Brynne Tillman: Welcome back to Making Sales Social. I am so thrilled to welcome back one of my absolute favorite sales experts in the world, Brent Adamson. He is a world-renowned researcher, author, and productive disruptor with nearly 20 years of experience shaping B2B sales strategy. He is known, first of all, for The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer. He and his co-author have absolutely transformed the way all of us sell today, whether you know it or not. His research and his books have impacted us greatly, and I am so excited because he has a new book called The Frame Making Sale, which was released a few months ago, in December of 2023. Again, it’s reinventing the B2B playbook by teaching sellers how to overcome customer indecision by boosting decision confidence. I was blown away by this because we all know that our biggest competitor is the status quo. So, Brent, welcome to the program.

Brent Adamson: Oh, Brynne, so good to see you as always. It’s great to be with you. By the way, regarding your introductory remarks, here’s where my mind went—which is a totally different place. When you said, “whether you know it or not, this has had a benefit,” I sat there thinking, “I wonder if that’s true for me as a father.” Like, do you think my kids know? You may know it, or you may not know it, but someday you’re going to wake up and realize your dad wasn’t so bad.

Brynne Tillman: Your dad had the biggest impact on sales since…

Brent Adamson: Well, I think we’re all trying to have an impact on our children, hopefully in a positive way. So there you go. But that’s a different podcast. I didn’t mean to distract you.

Brynne Tillman: No, I love that. I’ve got children and now grandchildren, so I get it, and I love that. But your impact and your legacy, family excluded, has impacted sales like no other author or expert ever, and I work with a lot of them. You get us to think differently.

Brent Adamson: Well, you know, it’s funny because The Challenger Sale really is autobiographical, right? They always say write what you know, and I don’t know anything other than that. That’s why the new book is just as important to me. It’s like Larry Levine might say: it comes from the heart. Some people, when I’m doing a Challenger keynote, will say, “Do you know your keynote follows the same path as the Challenger choreography?” It’s like, yes, I know; that’s not by accident. It’s the same thing with the new stuff. Actually, the company that I’ve now founded with my co-author, Karl Schmidt, to build around frame making is called A to B Insight. For those Challenger aficionados out there, they’ll know what A to B is all about: breaking down an “A” before you build up a “B.” That’s still what we’re doing, even with frame making. We’re trying to help the world understand that there’s just a fundamentally different way to think about how B2B commerce works today. As a result, it opens up a really cool opportunity for us to think pretty differently about how we’re going to sell, even for those who are dyed-in-the-wool Challenger followers.

Brynne Tillman: Yeah. You know what? I’m going to throw out my prepared questions because I really just want to dive into this.

Brent Adamson: I’ve screwed it up already! Okay, let’s roll.

Brynne Tillman: I always have these prepared questions, and then I get on a call with you and immediately think, “Why? Let me just talk,” because it’s so inspiring. I do want to talk first about The Frame Making Sale. Where did it come from? What inspired it, and why is it so important right now?

