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Can You Hear Me Now?

About 316 years ago, I had my 1st professional B2B sales gig. It involved a bunch of cold calling to people who ABSOLUTELY did not want to be hearing from me.

This was the early 1990s and I was selling corporate cell phone plans to small & medium sized businesses. I hated cold calling (still do), and I always got nervous - my voice got tight and always stumbled over my words. I had a colleague who was so smooth…and he sat next to me…so all day I hear Mark asking questions like, “OK, Tom, what I want to do is take no more than 3 minutes of your time, tell you what {big cell phone company} can do for your business. At the end of that 3 minutes, you can tell me if it makes sense to keep on talking. Would that be OK, Tom?”

Mark got Tom (or Jennifer or William) to talk for more than 3 minutes about 80% of the time. I got Tom (or Jennifer or William) past 30 seconds about 1 call in every 10.

I asked Mark how he did it. He laughed and said that all he did was ask questions and respond to the answers with more questions about why they answered that way. I did not understand at all. Mark, I learned, had been trained in Sandler Sales. At that point, I didn’t know anything about sales, but I listened & tried to learn from Mark all day long.

I could never cold call like he did. I got fired from that job after about 6 months - but I learned a lot from Mark. (I still suck at cold calls - I promised myself I would never do one ever again…)

The 2018 Video That Predicted Everything

Back in 2018, when webcam quality didn’t matter, I recorded a short video about a concept I called Return on Understanding. It was way ahead of my time. Other coaches and trainers loved the idea of a made up metric that measured some kind of return. Clients almost always wrote it down - and some of my clients from my 1st Agency Kickoff still post about it all these years later. 

I referenced my fancy made up metric in conference speeches, coaching sessions & pretty frequently in this old newsletter. But it never had the IMPACT that I wanted it to have. But as I keep my coaching and consulting in a constant state of evolution, it turned out to be the foundation of everything I teach today. It has only taken me about seven and a half years to finally figure out it’s place. (I am funny, I know how to use many forms of punctuation, and I make really freakin’ awesome pancakes…I never claimed to be a fast learner…)

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The Secret Metric You Forgot You Were Measuring All Along

Here’s the TL;DR.

Return on Understanding is the idea that your biggest leverage point in sales, leadership, and growth isn’t tactics or channels or ROAS. It’s your ability to understand the person in front of you at a deeper level than they understand themselves.

I talked about the moments when agencies hit inflection points. Moving from solo to team. Moving from small clients to bigger clients. Repositioning upmarket. Adding services. All those high-friction transitions demand one thing above everything else:

A new level of understanding.

New clients have different needs. Different risk profiles. Different fears. Different expectations. Old assumptions don’t travel well. If you don’t slow down long enough to understand the world your prospect lives in, you’re still pitching to an audience that is being polite by not telling you to STFU.

The fastest way to build credibility with a prospect is to reflect their world back to them more accurately than they’ve ever articulated it. When someone feels deeply understood, two magical things happen:

1. They grant you credibility

2. They invite you into their decision-making space

That flips you from vendor to insider…tribe member…collaborator. The sale becomes almost inevitable because you’re not “convincing” anymore. You’re building the vision of what’s next, together.

ROU wasn’t just about prospects - its about teams & partners & everyone in your ecosystem. As founders, we have an irrational and deeply emotional bond with our companies. Your team, for the moist part, does not. Not because they don’t care, but because their relationship is different.

Leaders have to understand their teams’ hopes, ambitions, anxieties, and motivations if they want to unlock loyalty, creativity, and initiative. Validation of their experience is oxygen to the people on your team. When someone feels understood, they invest more of themselves. When they don’t, they retreat.

IMHO, ROU is the universal driver behind:

• Client trust

• Team retention

• Better decision-making

• Better culture

• Better sales

It’s not a tactical exercise. It’s relational. It’s identity-level engagement. And it’s still the most powerful lever in business today.

