Insight Selling

**Surprising Research on What Sales Winners Do Differently**

By Mike Schultz

**Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

**What You'll Learn**

Why some salespeople consistently win while equally talented competitors finish second. What 700+ business-to-business purchases reveal about how buyers actually decide. How to become the seller buyers trust, respect, and choose.

**Who This Book Is For**

Sales professionals who want to move beyond product pitching. Sales leaders building teams that win complex deals. Anyone whose success depends on influencing decisions in competitive environments.

Every salesperson has experienced the frustration of losing a deal they should have won. The product was strong. The price was competitive. The relationship seemed solid. Yet the buyer chose someone else, often for reasons that remained unclear. Mike Schultz spent years studying this problem. As president of RAIN Group, a global sales training and consulting firm, he had access to something most sales experts lack: data. Not anecdotes. Not opinions. Data from more than 700 business-to-business purchases, collected from buyers who had just made significant buying decisions. What he discovered challenged conventional sales wisdom. The traditional approach to selling has been built on a simple premise: find a problem, show how your product solves it, and demonstrate why your solution is better than alternatives. This problem-solution model dominated sales training for decades. It produced competent sellers. But it also produced something else: commoditization. When every seller follows the same playbook, buyers struggle to distinguish between them. Products blur together. Prices become the primary differentiator. Relationships, while important, fail to compensate for the sameness of the sales experience. Schultz's research revealed that sales winners operate differently. They don't just respond to needs. They create new perspectives. They don't just answer questions. They challenge assumptions. They don't just present solutions. They collaborate with buyers to build them. This is insight selling. The term has become popular in recent years, often used loosely to describe any sales approach that involves sharing information. But Schultz's research gives it specific meaning. Insight selling is not about having clever talking points. It's not about opening meetings with provocative questions designed to make buyers uncomfortable. It's not a tactic. Insight selling is a comprehensive approach built on three levels: connecting with buyers, convincing them of the case for change, and collaborating to create solutions. Each level matters. Together, they create something more powerful than any single technique. The stakes are high. Sales training is a multi-billion dollar industry, yet most of it fails to produce lasting change. Sellers attend workshops, feel inspired, and return to their old habits within weeks. The problem isn't motivation. It's that most training focuses on isolated techniques rather than integrated approaches. Schultz's work offers something different: a research-based framework…