Brent Adamson: The foundational research, the data-driven aspect of it, was work that we were doing at CEB. Of course, CEB was purchased by Gartner, and that work continued long after The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer were published. We continued researching ideas that you know well, like sense-making and buyer enablement. All of that came out of that shop with Nick Toman and others working together. Maria Boulden drew the “spaghetti bowl” of B2B buying when we were there, which has now become a well-known graphic. What happened was—no offense in any way—as Gartner came in, priorities shifted. New research models were developed, and different tracks were created. Over time, this body of work that we had been developing started to hit the cutting room floor. It always left me wondering, after I left Gartner, what could we do with that? More importantly, what could we create that is new and inspired by it? The fundamental insight was—and still is—this huge amount of data showing that the number one driver of a high-quality, low-regret purchase (the thing that boosts the likelihood of customers buying a bigger deal with a broader scope at a higher price point and feeling good about it) is the degree to which customers report a high level of confidence in the decision they’re making on behalf of their company. This idea of decision confidence has been knocking around in my head for years. When you unpack decision confidence, the thing that really bends everyone’s brains is that it’s not: “Are we confident in the supplier?” “Are we confident in you as a trusted advisor?” “Are we confident in your product, brand, or value?” It turns out it has nothing to do with any of those things, which is what we all think about when we think about customer confidence. What it actually is: As a customer, how confident are we that we even asked the right questions in the first place? How confident are we that we can get consensus across our colleagues, that we even agree on the problem or the solution, let alone the supplier? How confident are we that we’ve done enough research and thoroughly explored alternatives? When you unpack all this, the reason this book exists and why Karl and I are building a company around it is that the single biggest driver of a high-quality, low-regret deal—the shortcut to growth for all of us—turns out to be customers’ confidence in themselves, not in you. It begged this really interesting question that I’ve been thinking through and building a model around since leaving Gartner: What does it look like to go to market and engage customers in a way that is specifically designed to solve for their self-perception, rather than their supplier perception? I don’t know that any of us in B2B sales have really given that much thought. That’s what frame making is really all about: it’s the solution and the framework for what that might look like. The reason why this matters now—we always used to talk at CEB about the “why now”—is that customer self-confidence is arguably at an all-time low. B2B buying is just broken. Customers are really struggling, and they’re not struggling to understand your solution or to find another insight (which would be Challenger). They are struggling with decision complexity: all the different people, steps, and navigating their own organization. People say, “We should map out the customer buying journey.” What if they don’t know how to buy? There is decision complexity, information overload (which we’ve all contributed to, ironically including Challenger), objective misalignment (different people having different metrics and priorities), and outcome uncertainty (“I believe you’ve had amazing results for other companies, but I’m afraid we’re going to screw this up because we screw up everything”). If I don’t feel confident in my ability to navigate the decision, make sense of information, align with my colleagues on objectives, and actually realize value, it doesn’t matter that I see your value. I’m worried about all that other stuff, so I’m just going to choose not to buy. The last time we tried this, as a customer doing the math in my head, we tried it with that technology or that vendor and it all went sideways. You mentioned that we’re all competing against the status quo, and that’s the starting point: your biggest competitor today is the status quo or indecision. Where I’ve come to land, Brynne—and I really want to get your thoughts on this—is that your number one competitor today, in many ways, is your customer’s memory. It’s the memory of the last time they went through a decision like this with anybody. When you walk into that room to have a sales conversation—whether on a Zoom call, Teams call, or in person—there is an invisible third party sitting in that room with you: their memory of the last time they tried to make a similar decision. Frankly, that third party is competing directly against you, and you’re losing. That to me is why this book exists: How do I compete against that memory? That’s what we all need to learn how to do.

Brynne Tillman: Two things come to mind. First, when we were chatting in the green room, I talked about how one of the biggest impacts early in my business of training LinkedIn was to lead to your solution, not with it. I hear you saying that insight helps build confidence in making their own decisions. From that, we teach creating content at the step before they even know they need you, helping them frame the questions—like, “Here are the 10 questions most people forget to ask when doing this.”

Brent Adamson: Yeah.

Brynne Tillman: We teach that because of the principle to lead to your solution, not with it, which is amazing. The other piece is a discovery framework we teach called CHIRP: What is the Challenge they’re facing? What is the History of what they’ve done to try to fix this before? What is the Impact on the business today, the Risk of no change, and the Priority in their business? It sounds like that history piece falls right in line with what you’re talking about: talking to them about bringing their memory back to the forefront.

Brent Adamson: It’s interesting to me. My co-author, Karl Schmidt, and I met at CEB. He ran the marketing practice there and built a lot of the things that ultimately became the Commercial Insight and Challenger workshops. He knows Challenger as well as I do. Karl and I have long discussions about where this new idea of frame making fits in with Challenger. We think Challenger is, in many ways, a subset of frame making. Frame making is simply the idea that when customers are overwhelmed with too many thoughts, options, steps, or questions, they need a guide, coach, or sherpa to take them by the hand and say, “It’s not all of these things. What we found in working with other customers like you is that these two or three things seem to matter most.” There’s the idea of bounding: taking something that feels big, hard, and overwhelming, and putting a frame around it. If Challenger is about being frame-breaking, this new work is about being frame-making—putting a boundary around it and saying, “It’s not everything.” Whether as parents, people buying our first home, or making complex financial or personal decisions (like assisted living for family members), you just want someone to say, “Look, it’s overwhelming and there’s a lot of information, but here is where to start—not just because I think so, but because other people like you found that it’s the best place to start.” That brings in social proof. The other part of frame making is prompting: creating a frame that prompts you to think about things you might have overlooked altogether. What we find is it boils down to three or five things, and one of them tends to get overlooked an awful lot. In working with other customers like you, we’ve found that this specific element is critical and needs to be brought up early. You can probably hear a lot of Challenger in that. Challenger is helping customers understand new ways to make money, save money, or mitigate risks in ways they haven’t fully appreciated. Although I am no longer affiliated with that IP (which is owned by the Richardson team), I still believe in it and talk about Challenger ideas on stage. I’m not throwing it overboard at all. However, 15 years on, the world we live in today is very different from 2008 or 2009 when we first did that research. The world is awash with information, particularly now with AI. What happens if I show up and challenge your thinking in all the right ways? I show you a new way to think about your business, and I get you to say, “Oh, I’ve never thought about it that way before.” Deep Challenger aficionados will recognize that canonical language. But then your customer thinks, “I’ve got to go do this. You can help me, but now I need to get this person on board, get a budget for that, and get approval for this.” They realize, “Just like you challenged me, I’ve got to go challenge these other people in my organization because this will be new to them.” Once they do the mental math, they think, “I’m exhausted just thinking about it. I don’t know if I can make any of that happen.” So while they agree that it’s a better way to go, they still don’t do it because they don’t have the confidence to make it happen. Where that leaves your customer is actually more frustrated than ever. The downside of Challenger is that if I challenge you successfully, but you don’t feel confident in your ability to act on that challenge, it’s demoralizing. We used to call this “teaching your customer into the desert.” That line comes from Deb Oler, who was the head of sales at Grainger. She taught me that line years ago: “We don’t want to teach our customer into the desert.” The key here is: How do we help people feel confident that they can get aligned, ask the right questions, and realize value? That is a whole body of work that wasn’t the priority 15 years ago, but is absolutely the priority today. That’s why this new book becomes really important. It raises interesting questions about your role as a salesperson and why you’re even showing up.

