Brent Adamson, Karl Schmidt: The Framemaking Sale

The Framemaking Sale

In early 1993, the team at Mosaic introduced the world’s first widely adopted Internet browser, and everything changed.

In a survey of nearly one thousand buyers of complex business-to-business (B2B) solutions, a concerning 43 percent reported they would prefer to make that purchase without ever speaking to a sales professional at all. Within just one year, that number had climbed to 75 percent.

The buyers who prefer no rep involvement at all experience a 23 percent higher level of regret.

75 percent of customers see today’s sellers as completely unhelpful. To be precise, these data don’t tell us that 75 percent of B2B customers are currently buying without speaking to a sales rep. Rather, they indicate that 75 percent would if they could.

Essentially, the vast majority of B2B buyers find so little value in most sales interactions that given the chance they would prefer to eliminate those interactions altogether.

This widening gap between customer reality and customer preference represents risk.

Let’s face it. Modern B2B buying is broken.

It’s not so much that sellers are struggling to sell effectively as that B2B buyers are struggling to buy effectively — or sometimes even buy at all.

What if sales professionals could engage customers in a way that customers actually found profoundly valuable? How can you become the one sales professional — the one sales team — that customers actually do want to talk to?

Framemaking is all about selling more by helping your customers buy better. Framemaking is the act of making a complex task or decision feel more manageable, both by establishing clear, credible boundaries around its scope and by prompting key considerations and prioritizing best next steps that customers might otherwise easily overlook on their own. Framemaking is a data-backed, customer-based, practical answer for engaging today’s B2B buyers in a highly differentiated, profoundly valuable way.

The four primary challenges currently undermining consumer confidence today: decision complexity, information overload, objective misalignment, and outcome uncertainty.

Creating customer confidence is our North Star for better qualification, shorter sales cycles, and higher quality deals with less customer regret.

Solving for Customer Confidence

More than anything else, the promise of online shopping is its convenience.

It’s no wonder B2B has its own “save for later” button. It’s called “no decision.”

A high-quality, low-regret deal is simply a complex B2B purchase where buyers report they didn’t settle for status quo or “good enough,” but bought the bigger solution, with the broader scope, usually at a higher price, often across a longer contract.

A supplier’s brand typically has no direct impact on customers’ likelihood to buy an HQLR deal. Brand gets you in the door, but it rarely gets you a bigger, better deal. Certain sales behaviors demonstrated meaningful impact on increasing the likelihood of an HQLR deal.

B2B buyers reporting a high degree of decision confidence were over ten times (!) more likely to make a high-quality, low-regret purchase than customers exhibiting average confidence.

Customer confidence matters. A lot. It is the single biggest driver of an HQLR deal we’ve ever seen, by far.

As a customer buying group, how confident are we that we: Asked the right questions? Conducted sufficient research? Thoroughly explored alternatives? Reached consensus on the most pressing problem? Reached consensus on the best possible solution? Can effectively implement the chosen solution? Will receive adequate value for our investment? Will have made the best choice on behalf of our company?

As such, these eight attributes represent a powerful, tactical framework for opportunity qualification and deal reviews.

In aggregate, these various dimensions of confidence represent the biggest statistical driver of sales success by far, and yet none of them can be “known” to be true because none of them is objectively knowable.

When it comes down to it, high-quality, low-regret B2B buying decisions aren’t based on what customers know but what they feel.

Decision confidence, in other words, isn’t just customer centric, it’s supplier agnostic.

Our customers are far more concerned with their self-perception. They’re less worried that a supplier will fall short and more worried that their decision will fall short.

In the words of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the 2018 World Economic Forum, “The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again.”

The “spaghetti bowl” of B2B buying. To orient you to the image, across the middle you see four key B2B buying “jobs”: problem identification, solution exploration, requirements building, and supplier selection.

Customers find themselves facing all manner of setbacks, questions, and additional considerations along their journey, forcing them to retrace steps repeatedly. We call this phenomenon “looping” as it’s a perfect description of how B2B buyers actually move along a purchase path — they don’t really progress through a purchase nearly so much as wander through it.

B2B buying is landminish. It’s perhaps the very best, most evocative way to describe the spaghetti bowl of B2B buying. It’s an unmapped minefield.

I. Never. Want. To. Do. That. Again. This is our current B2B reality. B2B buying is broken.

• Decision Complexity. If we think of a large-scale B2B purchase as a kind of organizational project, the first dimension along which buyers struggle is simply project management.
• Information Overload. What if today’s B2B buyers aren’t “empowered” by information nearly so much as they are overwhelmed?
• Objective Misalignment. B2B buying is a team sport, which naturally raises all sorts of questions: Who’s involved? In what way? What are their priorities? According to which criteria? Who breaks ties?
• Outcome Uncertainty. Even when customers completely agree on what to buy, why to buy it, and how it’s valuable, they can still doubt their ability to actually realize that full value. And with good reason. It’s not just hard to buy solutions; it’s equally hard to implement them.

