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Sales Coach
With so many sales frameworks to choose from, it’s easy to get lost in the rules and lose sight of what makes each approach effective.
We met Sales Coach Jeff Bajorek in a recent episode of Closing Time, where he walked us through the highs and lows of various sales methodologies like the MEDDICC sales methodology, Miller-Heiman strategic selling, Sandler sales methodology, and the Challenger sales method.
Jeff is back to help you tailor these methods to fit your unique selling style, navigate leadership decisions on methodology adoption, and know when to break the mold for better results.
He’ll also share some common threads and discuss his trademarked Sell Like You™ and Rethink How You Sell™ approaches.
Navigating the world of sales methodologies can feel overwhelming. With so many options out there—like Miller Heiman, Sandler, Challenger, and more—how do you find the right fit? Sales coach Jeff Bajorek has a straightforward approach: don’t get caught up in debates over which methodology is “right” or “wrong.” Instead, focus on finding what resonates with you and adapts to your selling context.
Jeff emphasizes that most sales methodologies share common principles. They’re designed to help sellers move prospects through the buying journey. Arguing over the nuances is less productive than understanding what these methodologies aim to achieve on a macro level. Jeff encourages sales professionals to dig deeper by reading books, exploring different approaches, and reflecting on what feels authentic.
But here’s a critical caveat: don’t discard entire methodologies just because some tactics are outdated. Instead, extract the timeless lessons and apply them in a way that fits today’s selling environment. Think of it as picking the best ingredients from a recipe while adapting the dish to suit modern tastes.
No sales methodology is one-size-fits-all. Jeff points out that a method like Challenger, which focuses on bringing new insights to customers, isn’t always necessary. For transactional sales, a straightforward feature-benefit close may be more effective. It doesn’t mean the method is bad; it just might not align with your current selling needs.
Jeff’s advice? Understand your sales goals, then choose the approach that helps you reach them. For new sellers, he recommends becoming a sponge—absorbing wisdom from books, experienced colleagues, and customer conversations. Identify where different methodologies overlap and find the common themes. This insight will guide you beyond the step-by-step processes found in textbooks to develop real sales mastery.
Transitioning into a sales leadership role poses its own challenges. Jeff cautions against bulldozing existing processes in favor of what worked in your past. Instead, he suggests listening. Understand what the team excels at and where they need support. The goal isn’t always to adopt a new methodology but to refine what’s already in place.
Jeff’s advice: leverage your experience to evaluate and fine-tune without micromanaging. Change takes time, and effective leaders know when to act and when to step back.
Jeff’s coaching philosophy revolves around two trademarks: “Sell Like You” and “Rethink the Way You Sell.” These aren’t just slogans; they’re a culmination of Jeff’s personal and professional journey. Early in his career, Jeff struggled by trying to conform to rigid sales scripts. It wasn’t until a mentor encouraged him to bring his personality and instincts to sales conversations that Jeff saw results. Authenticity became his secret weapon.
The core message? Sales isn’t about mimicking others. Each person’s words, energy, and style are unique. While there are proven strategies and scripts, true sales success comes when you blend these tools with your individuality. Jeff has seen time and again how giving salespeople permission to be themselves unlocks better results. Sometimes, all someone needs is a nudge to say what feels right, even if it’s unconventional.
Predictability and consistency are important for scaling a business. But there’s a fine line between repeatability and robotic selling. Jeff believes that connecting authentically creates lasting relationships. Ask questions out of genuine curiosity, not just because they’re on a script. Engage with your buyers as people, not just as prospects. This approach leads to meaningful conversations, builds trust, and ultimately fuels long-term sales success.
The best sales professionals don’t strive for mediocrity. They break the mold by bringing themselves fully to the process. Jeff asks a compelling question: “Do you want to hit your number this month, or do you want to consistently hit your number every quarter?” Long-term success often means playing the long game, even if it feels risky at first. But the right things done consistently lead to a flywheel effect, driving results faster than you might expect.
When stepping into new roles, particularly as a leader, it can be tempting to make sweeping changes quickly. Jeff advocates for listening first. Evaluate the current sales process, understand what’s working, and assess what’s not. He acknowledges that urgency is real, but great leaders balance speed with thoughtful reflection. Your past experience informs your decisions, but the culture and needs of your new team guide the implementation.
