Tag: Sales Strategy And Tactics

Discussion: Am I Doing It Right? – Thu 4 Dec 2025

High Probability Selling Community Forum meeting on Zoom. Everyone who has an interest in High Probability Selling is invited.

Topic:  Am I Doing It Right?
Date:  Thursday 4 December 2025
Times:  9:30 AM and again at 6:30 PM (USA Eastern Time)
Cost:  No charge. No registration required.
Zoom Meeting:  Click on THIS LINK to join the meeting at the scheduled time. 
Meeting ID = 834 3679 3215
Passcode = 751935

Recording:  Both meetings will be recorded.  A link to both recordings will be emailed to everyone who attends either meeting, but only if we have your name and email address.

Who Else is Teaching Sales Methods that Resemble High Probability Selling?

High Probability Selling (HPS) has been around for decades, yet most sales training programs today still focus on persuasion, manipulation, and closing techniques.  Even so, there is a growing movement of sales thinkers and trainers who advocate methods that echo some of the same principles as HPS, even if they never mention it by name.

Here are a few examples:

1. The Challenger Sale (Matthew Dixon & Brent Adamson)
This approach emphasizes teaching, tailoring, and taking control.  While it still assumes that persuasion plays a role, the Challenger model encourages salespeople to qualify opportunities more rigorously and avoid wasting time on prospects who are unlikely to act.

2. SPIN Selling (Neil Rackham)
SPIN focuses on asking questions that uncover a buyer’s situation, problem, implication, and need-payoff.  It shares some similarities with HPS in that it reduces pressure on the seller to pitch and instead emphasizes discovery.  However, it still assumes the salesperson can lead a prospect to a conclusion through carefully structured questioning.

3. Sandler Selling System
Sandler training stresses equal business stature between buyer and seller, up-front contracts, and disqualifying prospects who are not a good fit.  This alignment with HPS is clear—especially the idea of putting aside low-probability prospects instead of chasing them.  Where it differs is in its continued reliance on techniques for nudging or steering the prospect.

4. Customer-Centric Selling (Michael Bosworth & John Holland)
This framework shifts focus away from persuading and toward facilitating a buying process that is on the customer’s terms.  It emphasizes listening and aligning with the buyer’s goals.  The overlap with HPS lies in respect for the buyer’s decision-making.  Still, it often circles back to “advancing the sale,” which is at odds with the HPS principle of waiting for probability, not possibility.

5. Trust-Based Selling (Charles Green, author of The Trusted Advisor)
This method focuses on transparency, credibility, and focusing on the client’s interests.  It resonates with the HPS principle that trust and respect cannot be manufactured but must arise naturally from communication.  However, it tends to overemphasize relationship-building, which HPS deliberately avoids in the prospecting stage.

The Distinction of High Probability Selling

All of these approaches represent a shift away from the hard-sell tactics that dominated traditional sales training.  They encourage more listening, more honesty, and more focus on whether the buyer is a good fit.  In this way, they resemble HPS.

But the difference is fundamental:  most of these systems still assume that persuasion and influence are essential parts of selling.  High Probability Selling rejects that assumption entirely.  Instead of persuading, HPS is about searching—finding the prospects who want what you are offering, and only then continuing the conversation.

That distinction may seem subtle, but it changes everything.  It frees salespeople from chasing, pushing, or performing.  It also frees prospects from the pressure of being sold to.  What remains is a respectful, efficient, and surprisingly simple way of doing business.

We would love to hear your thoughts on this, even if you disagree (especially if you disagree). Please comment or reply to this post online, so others may benefit from your perspective.

Mystery of Sales Strategy – The Probability Game

Sales can be a bit of a mystery to many people.

People who do it, people who see it done, and the people who have never seen it done, but think they have. 

It has existed for a long, long time in the category of business alchemy and marketing. 

In the world of alchemy, what makes sense doesn’t work. What doesn’t make sense suddenly works. And then when we make sense of that, it doesn’t work anymore.

We look under every rock and internet resource and folklore and the rumor mill, constantly seeking that magic formula that will produce the results we seek.

