Everything You Need to Know About Gap Selling

Uncover the customer’s problem first, and then dig deeper.
Written by Brian Nordli
June 25, 2021Updated: June 25, 2021

Keenan never set out to create his own sales methodology, but after running nearly 10 years’ worth of sales training, a pattern began to emerge.

It started with a spur-of-the-moment sketch on a whiteboard to help a sales team better understand his approach to discovery. Before you start trying to give the client advice, he wrote, you have to understand what they’re doing now. He defined it as the customer’s “current state.”

More whiteboard sketches and blog posts followed on how to identify the customer’s current situation, the impact of their problem, and where they want to be in the future. Helping sales reps uncover that gap between the customer’s present state and their desired future state became the focus of his training.

Everybody says, ‘I’m sure it’s similar to value selling and the other [methodologies].’ But then they go through it and realize that it’s not.

It wasn’t until a friend of Keenan’s and a fellow sales leader pointed out that he was onto something new that Keenan realized he had a sales methodology on his hands. That was when gap selling was born.

What Is Gap Selling?

Gap selling is a problem-centric approach to sales. Reps use the discovery process to understand the full scope of the customer’s problem and uncover their “gap” — the difference between where the customer is today and where it wants to be in the future. Closing that gap becomes the foundation for all future sales conversations and is the motivation for the buyer to purchase your product. 

“It was from there that I sat back and started putting all of the pieces in place and drawing it out,” said Keenan, who is the founder of the sales consulting firm A Sales Guy. “Everybody says, ‘I’m sure it’s similar to value selling and the other [methodologies].’ But then they go through it and realize that it’s not. The equivalent would be to say that a platypus and a goat are both mammals. Sure, but they’re absolutely nothing alike.”

Keenan, who goes by just his last name, published his book on gap selling in 2018, making it one of the newest sales methodologies around. His strategy is based on two fundamental principles: 

  • The first is that nobody buys a product or makes a change unless their current situation is untenable.
  • The second is that it’s the salesperson’s job to influence that change, and they do that by getting a complete understanding of the customer’s current state and future state before they introduce the product. That’s the gap.

The framework is easy to learn, but it takes time to master. The key requires digging deeper into discovery than most reps are used to doing.

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What Is Gap Selling?

When Keenan was training other sales teams before he created gap selling, he noticed that sales reps spent most of their time pushing the benefits of their product and the cost of not implementing it. This forced the buyer to draw their own conclusions on whether it was worth it for their company to solve that issue. 

And when that happens, the results are out of the sales rep’s control, Keenan said.

“If the buyer doesn’t [understand the cost and benefit] on their own, the salesperson doesn’t know it. And if they don’t know it, they end up losing a deal they could’ve won,” Keenan said. “It’s much more like throwing a dart with your eyes closed than people realize.”  

Gap selling attempts to solve this issue with a problem-centric approach to sales. The framework hinges on an in-depth discovery process in which the rep must uncover the full scope of a customer’s current state and their desired future state before they discuss the product.

What Makes Up a Customer’s Current State?

  • Physical and literal situation. This includes details like where the customer is based, what they sell, who they sell it to, and their team size. 
  • Type of problem. The issue the customer is experiencing, both from a technical perspective and from a business perspective. 
  • Impact of the problem. The ways in which the problem affects the company, and any quantifiable data associated with that, like the cost for not solving it.  
  • Root cause of the problem. The fundamental issue or misalignment that’s causing the problem to occur.
  • Emotion. How this problem makes the buyer feel.

To help with this, Keenan defines the customer’s current state in five elements. First, the rep needs to understand the customer’s physical and literal situation. This includes things like where the company is located, who it sells to, the size of its team, and the industry it’s in. 

If the buyer doesn’t [understand the cost and benefit] on their own, the salesperson doesn’t know it. And if they don’t know it, they end up losing a deal they could’ve won.”

Next is the type of problem the customer is experiencing, and the impact of that problem. For example, the customer’s problem could be that they have inaccurate Salesforce data, which causes them to miss out on potential customers and $100,000 in revenue each month.