In the end, sales is about genuine human connection, adapting processes that work for you, and bringing your whole self to the table. The right methodology is one that helps you—and your team—sell authentically, effectively, and with lasting impact.
So, if you want to rethink how you sell, remember Jeff’s advice: Sell like you. It’s not just a tagline; it’s a powerful reminder that the best results come when you’re true to yourself.
Challenger. Miller-Heiman. Sandler. If you’re in sales, you’ll want to tune in and learn all about the different sales methodologies that are out there. Let’s dig in. In this episode of Closing Time. Thanks for tuning into Closing Time, the show for go to market Leaders. I’m Val Riley, VP of marketing for Unbounce and Insightly. Today I’m joined by sales coach. Jeff Bajorek. Welcome to the show, Jeff. Hi, Val. Thanks for having me. Jeff, there are a number of sales methodologies on the market today, and most companies choose one and adopt it across their team. I’d like to use our time today to talk through a few of the bigger names and get your take on them. Does that sound good? Sure. There are a bunch of them out there. It seems like there’s a new one popping up every day. Even though these older, more established brands, if you will, seem to have a foothold in the market, I think there’s. I really think that’s because there’s a lot of validity to them and each of their different approaches. But, yeah, let’s let’s dig in. All right. We’re going to start with one that I am personally trained in. And that’s Miller-Heiman. I used this methodology when I was at a company that was firmly mid-market, but I would say enterprise aspirational. I think, when I think Miller – Heiman,. I think enterprise, and when you go back in time and you, read the books, you know, the strategic selling or conceptual selling, I mean, these are Miller – Heiman constructs that I think illustrate how big and profound the sales process has to be in some of these enterprise accounts. And, you know, whenever I think of the word enterprise, I think big. And that’s, to me, what comes to mind when I think about Miller – Heiman. It’s very thorough in terms of mapping out all of the stakeholders, mapping out all of their desires. You know, the blue sheets that they put together and created so that people can keep track of all these things. It’s it was really,. I think, the first of its kind to do that intense of an investigation into all of the ins and outs of the sales process and, you know, one of the ways that and I don’t know what Miller and Heiman were doing,. I should ask, actually, Alice and Liz, are actually both legacy. Heiman. Their their dad was Heiman in, in the, in the Miller – Heiman pair there. I should ask them what he was thinking with this and if he really was the first person to put all this together. But,. I think, I think about reducing risk. I think about, you know, we’ve all been involved in deals where something out of nowhere, out of left field comes in, wrecks it, or there was a decision maker we weren’t aware of that comes and spoils the whole thing, even though we’ve done so much hard work. And,. I think for them to lay out that process and be so thorough with it, it can be a little bit labor intensive. It can be a little much if it’s a simpler sale that you’re, pursuing. But the process of mapping out those stakeholders, identifying each of the individual smaller sales you need to make along the way, I love it for how thorough it is. I think I see those blue sheets in my nightmares sometimes because they were, like, very tiny prints. And you had to do everything right. I think Miller – Heiman was interesting because they had the concept of a coach, which is somebody who’s on the inside of the organization who was actually helping the sales person kind of make headway within the org to move the sale along. Everybody needs a little bit of help from their friends. And that is a, a concept that you either learn early or you learn very in a very hard way. As far as identifying the people who can help you move a deal forward coaches, champions, economic buyers, you know, understanding all of the little cogs in the gears system that make the sale happen. And, it’s just as someone who, you know, thinks about rethinking the way they sell, this was the first system, if you will, that taught you to think through the aspects of the sales process versus here are my features, here are the benefits, here are the outcomes. And that’s why I love it. Yeah. Here’s my logo slide. Do you want to buy right. Exactly. Yeah. What’s taking you so long?. Why don’t I already have a PO? Exactly. Okay.. Well let’s jump to another methodology. And this one’s, really popular one called Challenger. It’s familiar to me because I’m a SaaS marketer, and, I feel like, Challenger speaks to, like, doing everything faster, better, cheaper. So it just kind of fits. Well in the SaaS marketplace. You know, Challenger is one of these, methodologies that, you know, as far as the handful that I know we want to go through today, this one speaks closest to me. It’s nearest and dearest. And I think, it’s no coincidence that this is the most modern or the most recently developed, that we’ve seen in the marketplace today, if you will. And, the idea that you have to build relationships and sales is not a new one. My question has always been, okay, based