How the sales course teaches you to sell
You learn to sell by doing it, not by reading about it.
This is a sales course about the other side of the table. It does not hand you lines to say. It teaches how a buyer decides whether to change what they are doing, and what you can do, honestly, to help that decision get made.
Those ideas come from published research into how people make decisions. The course’s job is to turn each finding into selling behaviour you can practise: a question to ask, a sentence to write, a habit to stop.
Why buyers agree and still do not buy
A buyer deciding whether to change is not weighing your offer against nothing. On one side is the gain from changing. On the other is everything changing will cost them: the disruption, the admission that the current approach was wrong, and their own exposure if it fails. Until the second side is lighter, agreement does not become a sale.
Every sales lesson, in nine parts
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The scene read
A short written scene of a deal going wrong, with no commentary, so the lesson attaches to something you have felt.
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The idea read
A short illustrated explainer of why it works, drawn from a named source, with one hand-drawn diagram.
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The reading read
A printable chapter of 2,500 to 3,500 words that goes further than the explainer. The explainer is the summary of the reading, not the other way round.
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The teardown analyse
An annotated sales conversation. Select any line to see what it did and what the alternative would have cost.
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Your turn write
You apply the idea to your own market and your own deals, in writing. Saved, revisable and exportable. You supply the era, which keeps the course current.
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The exercise interact, solve
One of ten exercise types, from a diagnostic tree to a redline of a deliberately bad proposal.
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The drill do
Record yourself saying it out loud, as you would to a buyer, then score the recording against a published standard. Stored privately; only you can hear it.
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The check prove
Three to five questions about real selling situations. Never memory tests. Every wrong answer teaches, and explanations are shown for right and wrong answers alike.
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The one-pager reference
A single printable page: the thing you keep by the phone.
A lesson counts as complete only when you have done the reading, written your own version, used the exercise and recorded the practice drill. Each lesson ends with a short check you take for yourself; it is not graded and counts toward nothing. Reading alone completes nothing.
Where a lesson’s 45 minutes go
| Part | What you do | Minutes |
|---|---|---|
| Written scene and illustrated explainer | read | 8 |
| Reading | read | 13–14 |
| Case teardown | analyse | 5 |
| Your turn, on a deal of your own | write | 6–7 |
| Interactive exercise | interact, solve | about 5 |
| Practice drill | do | 4 |
| Check yourself (ungraded) | check | 3 |
Typical minutes across the course’s lessons. Spaced recall and each course’s final project come on top of the lessons.
Ten kinds of exercise
The exercise in each lesson is one of ten exercise types, configured for that lesson. Every one works with the keyboard, saves your work as you go, and exports to a printable page.
- Diagnostic tree
- Branching questions narrow to a conclusion, with an explanation at each branch.
- Sequence builder
- Put steps in order, and see why a wrong order fails.
- Statement builder
- Build your own wording, then score it against a five-part standard.
- Stakeholder mapper
- Map the people in a buying decision: role, influence and what each of them risks.
- Numeric model
- Enter your own figures; the model computes and explains.
- Annotated conversation
- Select a line to see what it did and the cheaper alternative.
- Branching simulator
- Choose a response and see the consequence two turns later, not immediately.
- Recorder and score sheet
- Record your voice, play it back and score yourself against published criteria.
- Card sort
- Sort items into groups until the pattern shows itself.
- Redline
- Edit a deliberately bad proposal or email, then compare it with a worked revision and its reasoning.
Spaced recall
When you pass a lesson’s check, its questions come back at 7, 30 and 90 days as a short optional refresher by email. Opting out takes one click.
One capstone per course
- Foundations
- A complete written plan for winning one real sale of your own: what to ask, in what order, and what you need to hear before you ask for the business.
- Advanced
- Two pieces of writing about your own deals. A negotiation plan for a real deal: what each side really needs, the alternatives, the order of your concessions and the point at which you walk away. And a written review of a real deal you lost: what happened, what you believed at the time, where it was decided and what you will do differently.
Why the sales course does not date
The course names no sales tools, platforms or vendors, and contains no dates, current events or statistics with a vintage. Every framework works on paper. Where the course needs an example from your market, it asks you for one: the exercise in every lesson is where you supply your own deals.
That is a deliberate choice. A sales course built on how buyers decide, rather than on tactics for a particular tool, should not need rewriting when the tools change.
The sources the method draws on, and their kinds of evidence · The two courses