If we want to sell more in today’s commercial environment, we have to make things easier for our customers. Not easier to buy from us, but easier to buy irrespective of us.

Introducing Framemaking

The vast majority of B2B buyers cite their own organization as the key cause of purchase difficulty.

Our ultimate objective in B2B sales is boosting customers’ decision confidence. That’s the North Star that dramatically increases the likelihood of a high-quality, low-regret sale.

Customers need to feel confident they are making the right decision, not just an easy one.

Ultimately, the choice is the buyers’, not the seller’s. The agent simplifies the decision but does not make the decision.

There are many tools in the Framemaking toolkit, but chief among them are bounding and prompting — sort of first among equals when promoting ease and agency.

Prompting is suggesting, it is definitively not “telling.”

In the context of Framemaking selling, both bounding and prompting are specifically designed, deployed, and intended to make buying easier while promoting customers’ sense of agency.

Designing and deploying a Framemaking sales approach will always follow the same three steps: establish, engage, execute. The three E’s of ease, as it were.

• Establish. The first step in any Framemaking effort is to establish the frame itself. The first step in any Framemaking exercise is a kind of assessment or audit. Once we’ve identified what’s hard, we then need to prioritize. Effectively, we’re establishing a boundary — or frame — defining what’s in and what’s out for customer consideration.
• Engage. Once we’ve established a frame, we need to engage customers in a conversation applying that frame to their specific context. The whole idea here is to win buy-in. Not for you, your company, your brand, or your product, but for the frame.
• Execute. Now we’re ready for the follow-through on Framemaking. You’ve established an effective frame to simplify a buying task, you’ve successfully engaged customers in its application to their purchase process, and you’re ready to execute the plan.

Untangling Decision Complexity

Today’s world of B2B sales is a world of broad-based customer consensus.

When we first measured the size of an average B2B buying group over ten years ago, we found a typical B2B purchase included an average of 5.4 customer stakeholders.

Over the last decade, the average number of stakeholders typically involved in a B2B deal rose dramatically until our most recent survey, where it topped double digits at just over eleven.

You know you’re not closing the deal that day if the first item on the meeting’s agenda is “Get more chairs from the room next door.” And, you really know you’re not closing a deal that day if the meeting starts with customer stakeholders introducing themselves … to each other.

In the Harvard Business Review, Schmidt, Adamson, and Bird reported that purchase likelihood sinks from 80 percent to 30 percent when buying-group size increases from one to six people.

What if rather than waiting for customers to get stuck and struggle, sellers took it upon themselves to proactively help customers identify, address, or even avoid the purchase obstacles inside their own company that they didn’t see coming?

The core objective of The Framemaking Sale isn’t just to document customers’ frustration, but to reduce it — specifically through differently designed sales interactions.

Our job is to enable the journey to a purchase decision, not to make that decision on our customers’ behalf.

While most sales approaches focus almost exclusively on obstacles sellers face when selling, Framemaking centers entirely on the obstacles buyers face when buying, agnostic of sales interactions altogether.

As the sales team conducts the audit, it helps to view deal stalls through three distinct lenses:

• People: Which individuals, teams, or functions got involved unexpectedly, complicating or slowing the purchase process?
• Questions: What unanticipated questions arose, and from whom, requiring additional effort, time, or evidence to answer? Did any questions prove to be actual deal-breakers?
• Process.

It’s important to consider three key questions to ensure maximum value when engaging customers with the results:

• Are we teaching customers something new?
• Are we focused on a small number of obstacles with the greatest impact?
• Are we finding early indicators of future problems?

In addition to relying on sellers’ direct experience pursuing past deals, commercial teams can naturally consult with customers themselves to complete the picture of decision complexity standing in the way of efficient purchase decisions.

There are two questions we’ve found a small handful of companies using to elicit exactly this kind of insight from customers.

• Question 1: Based on your experience, what advice would you have for companies about to embark on a similar purchase journey that might make their lives easier?
• Question 2: If you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently to make your lives easier?

The important point is simply that we build a map of the minefield — an “inventory” of ways a purchase might be delayed, stalled, or killed altogether — accompanied by two things:

• Mitigating strategies: A strategy for overcoming each challenge based on a combination of team brainstorming and previous customer experience.
• Prompting questions: A set of questions mapped to each obstacle.

Be sure to parse those obstacles into practical, manageable steps, prioritizing the one or two most urgent at any given point to immediately increase ease and ensure progress.

One highly valuable role sales professionals can play in any sales interaction is connecting customers to common experience.

In a Framemaking world, the value sellers provide customers isn’t so much knowing these things as sharing these things after aggregating past experience into a small set of key lessons.

What the best sellers can uniquely do is create a connection. Not just between themselves and a prospect, or between their company and the customer company, but between a customer’s aspirations and similar organizations’ shared experience.

