Blog | P.S.I. Selling

Four Modes of Negotiation

Looking for a magic bullet to become a great negotiator? Good luck! The most challenging thing about negotiating is that it depends on...

The Hidden-Gem Hiring Process

The other day, I was talking with an old friend about the challenges he was having hiring the right salespeople for his team. He said:...

Demos: Principles for Structure and Impact

Years ago, I worked with a sales rep who said he was reluctant to do software demos. I asked him why. After all, a good sales-oriented demo can persuade prospects to engage in a full evaluation process by showing them how the product can help them. His answer got to a key problem in executing an effective demo: He felt like they always went down a rabbit hole. The prospect would ask about this button and that button and then tell him to click here and click there. The result

Effective Sales Messaging

When you’re in front of a prospective customer, what do you talk about? For most early-stage startups, the answer is: “Our product.” Picture a typical software demo: The sales rep shows the prospect how to use the software. Here’s one workflow. Here’s another. Here are the administrative features. And so on. The trouble is that most startups are doing something new or different. Prospects don’t just need to see what your product does, they need to understand why they should c

5 min read

Choosing the Right Sales Motion

Promising startups often fail by taking good ideas and applying them in the wrong context. Even the best ideas have a zone of validity: They work in a certain range of situations, but not outside that range. This creates risks, particularly for non-specialists. Picture a technical founder who hears about an exciting sales idea and tries to deploy it, only to find that it doesn’t apply in their situation. In sales, everything has to fit together: Your sales motion has to mat

7 min read

Targeting the Right Buyers

Let’s say you’re an early-stage startup founder. You’ve built a great product and have big ambitions. What’s the next step? For many founders, the answer is simple: “It’s time to hire amazing sales reps and go sell, baby!” The problem is that there’s a lot more to selling than hiring great reps. The product you build, the sales process you execute, and the sales reps you hire all have to fit together. And all of them have to be aligned toward the right target customer. Hirin

5 min read

Sales Presentation Series: Avoiding GTM Mistakes

Most startups don't fail because their product is bad. They fail because they make preventable go-to-market mistakes that drain their runway before they ever find their footing. We see the same three mistakes again and again: The wrong GTM motion and team. Targeting the wrong customers with the wrong sales approach, or hiring sales reps before the founder has proven the product can be sold. Either way, growth stalls and runway burns. Poor sales execution. Pitching features in

2 min read

How to Become a Rainmaker (Book Digest)

How to Become a Rainmaker by Jeffrey Fox is the best single book I've seen for learning sales fundamentals. Most sales books present a new framework that's helpful for addressing a specific sales problem. How to Become a Rainmaker ties together old-school sales wisdom across the entire customer lifecycle to help reps prioritize their time, prepare for sales conversations, diagnose problems, prove value, and grow accounts. It's a simple book and that's its virtue: You can r

5 min read

Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts (Book Digest)

Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke presents a framework for making better decisions in an uncertain world by recognizing that nearly every decision is a bet on the future. The book's key insight is that life is more like poker than chess: We make decisions with incomplete information and luck plays a significant role. The quality of a decision can't be judged solely by its outcome. Success comes from accurately representing what you know and don't know, creating systems that h

6 min read

Good to Great: How to Make the Leap (Book Digest)

Good to Great argues that many of the conventional paths to building an outstanding company are dead ends. Jim Collins and his team identified companies that made the leap from average performance to exceptional results sustained over fifteen years and looked for what set them apart from similar companies that didn’t achieve greatness. They found that building a great company isn’t about bold strategies, charismatic CEOs, motivational visions, or technological transformation

7 min read

Understanding Michael Porter: How to Develop Effective Competitive Strategy (Book Digest)

In Understanding Michael Porter , Joan Magretta synthesizes Porter’s theories to explain why some companies consistently outperform their rivals. Porter's central insight is that competitive advantage comes not from trying to be the best, but from making deliberate choices to be unique. Good strategy requires creating a distinctive value proposition and tailoring your entire value chain to deliver it in a way that competitors cannot easily copy. Porter's view is that profitab

6 min read

Obviously Awesome: Effective Product Positioning (Book Digest)

Obviously Awesome provides a systematic approach to product positioning, which is the art of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares about. Author April Dunford argues that positioning is the foundation for all marketing and sales efforts, yet most companies struggle with it because they've never been taught a practical method for doing it well. Positioning is context setting for products. When customers encounter something new, th

6 min read

Sales Fundamentals

Too many promising companies never realize their potential because they never figure out how to prove their product’s value. Founders give demos that don’t progress to next steps. Companies hire sales reps who don’t sell anything. Most companies think their sales challenges are caused by insufficient activity: "Send more followups, go visit more customers, and follow the process we've given you and all will be well." But the truth is that most sales teams are working hard. Th

15 min read

Revenue Strategy and Planning

When revenue planning goes really wrong, it’s usually not because of bad math. It’s because of bad judgment. Companies often start planning too late, failing to take account of the lead time they need to get ahead of their sales cycles. Startup founders used to acting fast and driving quick results need to adjust to a world where today’s outcomes have a lot to do with moves they made six months ago… or even longer. What’s worse, it’s easy to be in denial about the challenges

37 min read

The JOLT Effect: A New Playbook for Overcoming Customer Indecision (Book Digest)

In The JOLT Effect , Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna highlight a critical barrier to purchasing decisions: customer indecision. 40-60% of deals end in "no decision" limbo in which customers express the intent to purchase but never buy. Why don't those deals go through? Customers fear messing up more than missing out. In other words, they may agree that they should change but they fear the negative consequences of making a bad decision. The book introduces the JOLT method—a fr

4 min read

The First 90 Days: Succeeding as a New Leader (Book Digest)

Leadership transitions are among the most critical periods in any career: Your first few months strongly predict your overall performance in the role. Yet most leaders receive little formal training on how to navigate these transitions effectively. Michael Watkins's The First 90 Days is a valuable book because it helps you approach transitions effectively by managing yourself, your team, your boss, and your colleagues. What Can Go Wrong: Common Transition Traps New leaders

6 min read

P.S.I. Selling Presentation Summaries

This article contains summaries of the videos on the P.S.I. Selling Presentations Page . Together, they provide an overview of the the core of the P.S.I. Selling methodology. Each entry below can stand on its own as an introduction to the topic or as a way to quickly review the material in the video. You can also review them all in a series to familiarize yourself with the entire methodology. Below is a table of contents with clickable links that will take you to each of the

47 min read

Persuasive Sales Writing

Being a good talker isn’t enough to win complex deals. Prospects usually make their decision during an internal conversation when you’re not in the room. Your champion might meet with their VP and their CFO to make the case for a purchase. If you can’t influence that conversation, you’re leaving money on the table. So how do you influence it? Start by mastering persuasive sales writing. If you write well, their executives will engage with your written materials when they mak

21 min read