Guide
Keenan's diagnostic method: quantify the current state, establish the future state, and sell the distance between them.
Gap Selling, from Keenan's book of the same name, is diagnostic rather than persuasive. The deal is the distance between where the prospect is and where they want to be. Your product is not what you sell; the gap is what you sell, and the product is how it closes.
Current state, quantified. Volume, frequency, cost, time. "We get a lot of tickets" is not a current state. "Three thousand a week, forty percent repetitive" is. Everything downstream depends on this number, and it has to come from them.
Future state, quantified. What good looks like, with a figure and a date. "More efficient" is not a future state.
The gap. The explicit delta. If it has not been said out loud, the rep cannot sell to it, because the prospect has not yet agreed it exists at that size.
Impact. What the gap costs, in money, time or risk. This is the difference between a problem and a funded problem.
Root cause. Why it is still broken. This is where most discovery stops one question early. Whatever they tried before, and why it failed, tells you whether you are the right answer, and occasionally tells you honestly that you are not.
Emotional impact. What it costs the person, not the company. Deals stall in procurement when nobody in the building personally needs them to close.
Decision process. Who, on what criteria, by when.
Selling to a gap the prospect has not agreed to. A rep who has heard "it's a bit slow" and starts presenting is selling into a gap of their own invention, and every objection that follows is really the prospect telling them the gap is not that big.
Most calls do not skip a pillar; they raise it and move on. Repwing marks that as surface-only rather than covered, because it is the cheapest fix available to a rep and the hardest to spot in your own call: at the time, it felt like you asked.
Other guides: MEDDPICC · MEDDIC · SPIN Selling · BANT · The Challenger Sale · Discovery calls · Sales coaching
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