---
title: "When to Use Challenger, SPIN, Sandler — or Build Your Own Sales Methodology"
episode: 30
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "David Weiss"
guest_title: "Chief Revenue Officer, The Sales Collective"
date_published: 2025-10-28
date_modified: 2026-07-22
duration: 00:37:02
word_count: 6182
topics: ["sales-enablement", "sales-leadership", "gtm-strategy", "enterprise-sales", "outbound-sales", "ai-in-gtm"]
canonical_url: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/david-weiss-sales-methodologies/
source: "LeanScale Podcast Knowledge Hub — https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# When to Use Challenger, SPIN, Sandler — or Build Your Own Sales Methodology — Full Transcript

> Episode 30 of The LeanScale Podcast, with David Weiss.
> Published October 28, 2025 · 00:37:02 · 6,182 words.
> Machine-transcribed and **not diarized** — speaker attribution is inferred, so verify
> attribution against the audio before quoting a specific person.
> Structured breakdown: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/david-weiss-sales-methodologies/

## 00:00 — Welcome back: methodologies aren't silver bullets

**[0:00]** (logo whooshing) - David, it's so good to have you back. I know last time you were here, we were talking about how sales methodologies are not a silver bullet to solve your sales problems. There's so much more to getting a high-functioning sales organization waiting for your business. But we did talk about a few of the methodologies and the right fit they would be for certain businesses or certain go-to-market motions. So I was hoping we could break some of those down today. And I think we could probably start with the one that gets the most attention, especially in B2B tech, is Challenger. So I think some people are borderline obsessed

## 00:41 — Challenger — a fan, but often deployed wrong

**[0:41]** with this methodology, and it has so much buzz and noise around it. But when is the right time to use it? What's the right context? And what do you see people doing where maybe they shouldn't be using it, or any pitfalls they might be running into? - Yeah, for sure. And Anthony, thanks for having me back on. Appreciate you and the Lean Scale team. So yeah, let's jump into Challenger. So one, I've been Challenger trained. I've been trained on Challenger at like three separate companies, and I've taught people it myself. So like, I'm a fan. Like, I'm not here to say anything bad about Challenger. Honestly, I'm a huge fan of the methodology,

**[1:19]** but it is deployed incorrectly at times and in the wrong environment. So I'm happy to unpack that. First and foremost, one of the big problems I see with the Challenger methodology is people don't read the book, don't understand it, and they just go around being assholes to all their peers and all their clients. They're like, I'm a Challenger. I'm just gonna fight the world. And it's like, no, that's not the thing. - Well, it does have an aggressive title. So when people think of it, like the connotation is aggressive, assertive. I know I've read through it. I've been trained on it as well. I know that's not the intent,

**[1:59]** but on face value, it does tend to do that. - I completely agree. And at the same time, I wanna challenge our audience. Please don't read the cover of any book and think you understand the book. So that's gonna send my head sideways and make my brain explode. So deeply understand things before you do them. So let's talk about where Challenger does fit. So if you read Challenger's commercial methodology, it really talks about two selling environments. The first selling environment is low complexity. And what Challenger was, Challenger was a research piece. It was a piece of research work. And they took the research and they wrote a book around it

## 02:47 — The research: low-complexity vs. high-complexity selling

**[2:47]** because what they found in the research was really interesting. And part of their research that people seem to gloss over is the two major selling environments, low complexity and high complexity. What they found in low complexity sales environments is their archetypes of personalities, their archetype of the hard worker as they define it is the number one most successful salesperson, the hard worker. It's literally the person who makes the most calls, goes on the most appointments, gets in early, stays late. It's the person that literally just outworks everyone around them. If you're in a low complexity sales environment,

**[3:24]** which I would argue is frankly most of sales, the most successful salesperson will be the one who just works the hardest. That's what their research said. And if we are defining low complexity as they did, those are more transactional environments, single skew or few small skews. We're talking deals that are sub like 90 days. We're talking deals that normally have one or two stakeholders. We're talking probably 30,000, $40,000 deals. Things like that. Those are low complexity, fast moving, small to medium sized dollar, low stakeholder involvement, low change management and project management. Those are low complexity deals.

