Selling with Simplicity Masterclass: Part 1

Here's a stat that should startle every single sales rep: 90% of buying decisions are happening without you in the room. Now, think about that for a second. All those internal meetings, email chains, hallway conversations, budget discussions—you're not there for any of it. Yet, most of our training and process focuses on what we do as sellers when we are in the room: our discovery techniques, our demo skills, and our objection handling.

That's like training for 10% of the game and ignoring the other 90%. So the question isn't, "How do I get into more rooms?" because you can't. The question is, "How do I influence what happens in the rooms that I'll never see?"

The answer is building champions who can sell when you're not there. But here's the problem: not all champions are created equal. Some are attached to your deal like Velcro—if they hit some friction, they come apart. Others are welded to your deal like steel. They'll quit their job before they let your deal die. Now, the difference is co-creation.

There's a cognitive bias called the IKEA Effect, and it says we assign far greater value to the things that we build than the things that we buy. So that bunk bed that took you four hours and 98 bolts? You wouldn't sell it for less than $600, even though somebody in their right mind would never pay more than $200.

The exact same thing happens with your business cases. If you present something that is prepackaged—a "perfect" document—then your champion just feels like a passive recipient. But if you build it together, their fingerprints are all over it. They take ownership.

Most sales reps do the opposite. They create these beautiful business cases in isolation, and then they present them like a gift: "Here's why you should buy from us." But that's not champion building; that's champion dependence. Instead, your champion should look at the final business case and feel like they wrote it, not you. Because in the rooms that you'll never be in, they're going to be defending what they created, not your sales pitch.

So how do you co-create a business case that builds insanely committed champions? Well, it's a process that I call the Build Loop, and it has four different phases:

Phase 1: Draft the message. You start right after your first discovery call. You don't want to wait until you feel like you have all the information, and you want to use their exact words from the conversation. I'm not talking about a polished document; I just mean a few simple sentences in a Google Doc that captures the problem from their point of view.

Phase 2: Review. You share your screen in the next meeting and then you ask, "Hey, what did I get wrong here? What's missing?" This is where the magic happens. You're not presenting to them; you're building with them.

Phase 3: Refine. We let them edit the language to sound native or familiar to their organization. Replace all your corporate-speak with their own internal phrases and vocabulary. Change your priorities into their priorities.

Phase 4: Ownership. They present it internally, and they're doing this before you even see the conversations that are happening with decision-makers behind the scenes. Oftentimes, they're going to be presenting to their own team without you in the room. When you start to see evidence of this happening, that's how you know you have a real champion.

Each cycle of this loop is going to increase their ownership more and more, and it's going to reveal whether or not you've built a real champion or just a friendly contact.

In practice, this sounds like pulling open a shared document in your next meeting and saying something like, "Hey, I put together a quick recap of what I understood about some of the main challenges that we discussed. I'm not sure I got everything right—I'm pretty sure I got some things wrong—so I was hoping you could help me weigh in and fix some of these before we bring it to the wider team."

You literally edit the document live while they talk, because this is not a presentation—it's a workshop. You're asking things like, "Hey, you mentioned the current process was broken. What specifically makes it broken and how do you know?" or "You mentioned customer retention. Can you help me understand the connection between that metric and what success would look like if we fixed it through our partnership?"

Watch what happens. They're going to start speaking with conviction, and they're going to give you details that you never would've gotten in a normal conversation. They're going to start saying "we" instead of "you."

Here's how you'll know if it's working. Real champions always do three things that a friendly contact won't:

1. They edit your content. If you send version two and they just say, "Yeah, looks good," without actually making any changes, you're not there yet. You can even put something intentionally provocative into the next version—maybe a misspelling of a competitor's name—and see if they catch it.

2. They commit to action items. Ask them to gather specific data, schedule meetings, or present internally. People always make time for what's a priority for them. If they don't follow through, they're telling you this isn't actually a priority.

3. They push the timeline. Instead of you chasing them, they start chasing you. "Hey, when can we get in front of [Executive Name]?" or "What do we need in order to make this happen faster?"

The beautiful thing about this process is it's self-reinforcing. Building a better business case helps you build a stronger champion, and building a better champion helps you build a stronger business case.

We've created a one-page business case framework for you. It's going to help you start the conversation and begin to co-build with your champion, making it their internal document, not just a sales handout. And remember: you can't be in every single room, but a written business case can be. Just make sure that it sounds like them, not you.