The result we seek is for someone to say yes. 

In conventional sales techniques, gurus are all promising that they have the secret way to get everybody to say yes 100% of the time.

It’s been more than 100 years since assembly line style of scientific psycho selling has been invented.

We are all searching and seeking, drunk on dopamine that this one thing will be the one, the Holy Grail, the one phrase, the magic word, the technique that will get everyone we call and everyone we sit in front of and everyone we meet with to say, “Yes, where have you been my whole life?” 

Then something works.  We hear the yeses.  We draw the conclusion that we’ve been waiting for decades to draw, that we finally found the formula. 

So if an unexpected number of prospects say yes, when I’m using a technique that I picked up from a YouTube video by Jim Bandersnatch, then that’s why all those people, all of a sudden, said yes.  So now whenever I sell, I’m going to make sure I use the Bandersnatch technique, because that’s what made them say yes.

And of all the products and services that I sell, if the emotional charge, the emotional bookmark, the feeling was powerful enough when an unexpected person or persons said yes, then I become completely smitten with that particular product.  Because that product is the one that sells itself, a no-brainer.

And since I love the feeling of people saying yes, and I love the feeling associated of people buying from me, and I love the accolades that I get from people buying from me more than they buy from anyone else, then I’m going to chase that feeling constantly, even after conditions have changed.

Even after prospects (also known as people who are extraordinarily illogical) have changed their minds about the wonder product that I’m convinced will never stop selling, and they all stop buying it, even when I use the Bandersnatch technique.

So when things are working, whatever that means for us, and we happen to be using the Bandersnatch technique, and we keep our rabbit’s foot in our left pocket and a silver dollar in our right pocket, and we wear our shoes on the opposite feet, we don’t stop to inquire.

We’re like the gambler who thinks that they’re on a winning streak.

We worry about being attached to the outcome of a sale.  We’re not attached to the outcome of a sale. We’re attached to the feeling.  We’re attached to the thought that we found the magical combination of random factors that will produce the feeling that we’ve been seeking.

Casinos make billions of dollars off of that feeling, and normally intelligent, practical people, driven most of the time by common sense, will hand their money over to a casino as soon as they have had the feeling of getting lucky.

Now the professional poker player knows that the feeling of winning and the feeling of being lucky is the precursor to the apocalypse.

The professional poker player is a statistician.  Even when playing against people, they work in the field of mathematical probabilities, because they don’t give two craps about the feeling of winning.  They’re motivated by profit. Profit respects probabilities, and profit doesn’t care at all about feelings, and profit doesn’t care about beliefs.  Professional poker players laugh hysterically at beliefs. 

Most salespeople (at least the lower 99% according to our research and observation) run entirely on feelings, beliefs, hope and superstition.  The top 1% of salespeople operate on probabilities.  Real questions, definitive answers, real data, and they never ever operate on beliefs or hopium.

Jacques Werth dreamed of introducing High Probability Selling to a world full of super superstition.  He hoped that a straightforward, transparent sales process based on things like mutual respect and trust (like he observed and codified from three or four decades of observing top salespeople) would change the world.

It would somehow provide an alternative Way Of Being for salespeople (and those who find themselves having to do sales-like things in work, business and life).  This alternative way of being, way of interacting, way of communicating is based on probabilities.

It’s not exciting.  It doesn’t generate adrenaline.

When they made a sale or someone bought something from them, none of the top salespeople he studied did a happy dance.  They knew better than to establish for themselves an emotional bookmark, or even to consider that they would connect a specific technique or phrase and relate that directly to the fact that a client or prospect purchased their product. 

They knew intuitively that if they just showed up statistically at the right time and place, when their prospects and customers were ready to buy, that all that hope and all that attachment to the magic technique and the Holy Grail would actually stop and get in the way of business being done.

So what they really did was they figured out a way to reverse engineer the typical conventional assembly line sales process that everyone was taught, including them, and they removed all the parts of it that get in the way of doing business. 