**[4:10]** That's most of what sales, that's most of sales. So now let's talk about high complexity. In high complexity sales, the challenger won and was by far and away, I wanna say out of the 100% of people they surveyed, it was around 54% of people that had the challenger archetype or the ones that were the group that was winning. So far and among more than half and they had like five archetypes on there. That was the profile that won the most. And so that profile existed inside of high complexity sales environments. So think of your multi-skew, a large deal, enterprise type sales, lots of stakeholders, established product set

## 05:01 — Teach, tailor, take control

**[5:01]** where you need to displace the status quo. That is where challenger thrives. And what they found is that the people in those selling environments, what they did different than everyone else is they taught, is the teach, tailor, take control side of their methodology, which is essentially, I am going to teach you something new about macroeconomic climates in the world around you. I'm gonna tailor that environment specific to you and why you should make a change. And then I'm gonna take control through levels of expertise, advisory and deep recommendation through a stance of deep insight. As I am the expert, you need to listen to me

**[5:50]** and you're almost, you're taking an advisory frame similar to a high paid consultant that an executive would bring in to advise the future of the business specific to your product set. And when you are selling in that environment to executives inside of executive conversations, challenger is probably the best commercial methodology for driving change and driving change now, that's where you should deploy it. - Where do you see people deploy it just completely wrong? And I'd love if you had a story of the worst challenger implementation you've seen. - Yeah, if you're selling like a,

## 06:36 — Why Challenger is the worst fit for inbound

**[6:36]** let's talk about inbound, okay? If you're using challenger and the majority of your business comes inbound, it's literally the worst possible methodology you can use. Because think about it, I've already decided to make a change. I'm coming to you to make a change, but you know what I'm gonna do? I'm going to talk to you about why all your problems and why you're doing everything wrong. And I need to get to an executive and I need to have that executive lean into my message and I need to displace how you guys are currently doing business. Well, they've already chosen to do all those things. So you know who wins in inbound? Whoever understands the problem

**[7:16]** and quickly aligns the right solution. That's who wins in inbound. Who can tell you why they should pick you better than anyone else. Your great competitive seller wins in inbound. That same person may lose in outbound because what they're doing is they're focused on feature function, why them, as opposed to why change why now. And why change why now is the challenger message. So as an example, inbound. Inbound is a terrible use case for the challenger sales methodology. You should be deploying it in complex outbound. Also when you're doing low complexity inbound, part of challenger is again, teaching something somebody doesn't know,

**[8:05]** providing them deep insight, building a business case for change, getting to executives to embrace and lean into that change from a sponsorship perspective, broad team alignment. It's not that challenger can't work in low complexity outbound, it does. It's just not as effective because the speed at which you need to move in an outbound motion is so great that the person deploying a challenger motion is actually increasing their deal cycle by increasing the number of steps and the rigidity of the requirements on both sides versus just moving really fast and working harder than everyone around them. And so what they found is like in low complex environments,

## 08:46 — The archetypes: hard worker, relationship builder, lone wolf

**[8:46]** challenger was the number two archetype to the hard worker, but the hard worker wins because the challenger is spending more time than they need to close the deal as opposed to just working really hard to get a higher volume. - Right, right. What were the other archetypes, just for people listening who may not have heard of challenger? So we know at least hard worker challenger, they're the top two, but who are the ones that didn't report? - Relationship builder and lone wolf. Your relationship builder oddly was the least successful of the archetypes. It's not that relationships are important, but what they found is that often people

**[9:21]** who have good relationships struggle to challenge the status quo. They struggle to multi-thread because they're scared of disrupting the relationships that they've established. So they won't go over those people's heads. And when those people aren't willing to buy from them, they wanna maintain the relationship in the front. And they see it as a friendship. They get, there's what a lot of salespeople don't realize is that there's business relationships and personal relationships and how you act in a personal relationship versus a business relationship are just fundamentally different, but they cross those boundaries

