Shift90 Blog

Planning to Hire a Dinosaur to Train Your Sales Team?

Written by Mark Gibson | Jul 23, 2025 1:31:22 PM

Solution Selling. SPIN. BANT. MEDDPICCS

If your new sales trainer is planning on teaching frameworks built in the '90s, you're not preparing your team for today's buyer — you're handicapping your team before they even start.

The Real Issue: We're Still Training Qualification When Buyers Need Validation

The fundamental problem? SOLUTION SELLING, SPIN, BANT, and MEDDPICCS are all obsolete tools designed for a world where sellers controlled information flow.

However, today's buyers utilise LLMs to research vendors before even scheduling a meeting. When 67% of the buying journey happens before a prospect ever talks to sales, they don't need you to qualify them — they need you to prove you're worth their time.

In the first 10 minutes, they're asking:

  • Do you understand our business?
  • Can you help us?
  • Do we trust you enough to share real information?

Traditional frameworks train reps to extract information. Modern buyers want reps who demonstrate insight and earn the right to deeper conversations.

💥 In 2025, buyers won't tolerate:

  • Sales interrogations disguised as "discovery"
  • Qualification frameworks when they need competence signals
  • Rigid playbooks that ignore their context
  • Reps who follow frameworks instead of creating value through their interaction

Today's buyer wants a conversation that creates value from the first meeting — not a qualification checklist.

That means your training must be built on:

✅ Why your best customers decided to switch to you

✅ What created urgency and commitment

✅ Where trust was built — or lost

✅ Conversations that reflect buyer priorities, not seller processes

At Shift90, we train sales teams to lead with customer truth, not company pitch decks.

Our GTM enablement begins with Switch Interviews — revealing the emotional triggers and business pain points that drive decision-making, not what buyers think they should say during a sales call.

Then we design message architectures, deal narratives, and meeting frameworks based on what real buyers need to hear to move forward.

Teams trained on customer truth experience significantly shorter sales cycles and higher close rates because they're building trust from the very beginning, rather than trying to qualify their way to it.

🎯 Don't run your next sales kickoff on 30-year-old assumptions.