One of the most powerful tools a seller can use to establish their role as a connector lies in the language they use to engage customers in a Framemaking conversation. “In working with other companies like yours, one of the things we’ve been surprised to learn is … ” Sharing the experience of other customers shifts the conversational dynamic from convincing to collaborating .

The goal of Framemaking isn’t for customers to think more highly of the seller, but to think more highly of themselves.

Buyers typically think of companies “like” them through a lens of industry, size, or product mix. However, successful sellers can usually find similarities that others easily overlook. Perhaps two companies are similar in terms of go-to-market model, leadership structure, corporate culture, or government regulation.

Consider pairs like “we’ve learned,” “we’ve seen,” “we watched,” or “we’ve heard.” These are verbs of discovery and learning, conveying an invitation of collaborative exploration.

To successfully execute a Framemaking strategy across the many months of a typical B2B buying cycle, we’re going to call on a powerful tool called customer verifiers. A customer verifier is simply a specific, clear, predicable customer action that objectively demonstrates their progression through a purchase journey.

The idea of a sponsor letter was simply that a seller, after conducting an initial discovery call, would send an email to the customer champion summarizing five things from the conversation:

• The business challenge or opportunity facing the customer.
• The potential actions the champion’s company might take to address that challenge or opportunity.
• The specific ways the seller’s company might help.
• A specific next step in the purchase process.
• A request that the champion confirm those four things were correct and the champion was ready to proceed to that next step.

The critical point wasn’t that the seller sent the note; it was that the champion responded with a yes.

Every good customer verifier meets four criteria:

• Customer centric: Customer verifiers are completely supplier agnostic.
• Behavior-based: Customer verifiers aren’t based on something a customer says, but on something a customer does.
• Objective: That behavior isn’t open to interpretation — the customer says either yes or no.
• Documentable: Verifiers create a paper trail of sorts.

Here’s an illustrative list for a typical complex solution:

• Sign-off on a “sequence of events”.
• Confirmation by key customer stakeholders to attend a “stakeholder alignment workshop” at a specifically scheduled time.
• The completion of a stakeholder alignment workshop including participants’ documented agreement with the results.
• Buying group sign-off on solution design.
• Buying group sign-off on a business case for the purchase.
• Agreed-upon pricing, terms, and conditions.
• Procurement sign-off.
• Legal sign-off.
• Signed contract.

We often asked sales leaders a two-question thought exercise to demonstrate their value for pipeline visibility and forecast accuracy. The next time you’re speaking with a seller on your team about the status of a particular deal, after your seller shares where a particular deal stands along your sales process, ask them the following two questions:

• How do you know? How do you actually know that’s where that deal stands? What evidence do you have?
• If I were to ask that customer the same question , what would they say ?

The best tool in the customer verifier toolkit to execute a Framemaking approach to customer decision complexity is known as a sequence of events.

It is the result of a deeply collaborative exercise of cocreation with customer stakeholders early in a sale.

The real value of a sequence of events for Framemaking lies not in its creation but its acceptance by the customer organization.

A customer’s internal decision complexity is arguably the single biggest threat to B2B buyer confidence. The next of these challenges is information overload.

Reducing Information Overload

Primary customer engagement objective shifted from demonstrating industry expertise to helping customers categorize, analyze, synthesize, and prioritize existing information into a set of practical conclusions and organizational decisions that best suited their specific needs. It was a powerful form of Framemaking.

Picking up on a term broadly recognized in the business literature at the time, we called this posture “sensemaking” (we still do), but more specifically in the context of B2B buying, it’s a form of Framemaking tailored to information.

In a widely cited statistic first published in the Harvard Business Review, B2B buyers were, on average, 57 percent of the way through a typical B2B purchase prior to proactively reaching out to a supplier sales rep to get their input.

Customers were still finding quality information, useful and engaging, relevant to their needs, backed by data, conveyed in a compelling manner, and supported by leading industry experts. But now they were finding high quantities of high-quality information.

How do you decide which information to believe, when it all seems believable.

It’s almost as if every CEO woke up one morning in 2012, looked in the mirror, and said, “We need to stand out and build greater customer trust. I’ve got it! We’ll become a [wait for it …] thought leader.”

Seeing an opportunity to demonstrate greater value and generate broader demand, marketers enthusiastically picked up and ran with that mandate, developing an entirely new kind of marketing called content marketing. Most B2B suppliers have installed sophisticated technology to produce and place high-quality content in front of customers at tightly targeted moments of high receptivity. The channels through which suppliers can deliver that kind of high-quality insight are now seemingly endless.

More is not better. In fact, better isn’t better, either. From a customer’s perspective, the quality of supplier content isn’t the problem. It’s the quantity.

Over time, supplier content all starts to sound the same — addressing the same topics with similar insights backed by familiar data, all while claiming to offer fresh and unique perspectives on the market.

Today’s B2B buyers are drowning in a sea of sameness.