**[9:55]** and they don't understand the differences and nuances. So like relationship builder, least successful, lone wolf was the other archetype. Lone wolf is essentially the salesperson who puts up the two middle fingers. That's the most difficult person inside of every organization to deal with because they want no help, no support, no guidance. They want you to leave them alone. I don't even wanna meet with my manager. I don't wanna have to tell you anything. Just let me do my job. And if I'm not doing my job, you can fire me. But those are the people that don't do a good job working with cross-functional partners. And that's a very unsuccessful way

**[10:27]** of selling in the enterprise because you have to work with customer success and your solution engineers and your sales engineers and your deal desk people and your leader and your executive sponsors. And then you also need to do, be better managing political capital. And also on your client side, bringing in lots of different stakeholders and working a multi-stakeholder decision team. And oftentimes lone wolves aren't good at navigating all of those relationships internal and external. So that's why they're not as successful in a large complex environment. - No, makes a ton of sense. In a lower complexity environment, I haven't been trained on this one,

## 11:10 — SPIN and the roots of modern methodology

**[11:10]** but I've heard it being used and thrown around is spin. How would you describe that methodology and a good place to use that, bad place to use it? - Yeah, so spin was one of the first value-based selling and solution-based selling methodologies out there. Spin was designed around the concept of understand the situation S that your client is in, understand the problems that they are experiencing inside of that situation. Understand the implications of those problems related to what happens if they don't solve them. We're getting to a little bit of fundamental Medicare around metrics and decision criteria and things along those lines.

**[12:09]** And a little bit around the concepts of cost of inaction is the implication. And then need payoff. And need payoff was all about, if you don't do those things, what happens? If you do do those things, what happens? And it's all about driving urgency around the why change now message. So that's fundamentally what spin was based around. And again, to me, it's a great methodology. I mean, shoot, Neil Rackham wrote this thing, I wanna say like in the 70s. And it frankly still underpins almost all modern sales methodologies out there. Like it actually, if you really deeply understand, medic as a deal management methodology,

**[12:56]** medic was almost created where spin is a sales methodology to help salespeople navigate early stage discussions. Medic was as a deal management methodology took a lot of the principles of spin layered in forecast accuracy and then overlaid it on top of the whole deal as a deal management methodology. Spiced framework, essentially blended medic and spin to create spiced. And that's what, you know, Yako van der Krueger winning by design did. So like, it's actually really funny that so much of the commercial teachings of methodologies are still underpinned in what Rackham wrote about in the 70s. And so when so many people beat up as like an old methodology

**[13:37]** and it's like, it's not old. Like there's nothing wrong with understanding the situation that your client is in. The problems are trying to solve the implications of solving them and why they should do something differently now. Like, I'm sorry, I don't care how old that is. Like, that's a good idea. So, you know, if you're looking to, spin I really like using regardless of level of complexity as a early stage discovery framework specific to understanding current state, future state, value of change and implication of not changing. It's a really good book and a really good methodology to teach people how to handle that part of the sales process.

**[14:21]** So early stage, think stage one and two, pre-demo, great methodology. Where it doesn't solve big picture problems is spin doesn't teach you necessarily how to demo. It doesn't teach you how to negotiate. It doesn't teach you how to hunt. It doesn't teach you, ah, it teaches you slightly how to close. But the closing is very much the implication of doing nothing related to what you learned early on. - No, I love that. You know, some things become like new again, just with a different wrap around them. But I think a lot of the methods are just based in like human psychology and organizational theory. Like, how are big groups of people coming together,

## 15:06 — Solution selling and aligning to the buyer journey

**[15:06]** solve problems, and then how does the human mind work? And how can you communicate effectively? So I think there's always a new way to wrap those. So that makes a lot of sense. I think another one that's thrown around quite a bit, I feel like this was really big, maybe 10, 20 years ago, still comes up in discussions today, is solution selling. So I feel like maybe as sales became a little bit more complex, these type of methodologies started to come about. But tell us about solution selling, right context, wrong context, and a little bit about what it might mean. - Yeah, so solution selling is a riff off of spin. It is very much designed as an approach

**[16:05]** to understand the problems that your clients are faced with before offering a potential solution. And it essentially was designed to combat product lead selling, which is, hey, I'm gonna feature and benefit you to death. I argue, though, in a inbound environment, quickly understand someone's problems and then align why your solution is the right one to solve those problems and being a little bit more product lead once someone already knows what they want in a solution. I don't have a problem with that. And I honestly think that's...