All of the beliefs about making someone buy, the beliefs about manipulation, the beliefs about if I just use the right words, the beliefs about if I just used the Bandersnatch technique, all the beliefs, superstitions, where to put the rabbit’s foot, putting the silver dollar in the right pocket instead of the left pocket, wearing the right clothes, driving the right car, living in the right house, all the bullshit, all of the trappings of someone who is playing a sales game, instead of finding and doing business with people who want to do business.  

And unless you’re a professional poker player, stay the hell out of a casino if you have any propensity of thinking it’s about luck.  It’s actually High Probability Selling.  The casino is playing the probability game too, and the House never loses until someone comes in who’s playing the probability game against them.  And then they get nervous.

Sales Combat Simulator

On Reddit recently, someone asked what people thought about the idea of a sales combat game where victory depends only on your sales skills in things like negotiation, persuasion, and handling objections. Demonstrating these skills will give your character more powerful weapons and more attack powers in the game.

I replied with the following:

About 30 years ago, freshly returned from a Tom Hopkins 3-day sales training course, I would have been very enthusiastic about your idea.

Mr. Hopkins fully indoctrinated us with the belief that selling was all about tactics and manipulation of our prospects. Tactics that equated sales with military-oriented “win at all costs” mindset. Even lying was encouraged, as long as you got the appointment.

Winning through combat fits the thinking perfectly.

Combine that with the extraordinary levels of frustration and anger towards selling and my at-the-time assumption that it was my inadequate selling skills that needed major improvement.

Your war game concept would have been just what I thought I needed.

After all, I know my product is what they need, and I am the expert, and I know they will be much better off after they buy it.

I also know that if I don’t sell them now, then I won’t get paid my commission, so their failure to buy is keeping me from making a living.

And I want to get the accolades and recognition for being great at selling that others are getting.

Because I have been doing everything my manager said to do that would work if I just say the right things at exactly the right time.

THERE WAS ONE THING THOUGH…

Then I learned, sooner than later, fortunately, that sales can just as easily be a collaboration.

A mutually acceptable process towards doing business.

I discovered from someone who had studied over 300 top 1 percent salespeople over 40 years that real success in sales could happen without going to war.

That the people in my market, or any market, are not my enemy. They are not objects to be vanquished and defeated on some imagined battlefield.

The reason that prospects resist or appear to fight back is that they are feeling invaded and pressured. And that pressure and invasion is being intentionally created by a salesperson who is hell-bent on making them buy something they don’t want.

That may have been the way of selling 100 years ago, when the likes of Henry Ford believed selling was just another assembly line process. And prospects were just raw materials being turned into cars. However, times have changed.

What if selling, in a different way of thinking, could actually be a path to peace instead.

PS. To get the adrenaline rush of simulated combat and the feeling of a victory deserved, I took up paintball.

Sales Techniques and Closing – A Conversation on Reddit

The following conversation is copied from the subReddit called “Sales Techniques”.

Here is the opening question:

I sell a pretty high ticket item at $7000 over zoom meetings. My average is to close 5-6 new clients per week. BUT, I miss on another 10 or so. Yes that is a great close ratio and my employer is incredibly happy with that. But I cannot seem to shake off the ones I miss.. anyone else? Oh, 2025 will be my 35th year in sales, you would think I was over this by now..

Here is how I (Paul Bunn, aka Illustrious_Bunnster) replied:

There is a way to reduce the number of appointments with the prospects who aren’t likely to buy in the first place.

By this point, you probably intuitively know at least half of the low probability prospects that don’t really qualify for an appointment yet.

Use the criteria for those that buy to (temporarily) disqualify the ones who don’t really fit, that you might hope will buy but don’t.

When you become more selective about whom you meet with, your number of sales will actually increase overall AND compared to the number of appointments you book.

It will initially feel like you’re going to “lose” sales, but you can’t lose sales that aren’t going to follow through anyway.

The time and energy you save from meeting with low probability prospects will lead to more “found” sales who are looking for a salesperson with higher standards.

