Gap selling identifies a company’s current state and ideal state, problems creating a “gap” between the two states and solutions for closing this gap. Here’s more on gap selling, its benefits, types of questions and whether it fits your team’s needs.
Brian Nordli
Written by Brian Nordli
Cartoon drawing money falling between two cliffs, gap selling
Image: Shutterstock
UPDATED BY
Matthew Urwin | Dec 03, 2024
Gap selling is a sales methodology that focuses mobile phone number list on closing the “gap” between a customer’s current state and where they want to be in the future. To close the deal, a sales representative must uncover the full scope of the challenge standing in the way of a customer’s desired situation before discussing their product.
The gap selling framework was introduced by Keenan (who goes by just his last name) when he published a book on the subject in 2018.
What Is Gap Selling?
Gap selling is a problem-centric approach to sales in which reps look at the full scope of the customer’s problem and identify their “gap,” or the difference between where the customer is today and its ideal future. Closing that gap becomes the foundation for all future sales conversations.
What Is Gap Selling?
The gap selling strategy is based on two fundamental principles, according to Keenan:
Nobody buys a product or makes a change unless their current situation is untenable.
It’s the salesperson’s job to influence that change. They can do that by getting a complete understanding of the customer’s current state and future state before they introduce the product.
Gap selling boils down to understanding the problems your product solves and asking enough questions to accurately measure a customer’s gap. The key is digging deeper into discovery than most reps are used to doing. Once the right information has been gathered, gap selling can naturally change the customer’s relationship with the product, Keenan explained.
Keenan says he hatched this problem-centric sales framework from 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 this as the customer’s “current state.”
“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 Growth Company. “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.”
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How to Define a Customer’s Current State
For Keenan, a customer’s current state includes five elements:
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 and 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 of 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.
Once the rep has all that information, they can discuss the buyer’s future state — where the company could be if it solved this problem. The difference between where the company is and where it wants to be is the gap that becomes the context in which you discuss the product, and it’s the customer’s motivation for buying it, Keenan said.