Brynne Tillman: Keep going on that!

Brent Adamson: You had an opening question about what’s social about social selling, right?

Brynne Tillman: We usually end with that, but go ahead if it’s relevant.

Brent Adamson: It is, I promise!

Brynne Tillman: Okay. The question we ask all our guests is: What does making sales social mean to you?

Brent Adamson: Can we focus on this word, “social”? That’s really the key part. For most people, when they hear “social,” they think social selling, social media, or online channels. But there’s a broader definition of social: human-to-human interaction. That is what this book is all about. The book starts in the introduction with a piece of research—the last research I was involved with at Gartner around 2021. We were running big surveys of B2B buyers, asking how they buy. Someone on the team had the great idea to throw in a hypothetical question: “If you could navigate this entire purchase journey without ever talking to a sales rep at all, would you prefer that?” The first time we asked, 43% said yes. The next time, 75% said yes. Gartner today reports around 66%. Either way, a massive proportion of B2B buyers say that even for complex sales, they would prefer not to talk to a sales rep at all. I’ve gotten into huge debates with heads of sales about this. They say, “Look, that may be true in your research, but in our company, customers have no choice. Our solutions are custom-built, so 99% to 100% of our deals go through a seller.” My response is: keep in mind that this research isn’t measuring what your customers are doing; it’s measuring what they would prefer to do if it were possible. The fact that 100% of your deals go through a seller, yet 75% of buyers would prefer not to interact with one, creates a large and widening gap between customer buying preference and customer buying reality. That gap represents risk. At Gartner, our research looked at how to sell the way customers want to buy through digital channels, integrating digital and in-person channels. But the question that kept bugging me was: What if you could become the one seller that customers do want to talk to? What would that look like? Imagine that world. B2B sales is an honorable profession. If 75% of buyers say they don’t want to talk to sellers, but they say, “I’ll talk to Brynne; she’s different,” imagine the window of differentiation that opens for you. You’re the first person they call, giving you a head start on the competition. It takes the Challenger idea—that it’s not what you sell, but how you sell—and puts it on steroids. How you sell can take you from “I don’t want to talk to you” to “I don’t want to talk to anyone but you.” Everyone wants to talk about AI now.

Brynne Tillman: If you want your book to be evergreen, it’s good that you didn’t focus too heavily on it.