Overview of High Probability Selling: 3 New Courses for Consultants, Financial Services, and Real Estate

Who the Overview Courses Are For
  • People who want to have more understanding of the overall framework and context of HPS (and how it’s taught), before they make a larger investment of their time, energy, and money for more comprehensive training courses.
  • People who want to understand where the pieces fit, before they start taking individual courses a la carte.
  • People who have taken some courses, and want to see how what they already understand fits into the complete process.
  • People who have read the book, but want to see how HPS is applied in today’s Real World.
What the Overview Courses Provide
  • What has changed in HPS over the years
  • Selling Strategy:  The meaning and purpose of selling
  • The Mindset:  Beliefs, habits, attitudes, language
  • Overview of a complete HPS sale, with an outline of the overall HPS process
  • The HPS Way of Being
How We Teach These Courses
  • Three interactive sessions with live instructors on Zoom
  • Sessions are 60 minutes each, once per week, same time and day of week
  • Exercises to do between sessions
  • Video recordings of sessions are also provided
  • Taught by Paul Bunn and/or Carl Ingalls, with over 50 years of combined experience with HPS, in both sales and non-sales roles
Sign Up and Purchase — $297 USD per person

Links to purchase this Overview Course, for specific types of business. Note that times are in USA Eastern Time (same as New York City):

If you have any questions, please Contact Us, or call +1 610-627-9030, or email Info@HighProbSell.com

Refresher in High Probability Selling – New Course Starts 2024-03-22

Who It’s For:
People who have completed at least some training in HPS, and
– haven’t done it for a while and feel a bit rusty
– want to know how HPS has changed
– have never fully implemented it before
– want to see if they can apply it to their business now
– have used HPS but want to know if they are still using it right

What You Get:
– What has changed in HPS over the years.
– An outline and review of the overall HPS process.
– How to restart HPS in your business.
– How to troubleshoot HPS when it’s not working.
– How to keep the HPS mindset in a non-HPS world.
– Ways to improve HPS and make it work even better in your business.
– Discovering the path to the HPS Way of Being.

How We Teach:
– Interactive sessions with live instructors on Zoom. Each session is recorded.
– Exercises to do between sessions.
– Taught by Paul Bunn and Carl Ingalls (with over 50 years
of combined experience with HPS, in both sales and non-sales roles).

Schedule: 
Starts Friday 22 March 2024 at 1:30pm USA Eastern Time.  Two or three sessions (2 hours each), spaced one week apart, same day of week, same time.  Also see the HPS Calendar for updates. 

Price:  $397 USD per person
Purchase:  click here

If you have any questions, please Contact Us, or call +1 610-627-9030, or email Info@HighProbSell.com

What a High Probability Appointment Looks Like

by Jacques Werth, edited by Carl Ingalls and Paul Bunn

We were in a large meeting room in a nice hotel, in a suburb of Seattle.  Twelve successful Realtors were attending a Real Estate Sales Mastery workshop.  They were an unusually well-dressed group for a two-day offsite workshop.

At our request, one of the participants had borrowed a sample front door and door frame from a builder.  It was in the front of the meeting room and it was braced to stand on its own.  The outside of the door was to the right, and to the left of the inside of the door we had a kitchen table and some chairs.  Those were the props that we needed to begin the first exercise.

One of the workshop participants was asked to role-play how she approaches a visit to a homeowner who wants to sell his house.  The instructor played the part of the home owner.

The first Realtor walked up to the outside of the door and knocked.  The instructor opened the door and said “Hello.”

The Realtor flashed a big smile, held out her hand and said, very cordially, “Mr. Smith, it is so good to meet you.  I am Pam Jackson with XYZ Real Estate.  How are you today?”

The instructor invited her in and offered her a chair in the “kitchen.”

“Your home is very lovely.  I really like what you did with the kitchen,” said Pam with delight, while looking all around.

The instructor stopped the role-play at that point and thanked Pam.  He asked her to switch roles.  She would now play the homeowner and the next participant would play the Realtor.  That participant was even more effusive than Pam.  Each successive Realtor tried to out-do those what went before them in their attempts to impress the prospect with their enthusiasm, charm and likeability.

