Thoughts on Selling™

Pull up your CRM. Look at your sales stages.

Qualified. Discovery. Proposal. Negotiation. Closed Won.

Or some variation — Miller Heiman, Challenger, whatever your team standardized on five years ago and hasn’t revisited since. The names change. The shape doesn’t. Every stage is named for what the seller does.

Now ask yourself: what stage is your biggest deal in, from the buyer’s point of view?

Most VPs can’t answer that question. The CRM doesn’t track it. The forecast doesn’t surface it. The weekly pipeline review doesn’t ask about it. Which is a problem, because the buyer’s progression is the only one that determines whether the deal closes.

The Wrong Map

Your sales process is a map of your own activity. That’s useful for forecasting and management, and I’m not suggesting you throw it out. But it tells you almost nothing about whether the deal is actually moving in the buyer’s head.

Two deals can sit in the same CRM stage and exist in completely different realities. In one deal, the buyer has mentally handed you the wheel — they’re asking you to help them figure out the rest of the decision. In the other, the buyer is still deciding whether you’re worth a second meeting, and the champion is running interference so their boss doesn’t notice how little the rep actually knows.

Both deals say “Proposal” in the CRM. Only one is real.

The Buyer’s Process Runs in Parallel

The buyer is running their own process. It has its own stages. Each one has to be earned. And the buyer grants access to the next stage only when the previous one is complete.

That process has four stages. PATH.

The Pattern

A client of mine — a head of RevOps at an enterprise software company — sent me a forecast last quarter with six deals above $500K. Every one of them was in “late stage.” Every one of them had been there for two quarters or more.

We went through them one by one. Not against their sales stages. Against PATH.

Deal 1: The rep had never been in the room with the real economic buyer. He’d met the champion’s boss once, briefly, in a hallway. No Perspective stage actually completed. As a result, the rep had been operating as if he were in Trust, but the buyer didn’t even have a clear read on who he was.

Deal 2: The rep and champion had a great relationship — lots of texts, inside jokes, the whole thing. But every time the rep tried to talk about the harder parts of the deal — change management, implementation risk, political dynamics — the champion deflected into product discussion. Authenticity stage never completed. Trust was built on the safe parts only.

Deal 3: The one that eventually won. The rep had done the work at every stage. She had a real point of view on the buyer’s operation. She’d been in honest conversations about what would go wrong. Over eight months, she’d built trust through small, consistent follow-throughs. And now the buyer was asking her — unprompted — who else he should bring into the conversation internally. That’s Helm. She was being handed the wheel.

Four of the six deals slipped. The two that closed were the two where PATH had actually been completed in order.

It wasn’t about activity. It was about progression.

PATH — The Buyer’s Progression

Four stages. Sequential. Conditional. Each one must be fully navigated before the next opens. The buyer grants access at each stage. You can’t skip. You can’t borrow. You can’t fake it with activity.

P — Perspective. Get in the room.

The first thing the buyer grants is attention. They give it to reps who show up with a point of view on the buyer’s world — not just product knowledge. Perspective means you’ve done the work before the meeting. You understand the buyer’s industry, their strategy, their recent moves, their pressures. You’ve formed a read on where they might be stuck or where they might be heading, and you’re willing to test it with them.

Reps without perspective don’t get in the room. Or they get in once, contribute nothing the buyer couldn’t have Googled, and never get back in.

Test: before your next meeting, write down three things you believe about the buyer’s business that aren’t on their website — and three things you believe about the executive personally that aren’t on their LinkedIn headline. If you can’t do both, you don’t have perspective yet. Get it before you walk in.

A — Authenticity. Get into the real conversation.

Perspective gets you in the room. Authenticity gets you past the surface. This is where most reps stall — they’re in the room, but the conversation is still polite, still polished, still performing. The buyer hasn’t yet decided whether they can be real with you.

Authenticity is about presence. It means being willing to say what’s true, even when it’s not the polished thing. It means asking a harder question and letting it sit. It means admitting what you don’t know. And it means responding to what the buyer actually said rather than what your talk track anticipated.

Here’s what Authenticity looks like from the buyer’s side.

A client of mine — an enterprise portfolio rep — bumped into the head of nursing at a major healthcare conference. They’d met once before, briefly. They decided to grab dinner.

The two of them spent three hours together. None of it was about the deal. None of it was about his company. The head of nursing wanted to know what drove him. Why he’d stayed in his current role. What he’d do if one of his customers made a decision that was good for his company and bad for them. What he cared about outside work. Why he’d chosen sales as a career in the first place.

My client didn’t walk in thinking he was being evaluated. He walked in thinking he was having dinner. By the end, he understood that the head of nursing had been doing what he later described as deciding whether to sponsor him internally. Whether, if he put his reputation behind him with his colleagues, he’d regret it later.

A week later, the introductions started. The head of nursing didn’t just vouch for the company. He vouched for the rep. That kind of introduction doesn’t come from product knowledge. It doesn’t come from a good deck. It comes from someone on the buyer’s side deciding, in a room with no deal in it, that you’re worth backing.

The dinner wasn’t the sales meeting. The dinner was the Authenticity stage.

When authenticity is established, the conversation changes shape. The buyer stops narrating and starts thinking out loud. They say things like “Honestly, the real issue is…” or “Between us…” That shift is the buyer granting you the next stage.