Then you need to get to the root cause of that problem, which could be that their sales reps are too busy prospecting to manually enter the information. 

Finally, the rep needs to collect information on the emotion, or how this problem makes the buyer feel. 

Once the rep has all that information, they can then discuss the buyer’s future state, or where the company could be if they solved this problem. The difference between where the company is and where they want to be is the eponymous “gap” in gap selling.

That gap becomes the context in which you discuss the product, and it’s the customer’s motivation for buying it, Keenan said.

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Changing the Buyer’s Relationship to the Product via the ‘Gap’

Ryan Scalera estimates that he understood about five percent of gap selling the first time he read the book as a rep at the behavioral health software firm CentralReach. It wasn’t until he sat through an eight-hour team-wide training with Keenan that he started to grasp the nuances of the methodology.

“It just blew my mind how it was able to change the way I think about selling and how everything lives or dies on being able to diagnose business problems,” said Scalera, who’s now an account executive at Dooly. “After that [training], I was hooked.”

Scalera realized that he was only gathering surface-level information from the customer. He was closing the obvious customers, but missing out on those who weren’t at least partially committed from the get-go. What gap selling helped him do was close customers who may have been on the fence. 

There’s something in the back of your head that you’re either not aware of or you’re not telling me, but that’s going to be the decision.”

That’s because gap selling naturally changes the customer’s relationship to the product, Keenan said. For example, if a buyer tells him they want to fix their slow sales process, he knows they’re not going to buy on that need alone. 

“There’s something in the back of your head that you’re either not aware of or you’re not telling me, but that’s going to be the decision,” Keenan said. “I won’t sell you anything until I know what’s in the back of your head.” 

By focusing on the problem and learning that the slow sales process will prevent the company from expanding to Europe, which will help the company go public in four years, he now has that motivation. When he presents the product, it’s seen as a customized solution to a defined problem.

“It changes the relationship with the buyer because all they’re focused on the rest of the way is me fixing that problem so they can get to that next tranche,” Keenan said. “You move them away from the product and get them squarely focused on why they came to you in the first place.”

At CentralReach, SVP of Sales Mark Cope said the framework has helped his reps earn more trust from customers. His team has started delving beyond the surface-level pain to ask questions that quantify the scope of the problem their customers are experiencing. It can be an uncomfortable exchange for some customers, but when a rep can take that information and add value, they get more buy-in from the customer.

Gap selling isn’t easy to master. Part of what drew Cope to the methodology in the first place is the simplicity of the framework, but that simplicity comes at a cost. It also requires a rep to have the business acumen to adapt to each customer and ask the right questions to fully diagnose the problem. Cope calls the methodology a “double-edged sword.” 

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Still, where other frameworks require checking boxes and administrative work before a rep even gets to discovery, gap selling allows them to focus on the customer, Cope said. It simplifies everything else so reps can work on their sales skills.

Keenan knows how complicated gap selling can be to master. There’s no checklist of questions because he believes each discovery should be customized. Like improv comedy, it requires the rep to listen to the customer and intuit what questions to ask next.     

“Once you know what information you’re supposed to get, how you get it is up to you,” Keenan said. “That’s trial and error. That’s amazing listening skills and off-the-charts business acumen.”

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Preparing Your Team to Gap Sell

Before Cope introduced gap selling to his sales team, he wanted to make sure they had the foundation to grasp its nuances. Since it was a new team, he had the reps start with value selling to get them thinking about what drives success for its customers.

Cope would then listen to dozens of call recordings each week for signs that his team was ready to make the leap to gap selling. 

“It would be hard to go from a standing start to gap [selling],” Cope said, adding that he wanted to see that his team understood the full scope of a customer’s problem, that it knew how to quantify the impact of that problem and how to explain that to the buyer.

Once his team started showing an understanding of the business problems CentralReach’s product solved, he felt confident that it was time to introduce gap selling. 

It would be hard to go from a standing start to gap [selling].”