During those role-plays, the other Realtors watched intently and remained very quiet.  Several preened their clothing and hair before it was their turn.

For the second part of the role-play the instructor played the part of the Realtor, with Pam playing the homeowner.  The instructor knocked on the door, and the Pam opened it.  “Yes?’ she said.

“I’m Joe Instructor with HPS Realty.  Are you Pam Jackson?”

“Yes, I am,” she said, reaching to shake his hand.  “Come in. I suppose you want to look over the house.”

“Before we do that, we need to get to know each other and determine whether we have a mutually acceptable basis for doing business.”

Homeowner: “Okay, we can sit in the kitchen, here.”

Realtor: “When we spoke on the phone we agreed this meeting would take about ninety minutes of uninterrupted time.  Have you arranged for that?”

Homeowner: “Yes, I turned off my phone and put the dog out in the back yard.”

Realtor: “We agreed that the purpose of our meeting is to determine whether we have a mutually acceptable basis for selling your home.  Is that your intention?”

Homeowner: “Yes.”

Realtor: “And, we agreed that if we can meet your conditions of satisfaction for the sale of your home, we will make a decision about that today.  Is that still your intention?”

Homeowner: “Yes, it is.”

The instructor thanked Pam and asked her to rejoin the rest of the group.  Then, he asked the entire group, “What did you notice about the way I just approached Pam, the prospect?”

They called out their answers:

“You were very straight-forward.”
“You were dignified.”
“You were very relaxed.”
“You were authentic.”
“You were not acting.”
“You were in control.”
“You asked for and got commitments.”

Pam then capped it off with, “I felt privileged to be your prospect.  I felt respected, and I felt respect for you.”

The above article was copied from an earlier post on this blog, and recently edited by Paul Bunn and Carl Ingalls. 

No Magic Sales Closing Techniques – Just a Proven Selling System that Produces Dramatic Results

written by Jacques Werth in about 2006, and posted here by Carl Ingalls

High Probability Selling is a structured, linear, step-by-step sales process. At each step along the way, you, the salesperson, and the prospect both have the option of saying “Yes” or “No”. Prospects close themselves each time they agree to move forward in the sales process.

The Story Behind the Process

The High Probability Selling Process is based upon extensive research of the top 312 performers across 23 industries. They were an elite group—part of the top 1% in their respective industries—who typically out-produced the top 20 percent in their industry by a factor of 3 or 4. Over a period of forty years, Jacques Werth went out on sales calls with top performers, observing and recording everything they did.

The discovery? These sales stars had intuitively created a totally new selling system. They didn’t realize it was a different system. Jacques Werth did. He collected the data, analyzed it, and put it together in this simple yet powerful system—High Probability Selling.

Top performers are the best in the business. They know the difference between a true prospect and one who is merely ‘interested’ – and will hardly ever buy. They know that preparing elaborate proposals is usually a waste of time. They know that the only prospects worth their time are High Probability Prospects: Prospects who want, need, can afford your products and services, and are willing to buy—now.

Stop Wasting Time!

The most common mistake made by salespeople is that they waste time trying to manipulate, persuade and convince prospects to buy. A lot of time and energy is devoted to activities that will inevitably lead to nothing.

Learn to Focus Your Sales Efforts on Truly Qualified Prospects.

In High Probability Sales Training, we teach you selling skills that are proven and effective. We train you to close more sales by negotiating a series of mutual agreements – beginning with the setting of the very first appointment. We train you to consummate sales with dignity and professionalism – without stress or pressure.

High Probability Selling trains you to close more sales, enjoy selling more, and to earn more money—without compromising your ethics. Is that what you want? If it is, enroll in a HPS sales training course.

Note from Carl Ingalls, on 8 Feb 2022. I copied the above text from a webpage that Jacques Werth had created in about 2006. It is typical of the persuasive style he used when marketing (but never when selling). I prefer to use non-persuasive language in my own marketing efforts, because that is more consistent with what we do and teach in High Probability Selling, and also because I believe it is best to make marketing and selling more consistent with each other. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Conversation with a Long-Time Student of High Probability Selling

Jon Williams reached out to me (Carl Ingalls) on Facebook Messenger recently, with some questions about the application of High Probability Selling.

