customers buying what we call a high quality, low regret deal.

That is a deal where the customer doesn't settle for status quo, doesn't settle for the pilot, but buys the bigger solution with the broader scope at the higher price point. And almost paradoxically feels good about it. They have low regret at the same time, which is a bit of a unicorn. And in continuing that research and this research that we did for over the course of several years and just massive amounts of B2B surveys.

So that is surveys of B2B buyers involved in complex purchases. And some work that we still continue today. And some of the, and I'm sure over at Gartner, there's others still doing versions of But one of the things that we found is this is really interesting finding about customer confidence, which I can unpack for you.

But essentially the, the point being Ken is like the Challenger books became sort of this point in time of what we saw at that point, but then we just kept on learning. And so the Framemaking Sale is really a sort of catch up of everything that I've learned both at CB Gartner to some degree and everything I've learned since then in my sort of journeys afterwards and putting it all together in sort of a, hopefully a compelling package to kind of give you a sense of where we are today and B2B buying and selling.

[00:10:14] Ken Lempit: Yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, I think that from what I understand so far, nothing contradicts the challenger concepts, right? It's sort of further elaboration and some new questions and answers. That's how I see it too.

[00:10:27] Brent Adamson: Yeah. It's, you know, it's the, we're all trained today to say yes and not yes but yes and, so it's kind of a yes and sort of thing. However, the reality is, and again, I'm still a big, world's biggest fan of Challenger, but the world in which we wrote Challenger, believe it or not, it's hard to believe Ken for people like you and me because we've been around for a while.

No, I put you in that bucket, I hope that's okay. That was 15 years ago. I mean, it was a long time ago and the world is just different today, right? The certainly B2B buying is radically different today than it was in 2009 when we first did that research. And so I think in many ways, Challenger, while I still believe in it, I think is the right answer in a lot of ways.

It just plays out in a very different way today. And if we don't sort of add this new sort of dimension, it actually is going to, I think, prove to be significantly less helpful because it's less differentiated than it was when it first came out, when it was highly differentiated.

[00:11:14] Ken Lempit: So let's talk about, you know, the business at hand here, you know, your, your current work. So we have this thing we're calling Framemaking, which is helping prospects to arrive at a decision. But you call it really a mindset and you're not really proposing it as a methodology. So can you help us understand it at a little, a a little more depth?

And what does that look like for practitioners in sales and marketing who are trying to help their customers make the better decisions and regret free decisions?

[00:11:51] Brent Adamson: So let me unpack it, we'll maybe take a step back, we can unpack it sort of step by step, just jump in wherever you want, and we'll kind of go, because there's lots of different directions we can take that question, hopefully, to me they're all fascinating, but they may be, some may be less or more urgent or interesting to you. So if we go back to where I left off, you know, we're studying this really big question of what are the things that need to happen to drive up the likelihood of a high quality, low regret deal.

The single biggest factor by far, Ken, that we found in all that research. And by far it's, you know, everything else is like, you know, a hundred percent increase if that, you know, like the really big impacts that a lot of the, some of the challenger stuff is like, you know, it can almost double the likelihood of a high quality, low regret deal.

There's this one attribute that we found that was by far bigger than everything else. It wasn't like a hundred percent increase. It was a, it was an almost a thousand percent increase. It was an order of magnitude. And that was simply the degree to which customers report a high level of confidence in the decision they're making on behalf of their company.

So we came to call this decision confidence. And in many ways, this is the, sort of the pivot point or the core concept of the entire book, The Framemaking Sale is that the single biggest driver of a high quality, lower grade deal is the degree to which customers report a high level of confidence in the decision that they're making.

Now there's two things about this that are really important that are critical for the context of Framemaking. Number one is, I find when, particularly when CEOs see this, they say, no, absolutely. That's why customers, if we're going to solve for customer's confidence, which is exactly what this Adamson guy

talking so fast is what he says, then that's why we need to make sure our customers are confident in our product and our people and our value. They have to be confident in our value. They have to be confident in our, in our trusted advisors. And while that may be true, that's not what the data says, which is to say, it's not what this confidence is about. When you unpack it,

which you find is the single biggest driver of high quality, lower great deal. This thing about decision confidence is actually not supplier centric, but supplier agnostic. It's from a customer's perspective. It's things like how confident are we that we even ask the right questions in the first place?