In The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer, we laid out a step-by-step content approach specifically designed to generate what we call “commercial insight,” demonstrating why insight is far more effective than thought leadership.

in our surveys 44 percent of B2B buyers told us not only was the information they encountered as part of the purchase trustworthy, but it was also contradictory.

Customers who find the amount of trustworthy information to be overwhelming are 54 percent more likely to play it safe, to settle for a smaller purchase with a narrower scope, probably at a lower price, requiring less disruption.

Years of behavioral psychology research have identified that when logical, methodical consideration falls short, this is exactly where well-documented human biases take over.

• Anchoring
• Belief perseverance
• Selective exposure bias
• Status quo bias

These kinds of biases aren’t really about buying nearly so much as they’re about coping.

Herbert A. Simon’s realization was that when facing potentially overwhelming amounts of information, humans typically resort to one of two competing strategies in pursuit of resolution:

• Satisficing: A decision-making strategy where individuals seek to meet a relatively small set of criteria in order to identify a “minimum viable solution” rather than an optimal one.
• Maximizing: Individuals pursuing a maximizing strategy eschew “good enough” and seek instead the best possible outcome by exhaustively evaluating all available options.

The solution to too much information isn’t more information. It’s helping customers organize, prioritize, and analyze information in a more productive manner. To do that, we first need to understand what information customers consume already. Then we’ll need to help connect that information to their specific context in a way that feels easy and manageable.

Applying a Framemaking approach to information requires sellers to have a carefully considered information strategy.

The first step in helping customers navigate information with greater confidence is to identify which information they’re most likely to consume.

An information audit is simply an exercise whereby a seller, or sales team, identifies the following as accurately and completely as possible.

• The specific information customers are most likely to encounter as part of the purchase of their solution.
• The relative resonance of individual pieces of content to determine which information is most likely to capture customers’ attention.
• Extraneous information that’s too broad, too technical, or too vague, leaving customers simply overwhelmed.
• The unanswered questions customers struggle to answer.
• Any contradictory perspectives — backed by believable evidence.
• The confident decisions customers still struggle to make.

Specific information: Did you find the information you needed to help you through this purchase ?

Relative resonance: Which specific pieces of content did you find most (and least) helpful 

Extraneous information: Was the amount of information available on this topic insufficient, about right, or overwhelming?

Unanswered questions: Which questions did that information best help you answer, and which questions remained despite (or as a result of) your research?

Contradictory perspectives: Did you run into any contradictory information that made decisions more difficult?

Confident decisions: Did the content you consumed increase, decrease, or have little impact on your ability to make a confident decision?

Outcome: What did you ultimately decide to do , and how confident were you in that decision?

For those concerned that sellers going through this customer information journey will have decreased time on selling activity, keep in mind this kind of effort isn’t required on every deal.

Bottom line, the primary goal in framing information is to escape the smartness arms race, not to win it.

In HBR’s “Sensemaking for Sales,” we identified three statistically distinct, meaningfully different seller approaches to information, based on buyer perceptions: giving, telling, and sensemaking.

• Giving: Sellers adopting a giving posture to information can best be summarized by the motto “more is better.”
• Telling: Telling sellers are the individual experts on a sales team.
• Sensemaking: Sensemaking sellers are perceived by customers as less focused on providing information, and more on helping to prioritize perspectives, quantify tradeoffs, and contextualize or even deconflict competing perspectives.

Across over 1,100 B2B customers we surveyed, 87 percent were skeptical of giving sellers, and 72 percent were skeptical of telling sellers. Sixty-one percent reported they were not skeptical of sensemaking sellers.

Customers working with a sensemaking seller are nearly four times more likely to feel confident in the information they’re considering compared to customers working with a seller using a telling approach.

So, how are sensemaking sellers framing information for customers? Based on the customer data, we can categorize the behaviors that set them apart into three broad buckets: connecting customers to carefully curated information, clarifying that information by explaining, simplifying, and deconflicting, and collaborating with customers to help them construct knowledge for themselves.

First, sensemaking sellers curate the information they share for utility and clarity. Sensemaking reps readily admit the limits of their knowledge. Sensemaking sellers are particularly good at clarifying complex problems, explaining technical information, and turning abstract concepts into understandable, shareable, compelling insights.

Sensemakers’ primary objective is to guide buyers on a learning journey rather than to tell them what to do.

The primary goal must be to help customers arrive at a confident assessment of their position, not an automatic purchase of your solution. If the framework has even a whiff of self-interest, it’s suspect at best and likely fails to deliver on your primary objective — building customers’ decision confidence.

A diagnostic or maturity framework can provide customers significant help not only early in a purchase journey, mapping the boundaries of their purchase decision, but across the remaining journey as well.

Diagnostic frameworks are a powerful tool for both boosting customer confidence and improving customer qualification at the same time.

The real opportunity of an effective information-framing strategy is not just in helping customers consume more information, but in finding common ground on which and how much information matters.

Addressing Misaligned Objectives

In sales, it is profoundly painful to be the number one choice for your customer’s number three problem.

