The Framemaking Sale: 60% of Deals Lost to Indecision, Not Competition

And that’s the part Brent Adamson’s new book — The Framemaking Sale — absolutely nails.

Twelve years ago, I reviewed The Challenger Sale, and it became one of the most-read things I’ve ever published.

Adamson is back with co-author, Karl Schmidt.

And once again, he’s diagnosed exactly what’s broken in B2B selling.

But this time, the stakes are higher.

What Adamson Gets Right

Most deals don’t end in “loss.”

They end in no decision.

Even when buyers believe your solution is the best option, there’s still a 40–60% chance the deal stalls out.

It’s not about confidence in your product to do the job

It’s buyers’ confidence in their own decision-making.

Adamson identifies four forces killing that confidence:

• Decision complexity: Buying groups have tripled to 11+ stakeholders
• Information overload: 65% of buyers feel overwhelmed
• Objective misalignment: Only 26.9% of groups reach consensus
• Outcome uncertainty: Fear of implementation failure freezes decisions

Buyers who report high decision confidence are 10× more likely to make a high-quality, low-regret purchase.

Not 10%.

Ten times.

Adamson’s proposed solution: framemaking — setting boundaries and providing prompts to make complex decisions feel manageable.

But here’s the problem:

The book explains what to do.

It doesn’t show you how to operationalise it.

Where Theory Meets Practice

This is where practitioners step in.

I’ve spent the past three years extracting customer buying patterns using Jobs-to-be-Done methodology.

What Adamson calls frames, we call buyer decision patterns.

Here’s how you actually operationalise framemaking:

1️⃣ Interview customers about their decision process

Not “why they bought your product.”

But what helped them make a confident decision.

Ask:

• What triggered the search?
• What decision points mattered most?
• What almost derailed the process?
• What made you move forward?
• What would you do differently next time?

Your best customers will reveal the real pattern.

2️⃣ Map their buying stages — not your sales stages

Most teams force-fit customers into internal pipeline terms.

But buyers move through these jobs:

• Problem identification
• Solution exploration
• Requirements building
• Supplier selection
• Validation
• Consensus creation

Your sales process should align with their jobs-to-be-done.

3️⃣ Extract the frames at each stage

Ask:

• What boundaries helped them make progress?
• What considerations mattered most?
• What questions blocked momentum?

This is the operational core of framemaking.

4️⃣ Turn patterns into buyer-facilitation frameworks

Examples:

• Business case templates using real customer data
• Mutual action plans co-built with IT, Legal, and Procurement
• Comparison frameworks that help them evaluate vendors
• Visual summaries for internal stakeholder meetings

This is what Gartner calls Buyer Enablement:

Tools that help buyers complete their critical buying tasks.

5️⃣ Train reps on facilitation, not selling

Your best reps already do this instinctively.

They:

• Open conversations without triggering scepticism
• Surface unstated objections early
• Guide buying groups toward clarity

The rest of the team needs that skill.

Training shifts from “pitching” → “helping buyers make decisions.”

6️⃣ Deploy the patterns through technology

This is where modern AI agents change everything.

Your best reps’ knowledge lives in their heads.

AI makes that knowledge accessible to every rep in the moment they need it.

Before a call:

“What decision pattern should I look for?”

During a call:

Stories, prompts, and frames surfaced contextually.

After a call:

Summaries, action plans, business case components.

Technology scales buyer facilitation.

The Paradigm Shift

Across his books, Adamson has captured the evolution of modern selling:

• 2013 — The Challenger Sale: How you sell matters more than what you sell
• 2015 — The Challenger Customer: Consensus becomes the critical challenge
• 2025 — The Framemaking Sale: Stop selling. Start helping buyers make good decisions

The arc is clear:

What we sell → How we sell → How we help.

We are now in the How We Help era.

The Only Measurement That Matters

How many buyers complete their decision process with confidence?

When buyers make confident decisions, you win.

When they can’t, everyone loses.

Verdict

The Framemaking Sale is essential reading.

But diagnosis isn’t implementation.

If you want to operationalise framemaking:

• Interview customers about their decision
• Extract buyer decision patterns
• Translate them into facilitation frameworks
• Train your team
• Deploy through technology

That’s how theory becomes practice.

That’s how you help buyers make better decisions.

If you want the exact pattern-extraction methodology we use:

📥 DM me “Framemaking”.