And how confident are we that we've done enough research? How confident are we that we even looked at the right alternatives? Which In a world like today where there's a massive amount of information more than ever before, particularly with AI and things are changing so fast, it's really hard to feel confident in any of those things.

And what you find then is that the single biggest driver of a high quality, low regret deal isn't about customer supplier perception, it's about their self perception. And that's the thing that launched the book. And that's, we can come back and talk about that, but to get to Framemaking, the reason why all that matters is because of, okay, if it's customer self confidence, it matters above all else.

So how are they doing? Right? So where are customers? And what we find is customer self confidence is under massive pressure across at least four different challenges that we talk about in the book. One is decision complexity. Just how hard it's become to maneuver or navigate a purchase decision inside your own organization.

It's decision complexity, information overload, objective misalignment, just getting all those different stakeholders to align, not on how great your solution is, but just what are they even trying to do in the first place? And then outcome uncertainty, which is yes, you've driven great value for lots of other companies, but I don't know that we'll do it here because we'll find some way to screw this up.

So, customers just lack confidence in their ability to navigate decisions, make sense out of information, align with each other, and achieve results. Irrespective of you. Not because of you, but irrespective of you. And so when you start thinking about all those different ways in which customers are overwhelmed, this gets us then to the Framemaking solution, which is what if our opportunity, what if our role as a seller, was to help customers feel more confident, not so much in us, but in themselves, to navigate decisions, to make sense of information, to align with each other and to realize results.

to do that, you take something big, hard, and overwhelming, and you, narrow it down, you boil it down. You put sort of a frame around it, such that you allow your customers degrees of freedom to make their own decision because it's their confidence in themselves that matters, not you telling them what to do, but nonetheless, it makes that decision feel much more manageable and doable.

Such that they're more likely to decide something other than no decision at all. So that, that is it was the Burj Khalifa, but that's the elevator pitch for Framemaking and what it is.

[00:15:44] Ken Lempit: Well, I mean, I think that was a great way to set the table for the conversation. the thing I was thinking about as you were doing so was this requires a real shift in how the go to market team, not only manages their people and trains their people, but I think also, you know, if you're a sales leader, you have to look up and explain how you're going to be teaching your team to do the sales process.

Cause this is a very different, it's really an inside out kind of approach or, it's the dark mirror, you know, it's like, wait, you mean. We're going to teach these people how to make a good decision, not necessarily to our benefit. And hopefully, you know, we're there to collect some coin, right?

I mean, that's almost the skeptics view of it. But I think somewhere in there is the opportunity to become the trusted advisor, right?

[00:16:38] Brent Adamson: 100%. In fact, you know, all credit to Charlie Green, who's the author of the Trusted Advisor, one of the co authors of Trusted Advisor. And I, I talked to him the other day. It was actually the first time he and I had a chance to really meet and talk over, over Zoom. And I told him sort of what I was talking about, what I was working on, and just said, Hey, I'm gonna be out there talking about trust.

Are we aligned on how I'm talking about this? And he says, I probably articulate a little differently, but yeah, this is exactly sort of what we're talking about. We had such a fascinating conversation. And he said, you know, it's, it's it's almost like a good therapy session. And I've heard this from clients that we've shown Framemaking to.

It's like, you're asking us kind of be our customer's therapist. And it's like, kind of, you know, which is the, the reason why Charlie said it was like, you know, a good therapist will have an interaction with a client. In such a way that the client is the one that ultimately comes to their own decision about what they're going to do with and for themselves.

And what the therapist has done is just created a framework within which that decision has become doable and manageable for that client. And effectively we're talking, I don't know exactly the same, but you know, we're in the same ballpark. We're seeing, we're in the same planet when we talk about that in B2B, buying and selling,

because at the end of the day, I think, really, Ken, this is not so much a selling story or buying story. It's a human story of just how we, as humans, interact with each other. And and so, so you've got, there's a second question, We, I'm collecting pins. We've got the mindset versus methodology question. And then we've got the, how do I get paid for this question?

So let me put a pin on that because it's really important we come back to that. so One of the data points that we worked on at Gartner, it was really interesting. So how we actually opened the book is when we went out as part of that research, the last thing I was involved in, we asked customers, if you could, it was a hypothetical, if you could imagine a world where you could buy a complex solution without ever interacting with a sales professional at all.

Would you actually prefer that? And 75 percent of B2B buyers said, yes, right? 75 percent of B2B buyers said, I would love to be able to buy this solution without ever talking to a sales rep, because frankly, sales reps, they don't offer any value. It's just kind of like this hoop you forced me to go through that I don't really want to go through.