on what? Right. It used to be that it was, a boys club and it was, you know, all about who you knew, and it was who had the corporate expense account or the corporate credit card that they were going to use this time. And you could buy somebody time. And through that time you could hopefully exchange a little influence. I grew up in my sales career at a time in medical devices when you weren’t allowed to do that. Not only did I not have a corporate expense account,. I wasn’t allowed to pay for meals. I wasn’t allowed to take people to concerts. I wasn’t allowed to take people golfing and doing those things. And so I really had to understand what value I brought to the relationship. Instead of a piece of plastic with 16 digits on it that someone else would pay the bill for. And it made me think differently about how I could earn that access instead of just paying for it. And so I actually took a couple years longer than anybody else did to read Challenger, because what I heard about it was really familiar to me. And I joke, you know, tongue in cheek, that they wrote that book about me because that was very much the way that I sold. They didn’t know it.. I didn’t know it at the time. But give me language to use for how I think, you know, modern enterprise selling needs to be done. You need to provide insights. You need to earn the role of the trusted advisor. You don’t do that by trying to be nice and trying to make friends with someone first. You do that by challenging some of their long held beliefs, challenging some of those sacred cows, providing them with insights that will help them. I call it, you know, giving them the feeling that you, as the seller, know something they don’t know, and they’d be a lot better off for it if they did know. So a conversation with you is worth having. I refer to just in broad terms, as being someone worth talking to and having something worth talking about. That’s Challenger and putting those insights in front of people in a way that necessarily doesn’t offend anybody. You’re not trying to be adversarial, you’re just trying to be a resource and prove that a meeting with you is going to be worthwhile. I do feel like a Challenger rep has to have a lot of confidence. I think that’s kind of what you’re describing. I would go further than confidence and call it belief. You need to believe that a meeting with you is going to be worthwhile. You need to believe that a call from you out of the blue is going to be worth the interruption. It takes a lot of that feeling to get out there every day and put a hypothesis in front of someone that you don’t know. I mean, selling at its essence and marketing helps with this, but selling at its essence is putting yourself in front of strangers. What’s going to make it worth that call? And if you don’t believe you’re worth that, call, you’re going to have a hard time calling. You’re going to have a hard time delivering that insight or those insights when your turn comes up and it doesn’t tend to go well, right. And so as somebody who talks a lot about this, I’ve written a lot about this belief and swagger and, you know, your willingness to sell like only you can sell, it all has to start in the mirror every day. More so than just mapping out an account strategy or understanding what the steps in the process are. Do you believe that you can pull this off? Do you believe that you can make the first sale? And do you believe that you can make it again? That’s where it all has to start. That makes a ton of sense. Let’s move on to Sandler. And I actually admitted in our pre call that this one is new to me, but from the way you described it, it made sense because I’m more of a B2B mid-market enterprise marketer, and it feels like this one might be on the starter end of the market, or may have just been around a lot longer. It’s been around since the 70s or 80s. I don’t remember exactly when, David. Sandler wrote, but he’s the the name of the book was “You can’t teach a kid how to ride a bike at a seminar.” And I’m not quite, it’s a clever name for a book. I’m not quite sure how it relates to the methodology itself, but as I have worked with a lot of small businesses, many of them are very well familiar or even indoctrinated into Sandler. And as I’ve spoken with people,. I’ve spoken with trainers, I’ve spoken with, solopreneurs and freelancers who once they’re exposed to these concepts, it’s like their mind is blown, like, oh my gosh,. I got a call from a friend one time. He said, Jeff, have you ever heard of the upfront contract? And I said, well, yeah, I mean, I’m just agreeing on the next meeting before the current meeting is over. I mean, setting an agenda for a call. He’s like, Jeff,. I couldn’t believe this is where all of my meetings were going to die. I never had next steps. And, you know, I have a bias. As someone who’s been selling for 20 years, you just know what you need to do. Going into the call, I didn’t take Sandler training to learn that, but most people don’t get formal sales education. So to be able to put into simple principles the steps of a sales process, what needs to happen, what will help earn it will help you earn that next step. And to put it into parlance, that just about everybody can understand. It’s a very difficult thing to do. This is a valuable framework for helping those, solopreneurs or individual contributors to just understand