Good morning. That meeting went well. Now name the thing the buyer agreed to do.
Sales.
Advances, Not Continuations
For each of your last three customer meetings, can you name the action the buyer agreed to take before you next speak — not what they said, what they agreed to do?
SPIN Selling (1988) is remembered for its questions. Its second finding was the one that unsettled an industry built around closing. Neil Rackham's observers at Huthwaite, sitting in on live calls rather than trusting what trainers claimed happened in them, established a taxonomy first: a sales call can end only four ways. An order. An advance — an action the buyer agrees to take that moves the sale forward. A continuation, where the relationship carries on and nothing is agreed. Or a no-sale. Then came the awkward part. In small, low-value sales, more closing behaviour improved the hit rate, exactly as the training industry promised. In large sales it reversed: the sellers who pushed hardest for commitment at the end of a call won less often than the ones who didn't. Which leaves the whole weight of a serious deal resting on the advance — and the morning on committing publicly gave the mechanism: a decision nobody has said out loud to a named person, with a date on it, stays permanently renegotiable. A continuation is that decision. It gets written into the pipeline as progress anyway, because the handshake was warm and 'leave it with us' sounds like an event. An advance has a subject, a verb and a date, and the subject is never you.
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