In a world where customers have no contractual obligation to stick around long term, it is critically important that they maintain a deep and abiding appreciation of your solution’s unique value.

Articulating business value sits right alongside effective discovery and skilled negotiation as a core competency required of every effective sales professional and sales organization.

No question, convincing customers of your solution’s unique value is important. It just might not be of primary importance.

While value articulation is a critical step for deal success, it’s not the best first step.

The single biggest factor boosting the likelihood of a high-quality, low-regret deal isn’t whether customers are confident in your ability to deliver value; it’s their ability to collectively agree on a definition of “value.”

Building customers’ confidence in supplier capabilities in the hopes that confidence will prove sufficient to ensure customers’ collective buy-in to a problem represents a deeply supplier-centric mental model, which completely overlooks the broader organizational context within which that purchase decision unfolds.

The first thing a buying group needs to agree on is their objective: “What are we trying to do?”

One step down from objectives are tactics. If objectives represent what we’re trying to do, then tactics answer the question, “How are we going to do it?”

Objective: “What are we trying to do?” and, Tactic: “How are we trying to do it?” then the next logical question is, Result: “How will we know when we get there?” Notice, this is different from “Will we get there?” or “How likely are we to get there?” This is about defining the destination first.

Various stakeholders may agree on what to do and how to do it but strongly disagree on other things: “What does ‘good’ look like?” “How much is enough?” “How long should it take?”

There’s always that one person. The skeptic.

This is often what happens when large groups pursuing diverse priorities seek to make collective decisions.

It’s hard to move forward on a large-scale decision if the group making that decision cannot say with confidence exactly what they’re trying to accomplish to begin with.

There are actually three things it’s imperative for you to clearly, collectively, and confidently define in advance:

• Metrics: How will we measure our progress?
• Targets: How will we know when we get there?
• Timeline: How long is it going to take?

We refer to these five questions using the simple shorthand OTR — objectives, tactics, and results. Or, if you want to look fancy, OTRMTT for objectives, tactics, results (metrics, targets, timeline).

The question every B2B buying group must answer, therefore, isn’t, “Is the value of the supplier’s solution clear?” but rather, “Is the value of the supplier’s solution relevant?”

Your solution must deliver value in context.

If we want to avoid the pain and cost of customers’ late-stage second-guessing, then we have to determine their alignment across each dimension of OTR as concretely as possible in advance.

Framemaking is the act of making a complex task or decision feel more manageable. First, by establishing clear, credible boundaries around its scope. And second, by identifying key considerations and prioritizing best next steps within those boundaries.

Customers’ struggles to align across OTR represent a both productive and powerful way for sellers to play a far more proactive and valuable role in driving deals by serving as a helpful guide in aligning buyers.

Similar to decision complexity, the first step in ensuring customer stakeholders are aligned around objectives, tactics, and results is to determine which stakeholders matter the most when it comes to OTR alignment.

The most effective Framemaking sellers will review recent or even current deals with similar customers to better predict not just who is involved but who should be involved.

Having conducted an it-turns-out-that audit and created as complete a list as possible of stakeholders involved anywhere along the purchase, the critical step in value framing is to consider how those stakeholders relate to each other.

Framemaking sellers seek to predict where those stakeholders are most likely to do the following:

• Align with each other across objectives, tactics, and results.
• Conflict with each other.
• Fail to connect at all with each other.
• Lack confidence in their alignment.
• Collectively fail to consider an objective, tactic, metric, target, or timeline altogether.

It helps to organize this thinking into a logical framework we like to call “interpersonal personas.” Unlike traditional stakeholder personas, however, interpersonal personas place these individuals within their organizational context, mapping the interaction effects across stakeholders’ OTRs, with an especially strong focus on points of likely alignment and potential misalignment across each OTR dimension.

The only productive way to overcome stakeholder misalignment is to establish some sort of common ground.

Many times, stakeholders more central to a purchase decision will define clear metrics, targets, and timelines without confirming broader stakeholder agreement around higher-order objectives.

In the end, it’s far better to run right at stakeholder disconnects than run from them, by proactively assessing the buying group’s depth of agreement across OTRMTT as early as possible in a sale.

Value framing discovery is meant to determine stakeholders’ level of collective confidence in OTR alignment.

The single most important deal attribute of any complex B2B sale: the degree of customer consensus across OTR.

Framemaking sellers should consider a number of design principles:

• Prioritize purchase ease: The primary objective in Framemaking is to improve customer confidence by reducing purchase difficulty.
• Provide social proof: In the hypothetical questions above, one can imagine the Framemaking seller is ready to elaborate by providing concrete examples of similar companies that have addressed comparable questions, including what they did and whether it worked.
• Preserve customer agency: The objective isn’t to tell customers where they might be misaligned, but rather to prompt them to assess for themselves their current risk of objective misalignment, including its most likely source.
• Project real humility: As we’ve seen elsewhere, Framemaking sellers adopt the role of connector rather than expert when framing value.
• Promote urgent action: As important as it is for Framemaking sellers to ultimately boost customers’ confidence , when it comes to framing value, the immediate emotion Framemaking sellers seek to evoke is closer to concern or discomfort.