And when we showed that to heads of sales, they said, well, that may be true in general. But it doesn't apply to us because there's no way you can buy our solution without talking to our sales rep. It's just not, it's not possible. So we're just not seeing this. And to which I'd always say, hopefully respectfully, no, you don't understand.

We're not, this is not a description of what customers are doing. It's what they would prefer to be doing if they could. So in that story, there's this really interesting question of risk. Like when you've got such a big difference between customer reality and customer preference, that gap I think represents real risk that someone else could disrupt you pretty easily by just providing a better, more aligned customer buying experience.

[00:19:02] Ken Lempit: Well, I was going to say, this is a big opportunity, right? If this is this unmet aspiration, if not desire, and that data has been reported pretty consistently, right? I mean, there's There's a lot of, there's a lot of research saying, you know, 60, 70, 80 percent of sales completed before they want to talk to sales.

[00:19:22] Brent Adamson: Yeah.

[00:19:23] Ken Lempit: But it does create a huge opportunity to reimagine what is the role of the selling organization and how can they stand out in a positive way?

[00:19:33] Brent Adamson: Well, not only an opportunity, I would argue and not even a mandate, more like a, like, you better get on this, right? It's like, you know, one of the things we say in the book is, like, people said, maybe this is the death of sales as we know it. The way we look at it is, I don't know if it's death of sales that we, as we know it, but maybe it should be.

Which doesn't necessarily mean it's the death of sales altogether, right? Everyone thinks like this must equal the end of sales. I think it should just equal the end of sales as it's currently being practiced. Because the question we're so interested in is what would it take to be the one seller, the one sales team that customers actually do want to talk to?

And imagine they're now circling back. We start putting some of these threads together. What if your posture in working with customers, wasn't to get them to think better about you, to trust you, was actually to get them to think better about themselves, to get them to trust themselves.

It's very much like friendships. Like, you know, when I look in the mirror, I love that Ken because I love me when I'm around him. Do you know what I mean? It's like, it's a, how do I become the seller that shows up and interacts with customers such that customers feel better about themselves as a result of that interaction? And that's really what Framemaking is all about.

And that's why we call it a mindset as opposed to a methodology, right? I promise you, this book is, I was gonna say littered with, but that sounds derogatory, but it's like this pack, it's packed. This book is packed with tactics. I mean, and so in every chapter, in every one of these different challenges, we break it down to the very tactical level.

Here's things you can do. But I don't like the word methodology, Ken, because what I find, and I learned this from Challenger, Is that the word methodology over promises and under delivers, right? So you'd think the methodology sort of covers the waterfront of everything sales is supposed to be doing. And it's just, for what it's worth, Challenger was never meant to be a methodology either.

It's just the market kind of took it there. But I think the way to think about Framemaking is a mindset. It's like, what is it, what am I even here for? You know, what's my job? Or if you will, what's my opportunity? If I live in a world where nobody wants to talk to me, What can I do to be the one person people do want to talk to?

And that's not a follow this methodology. Step one is rather it's recalibrate your opportunity in your head, rethink, what are you even here for? And what if what you were here for is to help people feel great about the decisions they make and feel more confidence in themselves and you think, well, how the heck am I supposed to do that?

That's the book. But that's why I like this idea of mindset because it's really about purpose as much as it is about tactics. If that makes sense.

[00:21:45] Ken Lempit: Sure. And in fact I think marketing people are asking themselves the same question, right? If people don't want to fill out my form, if they don't want to click the book, a demo how do I impact, in a positive way, decision making, obviously, hopefully for my company, but understanding, for example, that resources like TrustRadius or Captera or G2 or even SoftwareAdvice are gonna intercept a lot of the information gathering and confidence building.

 How do we as marketers also respond to that changed environment? And so I think these things almost have to walk together. You know, that marketing has to be providing the truly useful resources that would in part enable a sales team to do as you suggest, right? We have to start building different things.

[00:22:40] Brent Adamson: 100%. And we, to be totally honest, and maybe fair to both the readers and to us as authors, we just barely touch on this in the book. And that was partly a practical decision, like, make the pain stop, I need this book to be done. And partly a, partly a question of, you know, just like, and we'll add another 80 pages at some point, you know, like. Publishers won't publish a book that long and no one will read it anyway.

