Stop Selling. Start Solving. The Manifesto for Modern Sales
- Matthew Earle
- May 27
- 4 min read
Updated: May 28
Stop Selling. Start Solving. The Manifesto for Modern Sales from The Selling Collective
Does your sales organisation pride itself on being "customer centric"?
Do senior leaders within your business proudly proclaim that they put the customer front and centre of everything they do?
In my experience, I’ve heard this claimed more times than I care to remember. Scratch the surface of their sales approach, process, and culture, and the truth reveals itself.
Internal focus on their impressive customer list, their “brilliant” solution, and a feature dump they assume buyers will care about.
Unwavering conviction that everyone needs their product, regardless of actual problems.
No real curiosity. No persistent digging to uncover the pain that truly impacts the buyer.
No diagnosis. Just surface-level discovery, vague assumptions, and a scattergun spray of product claims hoping something sticks. Little effort went into quantifying the buyer’s pain or how it flowed across their organisation. Instead, the reflex was to push their “perfect” solution before understanding the client’s reality.
The most effective persuasion is the kind that doesn’t feel like persuasion at all—it feels like understanding. Dr. Robert Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
My Eyes Have Seen The Gory
Here’s what passes for “customer-centric” in too many organisations:
Not being willing to understand: Avoiding questions that might make the prospect uncomfortable—or worse, skipping basics like, “How many distributors do you have?”
Being too self-focused: Spending 30 minutes talking about their company, their solution, and their impressive clients—without even asking why the prospect booked the call. (Spoiler: The prospect ghosted them.)
Used-car salesman tactics: “Are you in the market for an inventory solution?” (Asked to a buyer who used a completely unrelated product. Zero discovery. Wrong audience. Wrong business unit.)
Stuck in a rut: Demo’ing features without asking about the buyer’s pain. Same script, same assumptions, same success rates and same price.
Relying on “hopium”: Pitching blindly with no discovery, no understanding of pain points, not even asking who the person is or their role.
Pre-supposing: Sharing case studies without articulating the customer’s problem, impact, or outcome.
Being a “relationship builder” only: Trusting a contact to sell for them. Only to hear, “It’s not the right time.”
I’ve seen this hundreds of times, across teams, countries, and experience levels.
"People don’t buy products; they buy solutions to problems." Neil Rackham, SPIN Selling.
Stop Selling. Start Solving.The Selling Collective Manifesto for Modern Sales
The Selling Collectives manifesto for modern sales is based on three core principles:
Be Curious: Is your #1 priority. Understand, don’t persuade.
Be Trusted: Become an advisor through empathy, not ego.
Be a Solver: The best salespeople are problem solvers, not product pushers.
Simple? Not quite. Trust is hard to build, easy to lose, and easier to fake. How do you make buyers truly trust you?
No problem. No pitch.
Find the underlying problem only you can solve.
Uncover the personal pain, its financial impact, and how it spreads across the organisation.
No critical pain? No proposal. Problem-first teams win deals; pitch-first teams get commoditised.
Find the Real Pain
Surface-level discovery = surface-level urgency = a bloated pipeline.
Buyers change for pain, not convenience. And that pain may be hidden—even to them.
If your discovery doesn’t surface the real pain, you don’t have a deal you have a delay.
Build Trust, Not Slide Decks
Trust comes from diagnosis, not product dumps.
“A demo before diagnosis is like prescribing surgery before asking what hurts.”
Top performers ask hard questions. They expose risk, consequence, and impact and only then prescribe.
Pain-Focused Messaging
If your outreach feels like noise, it’s because it ignores the buyer’s stress and blind spots.
Most outbound fails because it talks at people. Speak to their world, in their language.
Slow Down to Speed Up
The best sellers don’t push, they uncover.
Lead buyers to the close by making solving their pain the logical next step.
Still With Me?
Customers don’t care if you close the deal. They care about solving their problems. Great sellers:
Lead buyers to their pain.
Help them articulate it in their words.
Build trust through empathy.
Map that pain across the organisation.
If this resonates, you’re not alone. Pitching doesn’t scale. Solving does.
Stop Selling, start solving with the manifesto for modern sales by The Selling Collective.
Ready to Transform Your Sales Strategy?
If you’re serious about improving your team’s performance, The Selling Collective can help. Our problem-centered sales training equips B2B teams to build trust, generate pipelines, and close more deals.
Check out our free course, The Art of Problem-Centered Selling: Unlocking Sales Success or book your free sales audit to identify gaps holding back your sales team — and discover ways to fix them.
Connect: LinkedIn – The Selling Collective
Stop wasting your first meetings. Start solving. Build Problem Focused Pipeline Generation Strategies.
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