No large B2B purchase decision occurs in a vacuum. It must compete against any number of equally important decisions for company resources, time, attention, and support.

Stakeholder alignment workshops are really designed to be supplier agnostic. The whole idea is to establish collective, confident alignment around the organizational context in which our solution might eventually be deployed, as customers’ collective confidence in that broader context represents a critical prerequisite for ensuring the clarity of our value.

Value framing conversations require sellers to adopt a posture of facilitating rather than selling.

There are two key steps that will determine the value of a stakeholder alignment workshop to both the supplier and the customer: winning customer buy-in to participate and conducting the workshop in a manner designed to create confidence around OTR.

In terms of workshop content, the objective is to complete the meeting with a clear articulation of objective, tactic, metric (s), target (s), and timeline that everyone agrees on that may — or may not — lead directly to the purchase of your solution. Again, that conversation comes later.

In Framemaking, we’re not solving for their confidence in us, but for their confidence in themselves.

To warm up, the facilitator asks stakeholders to discuss a current business objective everyone agreed to prior to the workshop.

The idea here is to confirm that the objective is unanimously considered worthy of attention and in need of attention.

The one thing the facilitator must guard against here is simply an effort by customers to divert to a different objective altogether, especially one completely unrelated to the supplier’s solution set.

Having level set on what’s hard about the targeted objective, the group is then ready to explore possible tactics meant to overcome those challenges and achieve that objective.

Once those tactics are on the table, participants are invited to discuss, compare notes, and successively narrow the list to one they can all agree on.

The balance of the workshop then follows the exact same pattern of prompting, exploring, and bounding across metrics, targets, and timelines.

By the end of the workshop, customer stakeholders share a common vision of what they’re trying to do, how they’re trying to do it, and how they’ll know when they get there.

At this point, we’ve solved for “What are we trying to do?” and “What does success look like?” But customers still face the challenging question of “Will it actually work?” ( i.e., outcome uncertainty).

Mitigating Outcome Uncertainty

Addressing customers’ outcome uncertainty proves especially challenging as it stems as much from human psychology as it does from process complexity.

Sellers will first have to stop focusing on their ability to deliver value and instead build customers’ belief in their own ability to extract value.

Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna document a version of this phenomenon in data-driven detail in The JOLT Effect. In contrast to FOMO, the fear of missing out, Dixon and McKenna introduce the idea of FOMU, the fear of messing up.

The whole idea of commercial insight is to incite customers to abandon the status quo and embrace organizational change by demonstrating convincingly (and diplomatically) that the cost of maintaining their current behavior far outweighs the price and pain of embracing a new capability or course of action.

The problem is, while commercial insight serves as a powerful way to disrupt customers’ current behavior by breaking their mental model, the practical reality is, the more disruptive the idea (and the behavior change it entails), the higher the risk that customers’ fear of messing up will ultimately drive them back to the very status quo you just pried them out of.

When it comes to managing outcome uncertainty, think of Framemaking as a fear-reduction toolkit.

Very much like the other three challenges undermining customer confidence — decision complexity, information overload, and objective misalignment — reducing outcome uncertainty has a strong process component to it.

At the same time, more so than with any other force undermining customer decision confidence, outcome uncertainty presents an especially tough psychological obstacle, given its speculative nature.

Customers scored nearly three times higher on decision confidence when they perceived suppliers as supporting their implementation efforts across three dimensions.

The first dimension is all about planning support. Irrespective of new customer acquisition or existing customer expansion, tasks are set. Owners are assigned. Orders of operation and necessary contingencies are identified. Timelines are clear. And buy-in is documented.

The second way suppliers can boost decision confidence through integration support is all about offering customers actual tools to help support that integration as it happens.

Finally, suppliers that connect prospective buyers to a robust community network significantly boost decision confidence by reducing outcome uncertainty.

Some stakeholders are naturally going to be more optimistic, while others prove more pessimistic (we’re looking at you, finance). We might think of this as outcome-uncertainty variability.

Variability in outcome expectations is an absolute killer of confidence. In their book Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein discuss how higher variability in judgments (referred to as “noise”) can make decision-making more difficult.

It becomes especially important to identify each stakeholder’s disposition toward purchase outcomes to determine the level of overall variability in expectations across a buying group.

Our goal is to boost the likelihood of a purchase in the first place, meaning we need to pull value realization conversations forward from postsale to presale.

We’ll need to invent a new kind of value realization altogether — effectively an anticipatory form of value realization so that customers feel sufficiently confident to set forth on a purchase journey.

One of the best ways to help customers identify where they might struggle with implementation is to ask similar customers who’ve been down that path already. The insight they can provide in those conversations is absolutely invaluable.