So maybe there's a volume two someday. I don't know. So in the book, when we talk about Framemaking, we break Framemaking into sort of three steps.

We call it the three E's, like the letter E. Making it thus far easier, which is Establish, Engage, and Execute. So in Establish, if the whole idea of Framemaking is to essentially become a guide or a coach or a sherpa to your customer, to guide them through their process, to guide them through information, the first thing you have to do is establish or identify what is the framing, what is the coaching that I'm going to provide in the first place?

What is it customers don't fail to fully appreciate? Or what do they not know about sort of how to navigate this decision that they could or should know that would make their lives easier? And I think there, this is partly of the, and then there's Engage. How do I engage customers in a conversation that helps them understand the view and then how do I execute that sort of, that confidence creation across a broader group over time.

So Establish, Engage, Execute. And I think especially with Established, that's where marketing has a huge role to play, which is essentially re capturing or recalibrating customer understanding in a really completely different way. So here, let me give you a real practical example. So we all, particularly in the marketing side, we'll do things like customer testimonials.

And if we get really good ones, really happy ones, we'll do raving fans, right? But we find, we go out and we try to find all the customers and have them say really nice things about us and all the value they've achieved from us. So we can go Hey company, go over here to this company and say, look at all the amazing value that this other company got from us.

They love us, so you should love us too. So it's all, notice it's all about us, right? They love us, so you should love us too. But imagine instead of a customer, you know, a supplier centric customer testimony, maybe it's a supplier agnostic one. So what if I were to go find two or three or whatever the right number is, 10 or 50, the number of customers who've successfully managed to buy our solution.

And ask them a different question, which is irrespective of our solution. Hopefully you like it, great, okay, that's awesome. But okay. Which is, that is important. Don't get me wrong. But, if I were to ask that customer, in thinking back across the journey that you had to go on with your colleagues to land you to this place where you were able to finally buy this solution.

If you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently to make your life easier? What are the missteps along that buying journey that you made that you know, going back you probably would do it a little differently. Or if you were to give some advice to another company who about to go on the same buying journey, what advice would you give them to make their lives a little bit easier?

Capture that notice that's all supplier agnostic, and that becomes in the fodder for coaching because now I can either put that on a website as a buying guide. I can put that in the hands of my sellers and my sellers now and that's Establish. And Engage, my sellers can now sit down with customers and say, you know, in, in working with other customers like you, who've managed to buy the solution, one of the things that we've learned that it's really important to bring in procurement early, because when they usually get involved late, it blows everything up and everyone gets really frustrated.

We found that companies have managed to do this well, bring in procurement earlier, and when they do, there's three questions in particular that they're really getting after to work on with them. And here they are. That is a short example of Framemaking that we talk about in the book, but this idea of.

Team sport of marketing and sales, figuring out what is the raw material of the guidance of the framing that I can provide. And then there's, there's the other side of marketing, which is how, you know, if my sellers can do it in person, how might I do that through a digital experience? What's the kind of content that I could create self serve content that customers could use to essentially coaching guides, buying guides, diagnostics, frameworks, maturity models prioritization exercises, checklists that would help them understand, like.

Because think about even like a simple buying checklist, like a readiness. Are you ready for CRM? Here's the five question checklist. I'm making that up, right? But now I've got a checklist, like it's not a thousand things. It's a, it's a bounded number. So that's bounding. Maybe it's 5, maybe it's 10, maybe it's 15, but it's not 150 because that's overwhelming.

And maybe on that checklist are one or two things I would have never thought to think of. So that's prompting. So this is bounding and prompting become sort of real key elements of framing. But now I've got this little package, a checklist, which I can put in the hands of sellers. I can put in the hands of you know, put on my website and if I can back it by data and say a hundred other customers surveyed, tell us that these are the things that they wish they'd done differently.

Now I've got social proof. So now I got the one thing you want more than anything else, which is what other customers like me do. And now I can use that as a customer. I think, well, gosh, this is, I'm really glad I found this. It's helping me feel a lot more confident that I'm making a good decision.

[00:27:05] Ken Lempit: Yeah, I mean, that's a really interesting turn on the testimonial. And I think a great thing to sort of underline or highlight for listeners is to make the testimonial more about the decision process than just, you know, glorifying the vendor, right?