T — Trust. Get into consideration.

Trust isn’t built in the meeting. It’s built between meetings. It’s the accumulation of small, consistent follow-throughs over time. You said you’d send something by Thursday; it arrived Wednesday. You promised an introduction to a customer; the introduction came with context they didn’t have to ask for. You said you’d check something with your team; you came back with a real answer, including the parts that weren’t convenient for you.

Trust is earned on the boring details. Reps who are brilliant in the meeting but sloppy between them don’t build trust. Those who are steady in the meeting and meticulous between them do.

Two stories. Same shape. Different endings.

A rep I coached lost a six-figure deal because he sent follow-up details two weeks late. One email, promised “by end of week,” arrived twelve days after that. The buyer was detail-oriented and had told him — directly — that she needed the timeline for an internal planning meeting. The email landed after the planning meeting. Her reply was two sentences: “We’re good. Thanks. Going another direction.” He never got another conversation. For the next quarter, he wondered what he did wrong. What he did wrong was treat a promised deliverable as a nice-to-have.

Compare that with a different rep, a different deal. Three-month cycle. A competitor came in at a lower price. Nobody on the buying team ever told the rep he was winning. He just kept doing the work. He showed up early to every meeting, prepared. He sent full notes with a summary and action items the same day or the next morning, every time. He remembered people’s names and a few personal details about them. Nothing dramatic. Nothing that would show up in a case study.

He didn’t hear it until after the deal closed and the implementation was underway. An internal project manager mentioned it to the engagement manager in passing: we chose you over your competitor, who came in at a lower price, because of your rep’s follow-through. We trusted him. We trust you.

That’s the Trust stage. The first rep was sending a late email. He didn’t think he was failing a test. Meanwhile, the second rep was sending on-time notes. He didn’t think he was passing one. Neither of them could see what the buyer was actually measuring — which is the whole point. The buyer doesn’t announce the test. They just watch to see if you pass it, over and over, in small ways, for as long as it takes.

When trust is established, you’re now in serious consideration. The buyer is thinking about your solution as a real possibility, not a polite conversation.

H — Helm. Earn the right to lead.

Helm is when the buyer hands you the wheel. And when the buyer hands over the helm, he’s handing over control.

Think about what that means. Up until this point, the buyer has been deciding. Weighing. Evaluating. Comparing you against other options, against doing nothing, against the internal politics of making a change. At Helm, that posture ends. The buyer stops evaluating and starts being led.

At this stage, they ask your opinion on things outside the immediate deal. They bring you into internal conversations you haven’t earned a right to be in by any conventional measure. They ask “what should we do?” rather than “what do you recommend?” The question shifts from which option to pick to what direction to take — and they’re looking to you for the answer.

This is the stage most frameworks don’t even name, because most frameworks end at “close.” Helm is different. It’s the stage where the close becomes inevitable, because the buyer has stopped evaluating you against alternatives. You are the direction now.

You can’t take Helm. The buyer has to give it. And they only give it when the first three stages are complete — when your Perspective earned the room, your Authenticity earned the real conversation, and your Trust earned the right to be followed.

Sequential and Conditional

Here’s what separates PATH from most frameworks: the stages are sequential and conditional. You can’t skip ahead. You can’t borrow Trust from a relationship that hasn’t been built. And you can’t earn Helm without Authenticity underneath it.

When Reps Operate at the Wrong Stage

Most stalled enterprise deals are stalled because the rep is operating at a stage the buyer hasn’t granted yet.

The rep is pitching a solution (Helm behavior) when the buyer is still deciding whether this person understands their business (Perspective stage).

Another rep is being vulnerable and personal (Authenticity behavior) when the buyer hasn’t yet been given a reason to take them seriously (Perspective stage).

A third is asking for the close (Helm behavior) when the buyer hasn’t accumulated enough small follow-throughs to actually trust them (Trust stage).

The mismatch is almost always the problem. And the rep usually doesn’t see it, because they’re measuring the deal by their own activity, not by what the buyer has granted.

How to Run This on Monday

Take your top five deals. For each one, ask two questions.

First: which stage of PATH is the buyer actually granting me right now? Not which stage of your CRM. Which stage of PATH. Be honest. If the buyer hasn’t really granted Perspective yet — if they’re still politely letting you take meetings but haven’t acknowledged you see something about their world — then that’s where you are. No matter what the CRM says.

Second: what am I doing this week that matches the stage the buyer has granted — versus the stage I wish I were in?

If those two things are mismatched, that’s your coaching conversation with the rep. Most reps don’t need to work harder. They need to work at the stage the buyer has actually granted, and do the specific work that earns access to the next one.

Check PATH against your top deals before you check the forecast. Nine times out of ten, when a deal is stalled or moving without explanation, the rep is operating at a stage the buyer hasn’t granted. Name the stage the buyer is actually in. Then do the work that stage requires.

The sales process in your CRM tracks what you do. PATH tracks what you’ve earned. The second one is the one that forecasts.

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PATH is the buyer-progression spine of Together We Win*, a Sales Operating System for enterprise sales leaders publishing fall 2026. Read the first chapter and try the Acelera Sales Advisor at together-we-win.com.*

Not sure which stage of PATH your biggest deal is actually in? Book a 30-minute working session. Bring the account. We’ll walk it stage by stage.

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