Understanding the problems your product solves is the most important piece to the gap selling puzzle, Keenan said. In most cases, companies don’t know what problems they solve. They’ll say things like, “We help customers do X,” but that isn’t a problem. It steers them to the future state rather than addressing their current issue, he added.

That’s why the first exercise he does with a sales team is to have each rep fill out a problem identification chart. The chart is split into three categories: problem, impact and root cause. He has the team start by listing examples of business problems that exist that their product solves. 

Using Built In as an example, one problem could be that the company is having trouble delivering projects on time. Then he asks the reps what the business impact will be if they don’t fix that issue. In this case, it could mean that the customer is always second to market and missing out on revenue. 

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Finally, he’ll have them write down why that problem exists, or the root cause. This could be that they’re having trouble finding the right talent or there’s not the right skill set at the company to deliver the projects on time, according to Keenan.     

Once management sifts through the responses to come up with an accurate chart, the reps can use it as a blueprint for their discovery calls, Keenan added. This unifies the team’s approach to gap selling and qualifying customers. From there, it’s up to the rep how they want to gather the information.

 

Gap Selling in Action

While Scalera went through Keenan’s training (and even worked for him at his consulting firm for seven months), he considers himself a mediocre gap seller.

It’s always a work in progress to dig deeper during discovery and adapt to each customer’s situation, Scalera said.

“For most reps, when you think you have enough information, you probably don’t. Dig deeper,” he added.

Gap selling boils down to understanding the problems your product solves and asking enough questions to accurately measure a customer’s gap. While Keenan doesn’t provide a checklist of questions, there are three different types of questions you can ask to get at the information you need:

  • Probing questions.
  • Validating questions.
  • Process questions.

Process questions get the client talking about how they approach a given task. They’re useful for getting to the root cause of a problem. At Dooly, Scalera might ask a question like, “Walk me through what happens when a new lead comes in,” or “What happens next?”  

Probing questions get the client to either think more deeply about the issue or consider something that they hadn’t thought of before. These are questions like “Tell me more about X” or “Have you considered X?” If Scalera hears the client mention that they struggle with customer attrition, he might probe them by saying, “Tell me more about this attrition.” 

Validating questions make sure you and the customer are on the same page. They are close-ended questions like, “Is this an issue you’re trying to solve now?” Peppering validating questions throughout the call helps you connect the dots with the customer so that you’re both on the same page, Keenan said.

Mixing those questions together will help you get a full picture of the customer’s gap, Scalera said. The key is knowing when to ask each question.  

[Gap selling] is not an easy process to follow, it’s something to aspire to. But if you can become an effective gap seller, you’ll be hired at more places, you’ll be paid more money and you’ll be better at selling.” 

When Scalera is on a discovery call, he usually starts with a broad question and then lets the client talk. Once he hears something that aligns with his product’s problem identification chart, that’s where he’ll dig in. He knows he’s onto something when he hears a client say, “Wow, that’s a good question.”

His goal is to ask enough questions to identify the gap and quantify the cost it has on the business. This allows him to both qualify the customer and get buy-in from other stakeholders within the company. For example, a customer experiencing low Salesforce adoption might tell him it’s costing them $250,000 in revenue each year. If the product he’s selling costs $10,000, Scalera can help the buyer convince their CFO that it’s a problem worth solving. But if the gap was only $5,000 instead, it might not be worth it to pursue a sale, Scalera said. 

It can get uncomfortable asking the number of questions you need to ask to get a full picture of their gap, but it’s effective, Scalera said. His advice to other reps looking to adopt the strategy is to push through the awkwardness and keep asking questions. 

If you’re missing any information, go back and ask the client until you have what you need. Otherwise, you’ll waste their time and yours.

Of course, he knows it’s not an easy process to master it. But based on his experience, it’s worth it. 

“[Gap selling] is not an easy process to follow, it’s something to aspire to,” Scalera said. “But if you can become an effective gap seller, you’ll be hired at more places, you’ll be paid more money and you’ll be better at selling.” 

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