Sales Patterns

Sell by helping buyers decide.

Methods for business-to-business selling, from first contact to growing an account, for founders, small teams and sales professionals. The cards cover finding people who need what you sell, understanding their problem before pitching, showing how their situation improves, treating objections as information, helping buyers commit, and forecasting the pipeline honestly.

48 cards · 6 suits · 5 recipes · 2 missions

What's inside

Prospect8Have you found people who need this?
Discover8Is their problem clear in their own words?
Pitch8Can you show how their world gets better?
Objections8Are you treating their doubts as information?
Commit8Have you agreed a clear next step?
Pipeline and Growth8Is your forecast honest enough to plan on?

A few cards

Prospect

Ideal Customer Profile

Sell to the customers you already serve best, not to everyone with a budget.

Discover

Discovery Call Plan

Know the agenda, the questions and the outcome you want before you dial in.

Objections

Welcome The Objection

An objection means they're thinking about buying, so treat it as information, not attack.

One card in full

Commit

Mutual Action Plan

Write down, with the buyer, every step from today to go-live and who owns each one.

Most deals do not die from a firm no. They drift, because nobody wrote down what has to happen, by when, and who is doing it. A mutual action plan (a well-known practice in B2B selling) is a shared timeline that you and the buyer build and keep together so both sides can see the road to a decision.

How to use it

Start from the date the buyer wants to be live, then work backwards to today.
List every step on both sides: trials, security review, legal, budget sign-off, kick-off. Use the Decision Process Map to find the ones you would miss.
Give each step one named owner and a date. "Them" is not an owner.
Share it where the buyer can edit it, and review it on each call.
When a date slips, ask what changed and agree a new one openly.

Example

A small studio selling a licence to a publisher agrees a 14-row plan with its champion: technical test by the 10th, legal review by the 24th, signature by month end. When legal slips a week, both sides see it at once and the champion chases internally.

Watch out

A plan you wrote alone and sent over is your wish list, not a mutual plan.
Never pad it with invented deadlines to rush the buyer. Pair it with Next Step, Every Time and Clean Handover.

Recipes

Demo That Sells: Build a demo around how the buyer will judge success, show their world before and after, back it with matching proof and end on a dated next step.
First Outreach: Go from a vague market to a short list of the right accounts and a polite, planned sequence of messages they will actually read.
Forecast You Can Trust: Turn a hopeful pipeline into a forecast built on buyer actions and evidence, and learn from the deals you lose.
Great Discovery Call: Run a first call that stays on the buyer's problem and ends with a summary they agree with and a dated next step.
Rescue A Stalled Deal: Find out what changed in a deal that has gone quiet, and either restart it with a shared plan or close it on good terms.

Missions

Prepare a sales call: from a name in the calendar to a call plan with research, the questions to ask, the likely objections and the next step you want.
Review a deal: from "is this deal real?" to a clear verdict, with the evidence for and against, the gaps to close and the actions for this week.

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