The first discovery call decides whether the deal lives or dies, and your reps walk in with a presentation nobody wants and no idea how to start a conversation.
Five minutes in, after pleasantries, they hand it off to the presales engineer.
Why? They lack the confidence and the competence to have a conversation that engages the buyer.
Your company spent from £5K - £500K building enablement content last year. Your top reps never opened it once.
Three months after your SKO, usage reports show 8% adoption. Your top performers never logged in. Your struggling reps can't find what they need when a prospect asks a hard question.
And when you mandate eLearning? Suddenly, every rep has a customer emergency. Or an aunt who's fallen mysteriously ill.
Most enablement content was designed for a buy-sell interaction that no longer exists. Product training. Sales process steps. Internal messaging frameworks.
None of it focuses on what actually moves customers. 90% of companies have no clue what that is.
Your LMS tracks course completions. Training hours. Adoption rates.
What you should be measuring: How many first calls turn into pipeline?
That's the unit economics that matter. Not whether someone clicked through 47 slides on your product roadmap.
Your reps walk into discovery with product knowledge. What they need is customer insight.
What struggling moment triggers buyers like this? What proof point lands? What objection is coming? What does a successful discovery call actually sound like?
That knowledge lives in your top performers' heads.
I've built enough eLearning to know the pattern.
In 2007, I designed adaptive learning on CogBooks (later acquired by Cambridge University Press). In 2019, I worked with Fortinet on industrial cybersecurity training. When COVID hit, I converted classroom training to online under brutal time pressure for California's Institute on Ageing.
Every project followed the same arc. Great content. Poor adoption.
Because the content was about us. Product features. Sales processes. Internal priorities.
You can't fix this with a new LMS. You can't repackage old content and hope it sticks.
You have to dump the legacy platforms, the legacy content, the legacy delivery model.
At Shift90, we start where enablement should have started: with your best customers.
We extract the actual buying pattern. What triggered them to look? Why did they choose you? What almost stopped them? What a successful first conversation looks like.
We turn that into a whiteboard story your team can draw and tell. We run immersive workshops where reps practise the pattern until it sticks.
Behaviour changes through repetition. Through doing. Through muscle memory.
Then we deploy the Agent, trained on customer buying behaviour and loaded with stories, verbatim conversations, proof points, and objection handling from your best deals.
Before a discovery call, the rep asks: "What pattern should I look for with this prospect?"
The Agent surfaces the struggling moment, the discovery questions, the proof points that land for buyers like this.
It suggests the sales prologue based on your meeting briefing:
"You're probably expecting another vendor pitch. I'm going to skip that as I've been thinking about this meeting since it was set. I tried to put myself in your shoes and think of some of the questions you might have for me.
Are these some of your questions? Do you have any others?"
It provides a Christopher Voss-style accusation audit: "You've probably talked to three competitors already. You're thinking we all sound the same. You might be wondering why this meeting is worth your time."
The rep walks in prepared. Confident. Ready to open a conversation that engages the buyer from sentence one.
Mid-call, they need an objection resolved. The Agent delivers it, using Josh Braun's technique and knowledge from customers who said the same thing before they bought.
Post-call, the Agent produces the meeting summary, 4-box visual summary, and next steps. It implements strong qualification criteria with a call for agreement and commitment to next steps.
New hires replay videos of what good discovery sounds like. Real patterns from real deals.
Extract the buying pattern. Build the whiteboard story. Workshop it until reps can tell your story from memory. Deploy the Agent so every conversation is supported by customer truth.
Sales uses it in discovery. Marketing uses it in campaigns. New hires learn it in 30 days instead of 180.
Pattern recognition. Embedded through storytelling. Reinforced through the Agent. Delivered exactly when the first meeting matters most.
Petabytes of unused content are trapped in global LMS platforms. Gigabytes sit untouched in your company's LMS. Most of it is designed for a world that no longer exists.
Your top performers carry patterns nobody can replicate.
We make those patterns operational.