I am posting our conversation here with some minor editing, and with permission.

Jon: I wanted to ask you, have you ever been asked about how to sell things that aren’t as straight forward as a product per se. Like artwork, finery items like collectors stuff?

I heard this marketers take on it and she said you’ve got to look at what people want and “need” (manufacturing the need because they want it) and focus on that rather than the literal item.

I was thinking more about this and thought that’s definitely a decent start and to think about what the collectors want, the history of the piece or collection (as a feature), etc.

Carl: I have had several people inquire about selling something that is not very tangible. HPS is one example of that. I have also been asked about selling art. Collector’s items are fairly straightforward, at least on the selling side.

Jon: Gotcha. Ya I’ve always wondered about strictly non-tangibles.

Carl: If you see your job as one of influencing someone to buy, then HPS methods do not apply at all. The marketer person you mentioned recommends methods that are consistent with that. You really have to pick one or the other. If you flip back and forth [between influencing and not influencing], people won’t trust you.

Jon: Influencing or making offers based on what they want?

That’s what I took away from it as far as what they were saying. She walked us through her thinking and then applied that back to her style which I agree can certainly come off more “getting this or that” vs discovery.

Carl: If the people you reach out to do not have a clear picture of what you are offering, you need to have a good marketing system in place that educates them. Don’t try to do it during one-on-one selling. Extremely inefficient and unrewarding.

Jon: From what I’ve learned in marketing, it applies to everything, which is, truly know your audience and get real feedback from their perspective, the good the bad and the ugly.

If we have this and don’t add to it, then it becomes easier to “make offers”. 🙂

Carl: Making an offer based on what the other person wants is perfectly consistent with HPS, and is not an attempt to influence their decision.

Jon: Ya that’s what I focus on too 🙂

We’ve all had about enough of the internet hype and all this pressure to sell based on their need.

What about empathy?

Do we actually care about the human on the other side? Or are they just another dollar with a pulse?

That’s been made clear via high prob and very verrry few sales training does this well or at all. (Marketing training seems even worse because it’s so removed from the one-on-one)

Carl: In classical HPS outbound prospecting (one-on-one), we normally do not know what the individual wants. We may know something about the probabilities, based on the demographics used when purchasing a list. And the most efficient way of finding out if they want what we are offering is simply to ask them directly. The more specific [the offer], the better.

With the newer HPS Inbound prospecting (where a prospect reaches out to the salesperson), we listen to find out what they want, and we decide if we want to offer something based on that.

Jon: I do hear the better ones saying this method where they do interviews with their existing customers or clients, not to sell them anything new but to gain understanding from their perspective.

I do love this method of listening to them and going from there.

I think you shared this once, that when we start listening we may find they have a completely different want than what we thought at the beginning.

Carl: Some people call that marketing research [doing interviews with existing customers].

Most of the time, I’m a one-man operation. This means that I fill all of the roles. Market research, marketing, prospecting, selling, fulfillment, office manager, etc.

Jon: How have you found that to work for you?

I’m the same way. I only want about 2-3 really solid clients when I get there.

Carl: I like the variety of roles, a lot. However, going solo is a very lonely job, and I do have trouble with that.

Jon: Ya, I’ve heard that too, about the lonely part. For now I don’t mind but it may change later, lol

Carl: I’m looking forward to doing a 3-session workshop on the TRI, starting this Tuesday 11 Jan. That’s real connection with real people, and teaching them how to do it too. Of course, you already know about that.

By the way, I’d like to put our conversation on the HPS Blog. May I have your permission to do that? I’ll probably use just our first names. Any thoughts?

Probably some minor editing. I’ll send you a copy to review first.

This is an example of one-to-many marketing that educates.

Jon: Ya that’s perfectly acceptable with me. Thanks for asking ☺️

Carl: You are very welcome. And I really appreciate the thoughtful conversation.

Jon: Yes it’s helped me understand the differences too and to get clear myself.

Questions and comments on this blog are very welcome.