There’s no reason why individual sellers can’t gather at least some of this information on their own through simple, old-fashioned one-on-one interactions.

If you had to start completely over implementing this solution, what would you do differently (and why)? If you were speaking with a peer executive about to embark on the same journey, what advice would you give them, to make their lives easier and help them avoid potential landmines?

In other areas of business management (e.g., strategy, finance, management) scenario planning is often used as a powerful means for managing effectively while still embracing — or at least acknowledging — a relatively high degree of outcome uncertainty.

Scenario planning as Framemaking follows four steps:

• IDENTIFY THE RANGE OF POSSIBLE OUTCOMES.
• DETERMINE THE ROUGH LIKELIHOOD OF EACH OUTCOME. First, the goal in providing a range of outcomes is to cast a sufficiently wide net to capture as many stakeholders’ expectations as possible. Second, this range of outcomes creates helpful boundaries for customer expectations.
• DIAGNOSE THE DRIVERS OF EACH SCENARIO.
• IDENTIFY THE ACTIONS MOST LIKELY TO PROMOTE A PARTICULAR OUTCOME.

Let’s face it, many of us in sales tend to think in extremes. But in the complicated reality of complex B2B deals, not everything in sales represents a rounding error between zero and infinity.

Can your company legitimately claim that past performance at one organization guarantees future results for all others? Unlikely.

Framemaking sellers are seeking to frame the implementation process — simplify it and make it feel more manageable.

The toolkit for framing customer outcomes largely resembles the greatest hits from the Framemaking toolkit for decision complexity and objective misalignment.

Framemaking sellers are seeking today to boost customers’ confidence in their ability to realize value sometime in the future.

A workshop designed to establish a clear path to value realization:

• STARTING POINT. An implementation workshop takes that OTRMTT as a given and starts instead with five very practical, tactical questions: How are we going to get there? What resources will we need? Are those resources currently available? What’s standing in our way? How will we address/avoid those obstacles?
• ATTENDEES. The customer success rep and implementation expert should be active participants in the meeting, prompting (and bounding) consideration of important dimensions of implementation that customers might otherwise overlook.
• ROLE OF PROMPTING AND BOUNDING. The meeting should feel optimistic and future oriented.
• MEETING OUTPUT. Ideally, the concrete output of the meeting is a kind of roadmap to value realization.

Map the step-by-step journey to value realization rather than to purchase decision.

The creation of the document is a powerful means to boost customer confidence prior to purchase by decreasing outcome uncertainty.

When it comes to reducing customers’ outcome uncertainty, the potential power of social proof in alleviating customers’ fears of implementation missteps and unrealized value is no different. As we saw in the data, one way to make that happen is through a customer community.

The Framemaking Mindset

How do we help customers make the best decision they can, in as little time as possible?

Framemaking requires strong ability across a range of sales skills considered by some, perhaps, to be more advanced — things like empathy, teaching, and trust building.

What’s critical for sales success today is the application of those skills in a specific manner to create deeper customer connection and drive real commercial impact. That application is Framemaking. It’s the mindset that resets the skillset.

Framemaking is first and foremost about thinking differently about our role as sales professionals, and then applying sales skills we’ve long recognized as important in new and powerful ways to build human connections and drive commercial results in today’s radically different world of B2B buying.

Framemaking arguably represents more of a human mindset than a sales mindset. It’s about boosting sales by making a human connection over a business connection.

If our primary opportunity to drive more high-quality, low-regret deals means making a human connection, then we’ll need to think just as carefully and systematically about building human acumen as we currently do about business acumen.

Sellers still need to understand how customers’ businesses operate, how they make money, the top challenges they face. But what’s often missing from those efforts is an equally deep understanding of how customer stakeholders currently feel about their business. Are they confident? Worried? Frustrated? Excited? What about their colleagues? Their frontline employees?

As Dan Ariely puts it, humans aren’t anything if they’re not “predictably irrational.”

There is no absolute truth for “right” or “sufficient” when it comes to questions or research in the context of B2B buying. Rather, “right” and “sufficient” are based largely on what customers believe to be the case.

So how exactly do we connect with customers on an emotional level? By using the language of feeling.

The single most consequential tactic for effectively engaging and then moving an audience to action is a technique we’ve come to call “what-to-know vs. what-to-feel.”

For every idea you share with a customer, you need to be able to answer the two questions, “What do I want my audience to know as a result of sharing this information?” and “What do I want them to feel?”

Do facts, data, and evidence matter for customer confidence? One hundred percent. But all that evidence absent an emotional context can easily wash over someone with little impact, as it fails to connect to the way customers either currently feel or aspire to feel.

If we’re going to materially influence the way B2B buyers feel about a purchase process, it’s extremely valuable to know how they feel about that potential purchase.

We call this approach hypothesis-led empathy. The technique unfolds across three steps.

• STEP 1: LEAD WITH A HYPOTHESIS.
• STEP 2: LEAD WITH SOCIAL PROOF.
• STEP 3: LEAD WITH EMPATHY.