## 16:56 — Mature vs. immature buyers (and buying a car)

**[16:56]** One of the challenges I see in modern selling is people try and deploy these one size fits all approaches to the sales process, as opposed to understanding the journey the buyer's on and aligning the right process to them. And we talk about that a lot in the modern buyer journey and aligning to the buyer journey and all this stuff, but so many organizations don't even know what that means. They just say it. So for the people that are listening, aligning to the modern buyer journey so much is rooted in understanding where the buyer is inside of their process. And so as an example, if a buyer is coming to you and they are a mature buyer,

**[17:32]** and a mature buyer is someone who knows what they want in a solution, who knows the problem they're trying to solve, has likely already evaluated a couple of your competitors. That's a mature buyer. In that environment, you absolutely want to get to the point quickly. You do not want to put them through multiple layers of discovery. Oh, and you need to talk to an SDR about the problem. And then that SDR is going to qualify you likely through budget authority needs timeline ban. And then they're going to give you to an AE. And then that is going to do it again. And then we can't show you the demo until like the fourth meeting, because we want to make sure

**[18:07]** you get all the right stakeholders there. Like that is the wrong approach. That is you're almost aligning an outbound more solution selling approach, where what the person wants is they want to quickly see, hey, how do you compare to what I'm looking at? And can you solve my problem? And do you meet the criteria I'm looking for inside of a solution? And in that one, you want to be more product focused. Hey, hold on a second. Let me understand your criteria. What are you looking for? You want these five things? Yeah, cool. I can do those five things. And why people buy from us is this. Is that compelling enough for us to keep talking? It is great.

**[18:38]** Let's keep talking. It's not cool part ways. Like that is aligning to a legit buyer journey. Inbound when someone is an immature buyer, cool. Now they don't know what they want a solution. So you need to actually spend some time co-creating the right solution with them, differentiating, documenting, writing it down. You can lightly understand the problem, but you need to more be on co-creating solutions because they already know what they want. They know that they're trying to solve that problem. When you get into an outbound motion though, all those things go out the window because you need to get someone to a point

**[19:11]** where they're willing to make a change now before they ever care about your product or you. They don't give a shit about anything because right now they're just living their happy lives. It's like you living your life and thinking everything's fine. And then you go to your doctor for an annual checkup and your cholesterol is too high. And it's like, okay, cool. Now I actually have a problem I need to go do something about. But if someone just knocked on your door pitching cholesterol medication a day earlier, you don't fucking care. Like I'm fine. You don't have a problem yet. And so that's outbound. That's like, I need to get this thing.

**[19:40]** I need to figure out the problem and get them to be willing to change and solution selling. That's where that lives. Solution selling lives in the helping you see the problem that you didn't even know you had. And then taking you through a why change why now type message. And that's where that's properly deployed. - No, that makes a lot of sense. And when it's not properly deployed, there is nothing more exhausting than knowing exactly what you wanna buy and then being forced through a lengthy discovery process, answering questions that are not helpful for you, not even helpful to the salesperson. And I think a sales process,

**[20:19]** everybody eventually goes through is like buying a car. When I go to buy a car, I've already researched at Nauseam every single potential model I wanna get. I'm gonna be between like two or three different ones. I've already looked at competitors. And I probably just have a couple specific questions as to why do people buy this one over this one and help me navigate that really narrow thing. But then asking like, oh, well, you know, where do you like to drive? And what's your family like, stop, just help me buy it. I'm here to buy. - Right.