what their next steps need to be. And, that’s it’s been around, I mean, going on 50 years now, and it’s very popular, very profound. And there are a lot of reasons for that. Yeah, totally makes sense. So I brought up on our pre call MEDDICC as a sales methodology, but you have a slightly different take on MEDDICC, that it doesn’t fit the classic mold of a methodology. Yeah, I think we can argue semantics about what’s a methodology, what’s a framework, what’s a process, what’s a checklist. I think of MEDDICC or MEDDPICC. I’ve got a friend who refers to it as MEDDPICC because the paper process that P in there is really important. I think this is more of and I think it ties very closely actually with Miller – Heiman because it’s most useful with a profound. I keep saying the word profound. I don’t think I’ve said the word profound this often in a conversation a long time, if ever. But in these big enterprise deals, because there are so many things to keep track of, you need all of the devices you can to keep track of them. And so when you look at and we don’t need to go through them here, but each letter in the MEDDPICC or MEDDICC algorithm acronym rather stands for something you need to take a look at. It’s helping us to keep track of all the things that need to happen in order for a sale to be made. And I go back to the idea of reducing risk. You know, we can take some things for granted, and we can still win sales, but every time we ignore or neglect one of those letters in the acronym, we introduce risk to our sales. So the bigger the sale, the more important the revenue, the more important the commission check is, the more you’re going to want to make sure that all those eyes are dotted, all those T’s are crossed, and you’re not overlooking something in plain sight just because you assumed it was going to happen. So one of the things I think is really helpful, and a friend of mine, really promotes this MEDDPICC system. His name is David Weiss.. You can look him up. But he actually creates a scorecard for himself and scores himself. Is this red, yellow, or green? Like a stoplight. And so that the color coding of this scorecard also, helps give you an idea of how well you’re performing in each one of these domains. And it’s there’s just nothing quite like a device like that to show you where you stand in a deal. Yeah. It seems like a really good organizational tool. Checklist. Like you mentioned, with, just color coding it, like, at a glance. It would be really easy for you to see. Let’s say you’ve got 5 or 6 deals working. If you had a MEDDICC list for each one, you could just quickly get up to speed with where you are in that particular deal. If you have to switch gears during the day. And I think about, you know, regardless of what you sell, you need to think about the complexity of your work week. Is your work week complex because you have a lot of simple deals going on at the same time? If you have a lot of simple deals going on at the same time, you might just need a spreadsheet. Your CRM, like Insightly would might be exactly the tool that you need. If you are managing a smaller, amount of really complex deals and it’s, you know, heresy to say this, but you may not need a CRM as much as you need multiple MEDDICC scorecards, you know, to keep track of, you know, you don’t do you need a tool to, you know, help you keep track of for deals? No, but you need a tool to help you keep track of the 45 individual influencers of each one of those deals. Right. And so really think about as you go to evaluate a tool like Insightly, think about the things that you that it will help you keep track of. Think about how much easier it will make your sales process from an organizational standpoint, regardless of which methodology you choose. You know, I think when you dig into either of them, you find that or any of the four that we’ve talked about today, you’ll find that they’re variations on a theme of fundamentals that you just need to get right. And if you, you know, subscribe to one or the other, there’s a lot of overlap. But, you know, pick the one that makes the most sense to you, but understand the complexity that you’ve chosen in your sales career has a tool that will help you keep track of the minutia. Keep track of the details, keep track of the things that are going to make you successful, that are often overlooked. And that’s where your results will really grow. You know, Jeff, thanks so much for your insight on those methodologies. Actually, what you just said is super interesting to me. I’d like to go further on our talk and, learn how you kind of sift through the options and pick the best one. But we’re short on time right now. Can I convince you to come back soon? And we can continue that conversation? If I had a nickel for every time I was on a podcast, and near the end they said, you know what, Jeff? You’ve been talking a while. We should probably do this again. I’d have a few nickels, but, yeah, I’m happy to come back. Anytime I get asked back. I know it’s a good place to be. Awesome. Okay, we will get that booked. Jeff, thank you so much for joining us today on Closing Time. Thanks for having me. And thanks to all of you for tuning in. If you’d like to stay up to date on new closing time episodes, subscribe to the Closing Time newsletter and using the link in the description below, and we will see you next week.