Brent Adamson: That was a conscious bet. AI is only mentioned twice in 200 pages. But let me connect AI to this social concept. I have a personal story about AI that I call the “dog food story.” A couple of months ago, late at night, I was scrolling through Instagram. The algorithm served up advertisements for human-grade dog food because it figured out I have a rescue dog with digestive issues. The ads made me feel guilty, like, “If you were a good dog owner, you’d feed her human-grade food.” I decided to research human-grade dog food using Copilot. I built an RFP for human-grade dog food: top vendors, benefits, drawbacks, features, costs, and criteria for my dog. I asked it to sort everything into a table, make a recommendation, and make it printable. I printed the table out, took it to the kitchen, and showed it to my wife. The paper was clear: there was an obvious winner with all the logic laid out. I walked her through it, and she said, “That’s interesting. What do you think we should do?” I said, “I don’t know. What do you think?” We went back and forth like that for two minutes. Then my wife stared at the paper with the clear recommendation right in front of her and said, “You know what would be really helpful? If we could just talk to a couple of other rescue dog owners and get their experience with these different brands to see what it’s like for them.” I said, “Yeah, that would make a lot of sense. I’d feel a lot better.” But we couldn’t figure out how to easily talk to other owners right then. We put that piece of paper on the kitchen counter, and it is literally still sitting there two months later. We haven’t done a thing about it. That is where we are today. While 75% of B2B buyers say they prefer to buy without talking to a sales rep, I do not believe 75% want a human-free experience—they just want a rep-free experience. They want to talk to people; they just don’t want to talk to a traditional salesperson. They want to talk to peers and other people like them. The question for sales is: How do we show up less like a salesperson and more like a human being? How do you give customers what they want most, which is social proof? Every customer at some point says, “I’d love to know what other companies or leaders like me are doing, and what has worked for them.” What if our main mission became sharing insights learned from other companies like them based on social proof? That changes your role from being the “expert” who says, “I’ve been doing this for 30 years; here’s what you need to do.” We know from our sense-making research that showing up as the ultimate expert actually undermines customer self-confidence. What works is showing up with humility and curiosity to share what you’ve learned from others. Your value as a seller isn’t your expertise; it’s your access—your access to other customers like them. Your role becomes that of a connector or conduit to help them feel confident. If someone in that dog food scenario had said, “We work with a lot of owners with five-year-old rescue dogs on a similar budget, and here are the three criteria that matter most for choosing the right path for your pet,” that would have been helpful. That is what frame making is. It’s not showing up to challenge their thinking with yet another thing to consider. It’s taking something overwhelming, bounding it, and prompting them on the few things that matter most. It’s competing against AI and other sellers by building a genuine human-to-human, social connection. That is what “social” really means.

Brynne Tillman: You juggled those points brilliantly. I have two additions to that. One of our primary one-liners is: “Detach from what the prospect is worth to you, and attach to what you are worth to the prospect.” The other piece is one of our most successful campaigns: “Prospecting by Interview.” We use Sales Navigator to track job changes. When people enter a new role, they’re overwhelmed. We reach out to interview executives in that role and ask, “What do you wish you knew in the first 90 days of your role?” We compile the tips from their peers, offer the insights permission-based, and then follow up to ask if they’d like to contribute their own insights.

Brent Adamson: I love it! You are acting as a broker of information and help. That is so valuable. AI isn’t collecting or packaging that information purposefully. Everything you learn from an exercise like that can be packaged at different levels: a conversational tip, a “First 90 Days” checklist, a readiness benchmark, or a maturity model. This is what consultants do when they use frameworks like Porter’s Five Forces or the BCG Matrix: they create frameworks to help you organize your thinking and take action with greater confidence. That is what we’re talking about here.

Brynne Tillman: In today’s environment, I use Claude to take call transcripts and extract those insights. I don’t want AI writing the content, but it’s great at synthesizing. It can pull insights from seven executives into a checklist or benchmark report that is authentically gathered.

Brent Adamson: What’s really cool is that the entry point into our Frame Making training is what we call “The Phrase That Frames.” The phrase is: “In working with other customers like you, one of the things that we’ve been surprised to learn is…” It’s not meant to be a verbatim script, but a posture: * “In working with other customers like you…” establishes social proof. * “…we’ve been surprised to learn…” gives you permission to learn collaboratively alongside them, rather than lecturing them. When you teach this language to sellers, it can feel foreign at first because they’re used to pitch scripts. But we’re trying to get them to speak naturally—like talking to a friend at a restaurant. It’s about choosing words purposefully to create an emotional connection, changing not just what they know, but how they feel. I watched a recorded sales call on Gong recently where a rep used this approach with a head of HR. He said, “In working with other customers like you…” and shared a piece of advice. The prospect and her colleagues immediately started discussing it among themselves right in front of the rep, solving their own problems based on that frame. They ended the call saying, “Thanks for bringing that up; that was really helpful.” We’re helping the rep show up as someone who provides great advice sourced from peers. That’s what frame making is about.

Brynne Tillman: That is brilliant. What I’m hearing is that we have to move away from being a “salesperson” and become a helpful human. We have to detach from the immediate sale. Unfortunately, our KPIs often make us stress about rushing through discovery questions. What matters right now is showing up in a way that is more meaningful to their world than not having you there.