## 20:52 — Sandler: upfront contracts and pain funnels

**[20:52]** - So that makes sense on solution selling. Another one that comes up quite a bit as well is Sandler. It's been a really popular methodology. How would you describe Sandler? Best place to use it, wrong place to use it. - So Sandler focuses on like, there's a couple big pieces of Sandler. Sandler focuses a lot on engaging the buyer, qualifying them and closing them. That's kind of their like three major like buckets that they teach. And so much of like the initial bucket that they're teaching is around the concepts of upfront contracts. And the upfront contract kind of sounds like, hey, agenda set, if I do all of these things today,

**[21:45]** can we agree that it makes sense to move forward? And it's like, hold on a second.

**[21:53]** We're agreeing to move forward before we've ever even like, we're agreeing to a second date before we've even seen how the first date went. That's like saying, hey, if this first date goes perfect, can we book the second date at the end? - Right. - Hi, nice to meet you. My name's David, like what the fuck? Like, why are you doing that? And it was rooted in psychology of like getting someone to agree to a next step to increase the chance of that next step. So I understand why someone did it, but it's highly manipulative and buyers. And this is like, I rail against people saying methodologies are old. I don't care how old something is.

**[22:37]** I rail against bad sales practices. And to me, Sandler, this is an old and bad sales practice because your buyer has seen it 10 million times. It's like how, it's like almost, they're so used to it that when they hear it, they're just like, great, I'm talking to another sales robot. And so I don't like upfront contracts. Like there shouldn't be a contract in a initial conversation. Like the only contract should be implied and the implied contract as me as the salesperson needs to understand your problems. And if you agree that I understand it well enough and that you agree that I can solve it, we're probably gonna keep talking.

**[23:24]** And if I don't, we're not, but I don't need to state that. Like that's obvious. Like I don't need, we don't need to agree to it. And that's the problem. Like it's the forcing agreement around that is manipulative. So that's one piece that Sandler teaches. The next piece that really falls into the qualifying side is related to like pain funnels. So like Sandler's really big on first, second, third level pain. I'm actually a fan of this part of Sandler. This is really good. This is what I call peeling the onion. This is where like, I almost call it the so what methodology in the sense that it's like, someone's like, oh, I'm struggling with this thing.

**[24:09]** And what most salespeople will do when you tell them you're struggling with this thing, I've got a great solution, let me show you that. As opposed to, hey, why are you struggling with it? How long have you been struggling with it? Who else is it impacting? What happens if you solve it? What happens if you don't? What have you tried to solve it? It's getting to the implication of the problem back to spin and solution selling. And that is where pain funnels are good. I hate that they're called pain funnels though. But that's where that's good. And then they go into their closing side, which is all about like presenting the right solution.

**[24:42]** So what I will say is that Sandler does have a fairly holistic approach. They do cover a deeper and broader set of the sales process than most commercial methodologies. Most of the methodologies out there are really focused on discovery and a little bit on closing. Or they're focused on the middle related to executive conversations. So like GAP and Challenger are some of the best executive conversation frameworks. Spin and solution selling are some of the best discovery-based frameworks. Sandler does blend both, so it is more holistic. The problem is there's a couple key. One, buyers have seen it coming for years.

**[25:33]** So when you deploy Sandler the way Sandler teaches it, it's highly the robotic and buyers don't like that. The other thing is that Sandler is taught by franchises. Sandler itself does not teach this. It's taught by franchise groups that buy into the Sandler franchise. And so what you find anytime anything is franchised is you have inconsistency in the deliverable and inconsistency in the teaching. And so that's the other potential pitfall. Again, not against it. It's just like anything else. Good ideas deployed wrong, bad ideas. And unfortunately, you've got a lot of robotic sellers that are Sandler sellers. - Yeah, and I feel like it's almost,

**[26:09]** the front end of that feels almost like just terrible TikTok sales influencers that are throwing out manipulation techniques. And one, even if you could finesse those, usually people can see right through it. Two, for the average person trying to pull that off, you're just gonna look stupid. So I think, I can't stand like that terrible advice that just gets spewed out on social media. And I know people are falling victim to just like throwing it in their next call and they're just sounding like jerks. - Yeah, it happens a lot. I mean, not to plug my own shit. I won't even like, I'm a big fan of fundamentals. There are sales is all about the really good,

## 27:03 — Fundamentals over methodologies: the puzzle pieces

**[27:03]** deep execution of fundamentals. How you execute those fundamentals, I honestly don't care as much, but like you need to understand like hunting and how to hunt properly. You need to reach decision makers. You need to be able to ask the right questions to uncover problems. You need to create needs for change. You need to be able to build financial business cases. You need to present well. You need to build strategic relationships. You need to know when to multi-thread and when to not. You need to know when to adjust all of these things and not. You need to be able to handle rejection. You need to be like comfortable like discussing money with people.