Framemaking sellers are looking to continuously improve the precision with which they connect to customers about how they feel about the challenges they’re facing and the outcomes they’re achieving.

Sales’ traditional role as teacher has been outsourced to the Internet.

The teaching objective in Framemaking is less about giving information and more about creating a context for productive learning.

Some of the key attributes of a more Socratic teaching style:

• Dialogue-driven.
• Question-based.
• Critical thinking.
• Reflective.
• Explorative.

While customers may not need more teaching as we’ve come to understand it, they could absolutely use more guidance.

Trust isn’t the gateway to human connection; human connection is the gateway to establishing trust.

A Framemaking mindset can easily sit on top of virtually any popular sales methodology or qualification framework (Challenger, MEDDPICC, Richardson, Sandler, gap selling, Miller Heiman, SPIN, TAS, value selling, etc.).

A Framemaking mindset reorients virtually every sales activity around purchase-process execution rather than sales-process compliance.

No one likes to lose slowly, but few in the room had ever really considered the all-in cost of winning slowly.

Framemaking is built on a set of probabilities. Strong probabilities, mind you, but probabilities nonetheless.

Let’s briefly address three ways to mitigate the risk of free consulting.

• LEAD TO YOUR UNIQUE STRENGTHS . In order to lead to your unique strengths, you must actually have a clear understanding of what those unique strengths are.
• CREATE A VALUE EXCHANGE. A customer who feels better and more confident about themselves, their company, and the decisions they’re making is strongly inclined to do business with the person who helped them feel that way.
• TAKE YOUR SHARE OF A BIGGER PIE.

Framing Framemaking for Framemakers

Framemaking, sellers engaged in the act of guiding are naturally going to need some actual guidance to serve as the basis of that action. We call this guidance framing.

As we move along this spectrum toward higher levels of formality, we shift into the world of frameworks.

A framework is a concrete tool that helps structure a person’s thinking. Some more common frameworks include checklists, 2×2 matrices, and process diagrams.

Design Principle #1 — Simplicity: Less Is More. The following list of commonly used framework forms is roughly in order of simplicity, starting with the simplest: Checklists Categorizations – 2×2 matrices (or larger AxB matrices). Process diagrams Assessments – (e.g., performance diagnostics, maturity models).

Design Principle #2 — Context: Putting the Customer in Focus.

Design Principle #3 — Bounding: Setting Limits. By adding the ability to add context with the extra blank line, the checklist adds a little flexibility and agency at the cost of a little simplicity and ease. This tradeoff between flexibility and simplicity is very common when designing frameworks.

Design Principle #4 — Prompting: Nudging the Customer.

For the most part, designing guidance that helps make complex decisions more manageable will produce framing that makes things easier for the customer.

A checklist of questions that sellers should ask themselves before they put Framemaking into practice.

• What help does this framing provide to the customer?
• How does the framing work?
• Why this framing?
• How do you run a conversation using the framework?
• What are the next steps?

Building a Framemaking Content Strategy

The first stage of the buyer journey map at your company may still be awareness, but it has shifted from “awareness of us as the supplier” to instead “awareness of the problem”.

Start with What Customers Need to Do. Bob Moesta, author of Demand-Side Sales, talks about four critical buying jobs:

• Problem identification
• Solution exploration
• Requirements building
• Supplier selection

Answering the Customer’s Questions. It is useful to think of a buyer journey map not as a series of steps but as a series of questions.

Mapping the Misery. The purpose of the buyer journey map is to figure out where the customer needs help. The best place to start is by mapping the misery. Identify where frustration and other negative emotions are at their highest and confidence is at its lowest, and capture that misery in the buyer journey map.

CREATING A FRAMEMAKING CONTENT STRATEGY

When a supplier creates a buyer journey map based on questions, then the opportunity to develop content that specifically answers one and only one question proves to be incredibly useful in determining where that customer is on their buying journey.

FRAMEMAKING CHANNEL STRATEGY — HORSES FOR COURSES

With the customer journey mapped as a set of questions and our strategy for our content designed around those questions, the next step is to determine how best to design our channel strategy.

Simply flagging each question in the buyer journey map as either “just the facts” or “it depends”. Digital Channels Are Suited for “Just the Facts”. Human Sellers Handle “It Depends” Questions.

Now that we have worked through the changes needed to our content and channel strategy, we will want to make sure our content is performing.

Framemaking, the Big Picture

The Challenger Sale. 53 percent of customer loyalty — over half — is a result not of what you sell, but how you sell.

The quality of insight they delivered as part of the sale itself. Over time, competition between suppliers resulted in not only commoditizing solutions but eventually commoditizing insight.

“What we sell” to “how we sell” to “how we help.” Thirty years of B2B selling wrapped up in three key shifts.

I love you not just because I love you. I love you because I love me when I’m around you. If you can be the person who helps customers feel better about themselves, you win.