[00:27:24] Brent Adamson: Yeah, you know what, the classic one of these four challenges, it's in chapter six in the book, I don't know if anyone will ever remember it, it doesn't matter, but we talk about outcomes, and the fact that customers are uncertain about outcomes, and one of the things here is even in this raving fan world, Ken, you know, we'll have the You know, the ROI calculator, the TCO will say, look at all the amazing value that, so here's a company just like you.

And they realized a 10 percent increase in X over the last year. Like, so we'll lay out all the results and how they got there. We'll do the best practice. We run the webinars where they come on and share their amazing stories. We do the panel discussion or sales kickoff or whatever it is. And what I'm finding for a lot of customers, they'll look at that.

And it's not that they won't believe you. They will. They say, no, I totally believe that you had that amazing impact for this other company. I just don't know what will happen for us. Not because I doubt you. But because it doubt us. I doubt our he's like, we'll find some way to screw this up. Because we always do.

You know, because we are, we're all convinced we work at the world's most dysfunctional company, and I've become convinced we're all correct. So, so that's the really interesting question is, that we get after in this chapter of the book, is, it's not that how do I make customers more confident in my ability to deliver value, it's It's how do I make them more confident in their ability to realize the value that I'm delivering.

And it's a totally different kind of concept. And it comes, you have to come at it from a different perspective to make that happen.

[00:28:33] Ken Lempit: Is there, in your experience, a challenge for, you know, the go to market team to sell this kind of vision to the CEO, CFO, board?

[00:28:45] Brent Adamson: This is where, you know, if you asked about connections back to Challenger for me personally, this is the single biggest connection back to Challenger because it feels like, you know, Groundhog Day. It's a, you know, when Challenger hit in 2009, as you remember, It was a pretty disruptive idea. And, you know, I could put it in front of a sales enablement leader or some sales leaders or sales managers, but until I got in front of the CRO, we didn't have many CROs back then, but CSO, you know, the head of sales or, and ultimately the CEO, it was hard to get long term sustainable momentum around Challenger.

Until you get senior leadership buy in to say, you know, this is different, but this really matters. And I think Framemaking is going to be the exact same. I'm finding myself as best as I possibly can. That's why you and I are talking in front of your audience is that, senior leadership has to be bought into this because parts of it are going to feel a little bit counterintuitive.

And, you know, this whole idea of being more, not customer centric, but supplier agnostic feels really kind of strange at first, but it's, in a world where your customers don't want to talk to your people at all, it's like, well, what's your alternative? Do you know what I mean? It's, and customers are overwhelmed.

They don't want to talk to you for help, but they, but they need help. This feels like it's just the absolute right story for the right time, but we will need to get in front of senior leadership to get them bought in, I think.

[00:29:58] Ken Lempit: Yeah, I mean, I think that is the key to success here. You know, the higher up the sponsorship, the longer lived the program. Right.

[00:30:05] Brent Adamson: Yeah, and for anything, really, right?

[00:30:08] Ken Lempit: Yeah, so I think that people listening and reading the book, which I definitely would recommend. You have to be thinking about who are the people within your organization that have to buy in and sponsor a change in the way you execute the sales process.

[00:30:23] Brent Adamson: This, to bring it full circle then this then is that, you know, that we saw that pin about methodology. This is the other reason why posing it as a methodology feels not helpful. Because whenever you pose something as a methodology, it feels like it's replacing some other methodology. Like, we were just trained on Challenger.

It's like, I thought you wanted to be a Challenger. Now you want me to do Framemaking. So which is it? And the way I look at Framemaking is again, as a mindset is whatever you're doing, whatever vendor you're working on or your own in house process or whatever steps you're taking, this is more of an answer.

Like there is a huge amount of how, but just as importantly as a why are we even doing this in the first place? And I think that's really the new thing that finally, the final pin on how to get paid for it is that if you're single biggest competitor status quo, the thing we've got to do is shake loose decisions.

You know, it's like, even if we keep the same wedge of the pie, but we make the pie a lot bigger by just making more commerce happen at all, by making customers more confident, making a decision other than no decision, I think you wind up winning. And I think that's, and ultimately, if you're the one person that shows up that helps customers feel better about themselves, rather than helping customers feel better about you, you're going to be so differentiated, at least from the short term, that I think you're going to win disproportionately larger amounts of the pie over time.

[00:31:29] Ken Lempit: Yeah. I mean, I think that's a, I just want to repeat it because I think it's really important. It occurred to me 20 minutes ago in our conversation

[00:31:35] Brent Adamson: Yeah.