**[27:41]** You need to be able to negotiate. You need to be able to present solutions really, really well and like break up those things into like micro pieces and like align to the exact problem versus just spewing all over people. Like so much of sales is like, is all of these like little puzzle pieces and each of them have a little different name and you got to put them all together correctly. And when you execute the fundamentals with a high degree of expertise, you're going to be successful and you're going to do well. And when you don't, you're not. But if you just deploy one or two puzzle pieces, like you still got a big picture that you don't know what it is

**[28:14]** and you're not going to get the right outcome. So it's like, you got to learn all the pieces and then execute all those pieces correctly in your unique way that suits you. And like that's ultimately where it's going to be successful. And that goes back to what we said before. Like all of the methodologies lie to you because none of them are silver bullets. They're just a piece of the puzzle. And instead of just again, focusing on root cause problem and focusing back to the fundamentals and proper execution and coaching to mastery. Like that's really where like I see deep success. That's why I became successful is I took everything,

**[28:44]** all the methodologies and all the different pieces. And I tried to master every single one and then put it all back together. - Yeah, it's normally when people are looking for these shortcuts that they find their pitfalls. There's more to it, you know, and you got to do the right thing every day. I think another methodology, I'm actually a little excited about and it's a little bit newer. Gartner has been talking a lot about it and they've been making a lot of buzz around this one, but sense making. I think this has a lot of potential. I think it sounds current to where the modern buyer is right now. But how do you feel about that methodology?

## 29:27 — Sense-making and buyer decision fatigue

**[29:27]** And same question, good place to deploy it, any potential places you wouldn't. What's your take on it? - Yeah, I'm a big fan of sense making. I mean, you had, you know, challenge your sale, then you had challenge your customer. I think these are just continuous evolutions of essentially how to show up right for your buyer. Like that's essentially what we're doing. It is the continuation of the concept of buyer and seller journey alignment. And so sense making, you know, to me came about with the concepts of decision confidence and decision fatigue. And Gartner did this whole piece in their CRO review, I wanna say like five or six years ago

**[30:12]** around modern buyer decision fatigue. And what they were highlighting then is that if you go back 15 or 20 years in sales,

**[30:26]** the level of information wasn't there. So what the buyer at that time did was it was essentially who in my local area can solve the problem. They had limited information. There was deep levels of differentiation because there weren't as many competitors. And it was really very much kind of this local concept of, hey, I sell in my territory. I am going to sell to you. I have a thing that, and I don't have a lot of competitors. So it was really easy to see the difference. And people chose to buy who they chose to buy from. If you think about where evolution is taking us, it's the exact opposite now. The ability to buy is global.

**[31:08]** The ability to get what you want from any corner of the world exists. The speed of evolution of tech and products is faster than it ever has been. I want to say it was something like over 2,000 new AI companies popped up just in the back half of last year. All of the, if you're looking at how to do no code AI design like through companies like Bolt. Bolt was the fastest company in the world to go from like zero to 20 million. I've been playing around with him lately and doing like no code AI prompt design. And what it's able to do is just. - It's amazing. It's incredible. We've used it to build a few of our own internal apps.