Brent Adamson: Exactly. Just be helpful. Customers are overwhelmed by decision complexity, internal alignment, and accountability for results. If you show up with a product feature dump, that doesn’t help. Even a Challenger approach in the wrong context can add to their overwhelm. I am pretty adamant about describing frame making not as a methodology, but as a mindset. The word “methodology” gets people hamstrung (“Should I do Challenger or Frame Making?”). Why can’t it be a mix of both, along with SPIN Selling or GAP Selling? There are gold nuggets in all of these frameworks. Framemaking isn’t about replacing your process; it’s about asking one question before every interaction: “Why would they want to talk to me in the first place?” It’s not to learn about your product features; it’s to help them feel better about their own decision-making process.

Brynne Tillman: Building confidence in making a decision.

Brent Adamson: Right. Think about going on a date, or being around someone you love—a spouse, child, or friend. When you think of someone who makes you light up, you think, “I love who I am when I’m around you.” In frame making, the goal is: How do you become that kind of presence for your customer? How do you interact so that the customer thinks, “I’m so glad I talked to her because I feel better about myself and our direction as a result of that conversation”? That’s how you become the one seller buyers want to talk to. The mindset is simply: How do we help our customers make the best decision they can in as little time as possible? The last part of that phrase—”in as little time as possible”—protects you from the free consulting trap. If you’re going to lose a deal, you want to lose early. Let’s have helpful, confidence-building conversations early on. If they aren’t open to it or aren’t going to buy, I’d rather know sooner so I can focus where my help is valued. We need to re-engineer our “why” in sales around why this profession exists. If we keep doing what we’ve been doing, AI will replace us. But while customers don’t want to be “sold,” they do want help.

Brynne Tillman: It feels like a switch from Salesperson to Sherpa—being a guide to help them through the journey as seamlessly as possible.

Brent Adamson: In frame making, you have to be comfortable helping them make a decision they feel good about, even if that decision isn’t to buy from you. If it isn’t a fit, you want to find out early. Brian Smith, the CEO of Expedient, once told his sales team: “If we’re going to lose, let’s lose early. But I want to show up in such a way that no one else is showing up, so that even if they don’t go with us this time, we’ll be the first person they call next time because we were the only ones who were actually helpful.”

Brynne Tillman: I love that! A core message we teach is how to start trust-based conversations without being salesy. But there’s a distinction here: trust is about them having trust in you, whereas confidence is about them having trust in themselves.

Brent Adamson: Right before Christmas, my friend Dave Brock put me in touch with Charlie Green, co-author of The Trusted Advisor. I shared this concept with Charlie to get his take on trust. Much of what is done today in the name of “Trusted Advisor” focuses on: “How do I get the customer to trust me?” In frame making, we flip that on its head: What if, rather than solving for customers trusting you, you become the catalyst for customers trusting themselves? If you help customers trust themselves, their trust in you becomes a natural byproduct. Charlie agreed and mentioned that a great sales call is like a good therapy session. A therapist doesn’t just tell the client what to do; they create a framework so the client can make choices for themselves. The agency lies with the client. We talk a lot about self-agency in the book. When you support the customer’s self-agency, their confidence grows because they are the ones making the choice. We advocate for being supplier-agnostic in our approach—showing up specifically to help them feel better about their choices. Our data shows that this is the single best way to drive growth.

Brynne Tillman: We teach that you aren’t bringing value unless the insight you provide is vendor-agnostic. It has to be valuable to them even if they don’t end up buying from you.

Brent Adamson: Customer self-confidence is based on subjective things: “Did we ask the right questions?” “Have we done sufficient research?” None of these have an objective finish line; they are subjective feelings. We train sales teams to get customers to know something, but the hill I’m climbing now is equipping sellers to get customers to feel something. That is what AI can’t do, and what other sellers aren’t doing. If you want to be the one seller customers want to talk to, be the one who leaves them feeling better about what they’re doing as a result of the conversation. That’s the flag we need to plant for the B2B sales profession over the next decade.

Brynne Tillman: What a great place to wrap up! This has been amazing, Brent. Where can our listeners find your book?

Brent Adamson: The book, The Frame Making Sale, is available wherever books are sold online, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble. You can also find me on LinkedIn, where I post five-minute videos every Thursday breaking down frame-making concepts. You can also visit our company website at A to B Insight.

Brynne Tillman: Awesome! Thank you so much, Brent. You are amazing.

Brent Adamson: Thank you, Brynne. You’re amazing, too!

Brynne Tillman: To all of our listeners, when you’re out and about, don’t forget to make your sales social!

Brent Adamson: Cheers, Brynne!

Brynne Tillman: Thank you! I’ll let you know when it’s live.

Brent Adamson: Sounds great. Talk soon, Brynne! See ya.

Subscribe for the latest episodes. You can also listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and other platforms. Visit our website, socialsaleslink.com, for more information.