That’s what it feels like when you gap sell your way to closing a deal. It’s a feeling of pure elation and satisfaction. It’s not, I sold a product. It’s YES! I can help! We can fix this!

But by staying focused on the current state and having the patience to stay in the current state until I helped the customers land on their real problems, I was able to guide them to their desired future state, assess the gap, and lay a custom-made solution at their feet. It’s exciting for you and the customer because you’ve done the work together,

Successfully implementing gap selling starts and stops with leadership. It’s your ability to reinforce the gap-selling principles via pipeline meetings, coaching sessions, the hiring process, and in annual reviews that will make your organization operate smoothly.

They need your guidance, your feedback, your direction and your inspiration. If you start thinking of yourself more as a coach than a manager, you’ll put yourself in the right mindset to build and grow a winning gap-selling team. Coaches teach, train, and motivate, and they can even be hard-asses, but you know what else they do? On game day, they

In sum, when building and growing your sales team, a candidate’s networks and number of years working in the business should take second place to their skills. Do they have the right temperament to be a good gap seller? Do they have huge amounts of patience, grit, and curiosity? How much time do they spend reading and staying on top of industry

Like artists, creative salespeople have a special skill for solving problems, seeing different ways to accomplish goals, address objections, mitigate risk and overcome roadblocks. When a problem is simple and straightforward, it might just require a simple and straightforward solution. The gap-selling process, however, reveals that in general, few

The Healthy Pipeline Checklist You know you have a healthy pipeline if your salespeople can provide: Accurate close dates (within 30 days) Accurate quarterly commits within 15% on either side Clear next steps (the next yes) Clear deal strategies Adequate pipeline coverage (the pipeline will allow them to meet their commit and quota) Evidence for

As a manager, your job is to make sure your salespeople know what the next yes must be, and have a customized deal strategy in mind to get it.

Prospecting is about figuring out what you can do to trigger your buyer’s “oh-shit” circuit so they notice you amid the solid wall of other salespeople waving frantically to get their attention. But it’s not enough to catch their eye; you have to hold their attention.