**[31:51]** Yeah, with barely a developer team, so. - It's like, wow, and so the speed, that level of speed is like we've never seen. So what does that mean for all the sellers or people listening to it? Whatever your product is, there can be a competitive one built tomorrow and whatever differentiators you think you have, new ones can be instituted very, very quickly. So speed of evolution and speed of availability and amount of information is reaching critical points. It's never reached before and it's only getting worse. And so what does that mean for your buyer? Well, similar to what we've been talking about in sales for the last few years related to buyer journey

## 32:32 — AI, commoditization, and the race to the bottom

**[32:32]** and decision fatigue and decision confidence, your buyer's just overwhelmed. And they're getting more and more overwhelmed every single day. And when that happens, what that means is they can't tell solutions apart. They start telling sellers, I can't tell you apart. They start saying things like you all look alike. And when those things happen, all decision making comes down to price, whatever's the cheapest. And it's a race to the bottom. And there's no way to survive, especially in a margin compressed world with a race to the bottom on cost. So that's sense making. Sense making is all about taking all of those things

**[33:10]** that I just said and helping your buyers make sense of all of that data. And to me, that's the only way that the sales profession stays alive. Because if I can just buy a line from AI and get all the information I need, why the hell do I need all of you? And that to me is going to be the death of a lot of salespeople. It's the ones that don't lean into the craft. It's the ones that don't understand their solution, the competitive solution, the buyer's environment, the persona that, you know, what they struggle with in their day to day. And they're not able to sit next to the buyer in their buying process and be like, hey look, I know you're gonna go talk

**[33:49]** to these five competitors. You're probably gonna talk to these other ones. Like this fundamentally, and I know our competitors, I know my solution, I know the problem that you're solving, and I know your environment, I know all these things. This is why you should pick us. And this is why we are the right solution for you. And here are the tiny little differences that I don't care how much you read and what you see that you need to remember. It's the ones that can make sense of all the data and all the things to help them make a confident decision. Those are the salespeople that are gonna be successful and stick around because by the name sense making,

## 34:21 — Putting competitors in a box; how LeanScale sells

**[34:21]** they're able to help their buyer make the right buying decision. - I love that. And I think it is the best way to build trust in that process too. And even the way you did that quick example of hey, if you're this type of person with this type of problem, maybe that's a better solution for you or this one over here is a better solution for you. What we are built for is if you're this type of situation and we solve this problem in this very specific way. So I mean, this is how we would sell LeanScale. It's a very specific company that would want to work with us and have very specific problems where we are uniquely advantaged to perform well.

**[35:02]** And for a lot of others, we say hey, if you're looking for XYZ, we have referral partners. Maybe this is a good partner or that's a good partner, but maybe we don't solve exactly the way that you're looking for, so. - Yeah, and look, from a competitive positioning perspective, that's called putting your competitors in a box. And sometimes you're the right box for them and sometimes you're not. But if you can label things properly and you can put people in the proper boxes, then you can accurately say hey, look, they're great for here. We're great for here. Based on what you're telling me, you are more of this box than this box,

## 35:33 — Where to find David

**[35:33]** or you know what, we're not the right fit for you. We should go to them. And the more you can label and do that, now you're helping people make sense of all of the world so they can actually make an informed and proper decision. - Absolutely. David, this has been awesome, awesome. I really appreciate you going through each of these, unpacking them, giving people your sense-making for me right now, so I really appreciate it, hoping we understand when a business should use one methodology over the other. Some of the advantages, each one of them sounds like hey, there's some nuggets of gold to be taken from each one,

**[36:08]** but as a whole, maybe it's not fully applicable. But to your point, lean into the craft, understand the nuances, peel back the layers of the onion here, know what's behind each one, and then craft what makes sense for you. - Absolutely, no one answer, no silver bullet. If you want to be really great at anything, you need to learn all the pieces, so spot on. - Yeah, well thanks for coming on for a second time. It was great to have you back. Just so our listeners and audience know, best way to get in touch with you? - Probably always LinkedIn. David Weiss, David at the Sales Collective, just hit me up on LinkedIn. I literally respond to every message I get

**[36:46]** as long as you're not AI pitching me. And even then, I'll probably tell you how to improve the message, but still. - Love it, perfect. Well, if you want to get in touch with David, find him on LinkedIn, or if you want some coaching on your messaging, send him a note. - That's right. Anthony, thank you, sir. Appreciate you having me on again. - Thank you.