[00:31:36] Ken Lempit: which is if half the sales aren't happening because of no decision. And a good part of that is lack of confidence. And one of those four areas you outline.

Hey, if we can shake a third of those loose and our usual, you know, our usual win rate is one out of two, one out of three, when it gets down to it. That's a big jump, right? That's a change in the outcome for sure.

[00:31:57] Brent Adamson: You know, in the, in the mindset, and we lay this out in a whole chapter on this, this idea of mindset, and the mindset for Framemaking is how do we help our customers make the best decision they can in as little time as possible? And so the idea is like, if they're going to choose someone else, I'd rather have that happen sooner than later going back to our qualification point, right?

That's, if you're going to lose, lose early. But if you show up, if you're the one company, the one person, the one team that shows up to help them make decisions that they feel good about, even if they choose someone else other than you. The belief is, and it's a strong belief that you'll be the first person they call the next time it comes to make a decision, because you're the one that, to your point, that they've ultimately built trust with, because you're helping them feel better about the decisions they're making.

[00:32:33] Ken Lempit: Yeah. And I think this is both for organizations and for sales professionals, right? If you want to have a long lived career in sales, you want people that buy from you repeatedly, right? I know people have been selling for twenty, thirty years. They've been in five, six, seven companies. How do they get the same customer to buy from them four times?

[00:32:53] Brent Adamson: Yeah, because they're the ones that show up and say, I love talking to Ken because I just feel better about the decisions I make every time I talk to Ken. It's like, let me give, let me just give Ken a call. Let's see what he thinks about this. You know, that's who you want to be. That's who you're aspiring to be, right?

I think that becomes this really interesting question. I guess here's maybe a quick last thought on this, because when Challenger first came out, one of the funny criticisms to me of Challenger was always, you know, Brent you're not saying anything new here. People got mad. It's like, there's nothing new here.

You know, they say there's nothing new here. My best people are doing this already. To which we'd always say, we'd always say, well, no, actually, you're right. We know your best people are doing this already because it wouldn't show up in the data unless your best people were doing it already, because that's literally how the data worked.

But I think Framemaking is the same thing. If you really look hard at what some of your very best people, and to your point, Ken, the people that can remain consistently the best, even across employers and across a career, and you look at what they're doing, for most of them, or many of them, I'd imagine you just have to barely scratch the surface to find this kind of posture that they're engaging customers with.

And I think, ultimately, that's what Charlie Green was talking about when he talked about trusted advisor, right? This is you, you don't lead with trust. You don't say, Hey, trust me. And you win trust. It's rather, let me help you trust you and I'll get your trust as a by product of that. And I think that's the, really the physics at work here.

[00:34:05] Ken Lempit: Well I think that's a great place to land our episode. I really appreciate the time, Brent. If people want to catch up with you at A to B or learn more about your book, how can we do that?

[00:34:18] Brent Adamson: I'm on LinkedIn all the time. I joke, I feel like I sleep here now, so, I'm on LinkedIn. book is The Framemaking Sale. So the website is theframemakingsale.com We have a company website, which is atobinsight.com.

The easiest way is just find me on LinkedIn or go to theframemakingsale.com and and I'm out there and happy to engage because I, I as you can tell, I'm pretty animated, super excited about these. I'll tell you, Ken, for me personally, I don't know how it is for other people, writing a book is a pound and a half of flesh.

It is hard. It takes me to a dark place. It gives a chunk of my soul to write a book. And so I don't write them lightly. And this one took a lot of time and a lot of thinking before I decided it was worth it. But I wouldn't have put it out in the world if I didn't think this was really, truly worth all of our time.

And I think in this case, it absolutely is.

[00:34:59] Ken Lempit: Well, I'm with you. I agree. I think it answers a lot of questions for salespeople who want to, sales organizations, salespeople, sales leaders who want to be successful in today's world. So I really thank you for being on the SaaS backwards podcast. If you haven't subscribed to SaaS Backwards, if this episode hasn't convinced you, you ought to do so.

Well, I don't know what will. Distributed almost everywhere that podcasts are offered up. I'm also available on YouTube. If you prefer to consume your content in video, it's just predominantly an audio cast. If you want to reach me, I'm on linkedin/in/kenlempit, and my advertising and demand generation agency for SaaS and AI firms is Austin Lawrence Group, and we can help you to build something bigger.

And Brent, thanks so much for being with us today.

[00:35:47] Brent Adamson: Thanks so much, Ken. Appreciate you.