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The WTF Sales Method

After listening to Mark asking questions, repeating answers & getting prospects ask what the next step would be, I realized that I didn’t need to sell like anyone else. I felt like a total fraud making cold calls. But plop me in a room (real or Zoom) with someone where I can see their expression, where I can see what makes their eyes grow wide or dart away gives me the CONNECTION to understand what they need, what their business needs, and how they are going to be able to understand whatever it is I am offering.

The Human First Sales System That Makes Every Other Sales Framework Feel A Little Plastic

I didn’t even really understand this for years, but I’ve been building a sales framework that revolves around one idea.

If the prospect does not feel understood, they cannot buy.

The WTF Sales philosophy is built on four core behaviors:

1. Human First: Before you ask a single question, your job is to create safety. Warmth. Presence. No one opens up to a seller who feels like they’re about to run a script on them. When someone meets the real you, not the “sales version” of you, everything changes.

2. Deep Connection: Your questions matter. But being tuned in matters more. You notice tone. You notice shifts. You reflect their meaning, not just their words. This is how trust is built.

3. Problem Identification: Not surface problems - but deep problems around identity, team, organizational problems, market problems, eco-system problems, value problems, cost problems, audience problesm… You’re listening for the true shape of the pain, and because you are really tuned in, you see the patterns & constraints they live inside. You help them gather decision-making energy. They share stuff they don’t tell anyone else because no one else listens and understands this way.

4. Make the Prospect Feel Seen: This is the ROU at work. You summarize their world more clearly than they’ve ever said it. When you do that, you unlock instant trust and instant credibility. And most importantly, you create emotional validation. That’s the real currency of the sale. (I know that you don’t believe me…but it is true…)

And no, this isn’t therapy masquerading as sales, or some kind of woo woo BS. This approach is effective with Fortune 50 prospects and struggling entrepreneurs…when you understand the problem, and can articulate it’s impact with some precision, you step out of the sales role into the role of ally.

Yes, BANT, MEDIIC, Challenger, SPIN… they all have their place. They’re useful. They’re tactical. But none of them generate emotional safety. None of them transform a skeptical buyer into an open one. None of them create the conditions for truth.

The WTF Sales Method does exactly that. It’s the strategic layer all the tactical frameworks are missing.

The Real Reason Your Close Rate Improves When You Stop Acting Like a Seller

This method works because it aligns with how humans actually make decisions. People don’t buy the best option. They buy the option that feels safest..and safety comes from one place only.

Feeling understood.

Here’s what changes when you sell this way:

1. You shorten the sales cycle: When someone feels seen, they stop hiding information. That speeds everything up.

2. You eliminate most objections: Objections are protective shields. When you build trust early, they fade.

3. You increase deal size: Understanding more deeply unlocks bigger problems. Bigger problems unlock bigger projects.

4. You win on fit, not features: When buyers trust you at the emotional level, competitors disappear. They’re not choosing between vendors. They’re choosing between someone who understands them and someone who doesn’t.

5. You get the real story: Which means you can diagnose accurately, propose correctly, and deliver cleanly. This turns you into a category of one.

Understanding is leverage.

Understanding is speed.

Understanding is differentiation.

Understanding is retention.

Understanding is everything.

Call Lab Lite and Pro Are Coming… and They Actually Teach This Stuff

If you’ve followed my work for a while, you know that I hate “Do it this way…”. I hate templates, scripts, emotional manipulation and bullshit questions like “What’s your why?” or “What keeps you up at night?”

You have to EARN the right to get insight into those questions. I care about real conversations that create real connection, real solutions and real revenue.

We built Call Lab Lite and Call Lab Pro to grade calls based on the WTF Sales Method itself.

• Did you create a human container

• Did you build trust early

• Did you go deeper than surface symptoms

• Did you make the buyer feel understood

• Did you reflect their world more clearly than they said it

• Did you avoid early pitching

• Did you earn the right to present a solution

• Did you create emotional safety

The Lite version will give you a fast diagnostic.

The Pro version shows your growth over time and gives you surgical precision feedback on the parts of your conversations that actually matter.

Call Lab Lite & Call Lab Pro - Available Tuesday Dec 2

Call Lab Lite - Free

Call Lab Pro - $29/mo

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