Ater decades of sales transformation initiatives — vertical specialization, business fluency academies, peer-to-peer playbooks — a troubling question persists: Why do 67% of B2B buyers still say sellers don’t understand their business well enough to be helpful?*

The theory seemed convincing: If sellers could master the client’s business, they’d earn a seat at the strategic table. So companies invested heavily in this vision — training sales teams to read 10-Ks, developing acumen to “speak CFO,” and choreographing strategic conversations — all in the hope of producing “Trusted Advisors” who would secure executive trust. Yet consistent CXO engagement remains as elusive as ever.

The Identity That Never Really Fit

The Trusted Advisor status always sounded aspirational, but it was never truly attainable for most sellers. The harsh reality is that executives already have trusted advisors: board members, deputies, consultants, and former colleagues. They don’t need — or expect — SaaS reps, account teams, or even vertical SMEs to fill this role.

Sellers have been handed an impossible charter: to perform strategic fluency at a level that even internal leaders struggle to maintain. Yes, understanding the customer matters, but expecting salespeople to shapeshift into advisory roles for high-level corporate officials is delusional. Sales execs instinctively recognize this challenge, which is why many retreat to feature-function modes. This isn’t a failure of effort — it’s a failure of expectation.

The CXO Messaging

Those expectations have been hard-wired by Trusted Advisor models which framed pitches around deficits, i.e. pain points, gaps, and unmet needs. This approach, imbedded through years of value-selling playbooks, backfires in today’s executive theater. As corporate agendas turned toward transformation and disruption, “deficit-framed messaging” is being rendered obsolete. What once sounded like astute diagnosis now lands as tone-deaf irrelevance.

The Mindset Shift within the C-Suite

Deficit-framed messaging reduces transformation agendas to correction exercises, killing curiosity before it has a chance to form. Worse, it pulls the narrative backward into remediation just as executives are leaning forward into possibility. In executing modernization strategies, CXOs don’t measure progress in problems solved — they measure it in momentum created.

Their mindset is forward-oriented, focused on how to leverage past investments and accelerate what’s already working. As a result, messaging that assumes inertia is perceived as dated and out of touch with the executive agenda. The trap, then, is assuming critique still carries appeal. This sensitivity gap remains one of the most common reasons C-suite access and engagement falls flat before it even begins.

Beyond the “Advisor” Identity

Executives don’t need more advisors. What they’re desperate for is a resource that serves as a catalyst to their biggest ideas. Those who establish that identity earn trust faster than any self-appointed advisor ever could.

ENGAGEMENT EXAMPLE

Introduce GTM teams to an AI workflow to ingest their recent CXO outreach, tag where the Trusted Advisor reflex appears, overlay those patterns against account-specific ‘Momentum Briefs’, and establish a simple, repeatable practice for thinking in terms of customer momentum and forward-leaning commitments.

ASG’s 2024 buyer survey – 5 Things B2B Buyers Expect from Sales Reps in 2025

Part 2: A Strategic Alternative to the Trusted Advisor Identity: The Trusted Catalyst®

COMPLETE SERIES

Part 1: The ‘Trusted Advisor’ Was Never Realistic (Current)

Part 2: A Strategic Alternative to the Trusted Advisor Identity: The Trusted Catalyst®

Part 3: Your C-Suite Pitch Deck: Stop Storytelling!

Part 4: Your CXO Pitch Deck: Still Not “Vaccinated”?

Part 5: The CXO-level Business Case as Stage One of the Sales Motion

02 // A NEW IDENTITY

Part 2 : A Strategic Alternative to the 'Trusted Advisor' Identity

The Trusted Catalyst®

Why the Advisor Model Has Reached Its Limits

Many B2B sales programs aspire to embody the ‘Trusted Advisor’ model, a vision rooted in diagnosis and remediation that’s been shaped by the value-selling tradition. While well-intentioned, this approach often frames the buyer in terms of their deficiencies.

This style of framing — often called “deficit framing” — assumes stasis and undercuts the momentum corporate leadership has already established. Moreover, it fails to account for the mentality shift that’s emerged as corporate agendas tilt away from incremental improvement toward transformation and disruption.

The construct has to be reframed – from classic ‘ol “what keeps them up at night” to “what gets them up in the morning”!

Shifting the Tone: The Emergence of Affirmative Messaging

The adjustment required in C-suite engagement is less about demonstrating exhaustive business expertise and more about shifting the tone from prescriptive to catalytic.

Catalysts don’t build cases on problems or pain points. Instead, they rely on Affirmative Messaging. It’s a construct that assumes the client is already making progress, allowing the seller to position their offerings as amplifiers of that momentum.

AFFIRMATIVE MESSAGING EXAMPLES

“The moves you’ve made in [X] have laid the groundwork to capitalize…”

“Given your traction in [initiative], now is the right time to extend that advantage,”

“The foundation is in place. The opportunity now is to accelerate the impact.”

By shifting the tone from prescriptive to catalytic, affirmative messaging sets the stage for more strategic engagement. If the Trusted Advisor identity anchors its messaging in deficits, the emerging posture roots its messaging in momentum. Sellers who frame their approach not as advisory, but as catalytic, establish a more credible role:

The Trusted Catalyst®.

Operationalizing the Catalyst Identity

Common messaging practices include:

Leading with radical candor: Todd Caponi’s The Transparency Sale is an excellent guide.
StoryListening®: This creates a dialogue theatre that encourages imagination rather than interrogation. (Part 3)
Preemptive Business Cases: Positioning offerings as the enabler for what comes next. (Part 5)

These practices help reengineer the messaging from a “fix-the-problem” frame into shared ideation, moving the conversation from mapping value to accelerating momentum.

The Role of Value: Validation, Not the Driver

To be clear, value selling isn’t “wrong.” It’s simply too small for the way CXOs think today.

Here’s another way to think about it: In the modern executive theater, harping on deficits is like endlessly patching leaks while the ship idles. Catalytic messaging catches the wind instead. It harnesses existing traction to propel the voyage into uncharted opportunities, where ROI charts the course but doesn’t cap the potential.

Value remains relevant as a supporting element to provide quantifiable validation, but it should play a secondary role to the forward-looking possibilities unlocked by affirmative messaging.

A Smarter Future for Strategic Sellers

This messaging technique does more than just help establish a new identity. It has a practical upside for enterprise sales organizations: it’s easier to adopt and operationalize. It removes the unrealistic expectation that every seller must become a quasi-executive. Instead of over-indexing on business or financial fluency, sales organizations can focus on building a proficiency to spark imaginations to help establish credibility with CXO’s.

Enterprise sellers don’t need to perform as advisors. The Trusted Catalyst® is an identity purpose-built for the demands of modern C-suite access and engagement.

Engagement Example #1

A SKO session to support organizations introducing a new or emerging set of capabilities — where the upside is the breakthrough potential these capabilities can unlock for clients. The session builds the case that today’s C-suite is running a different playbook: moving from incrementalism toward disruption and transformation – and that this mentality shift changes what earns attention, credibility, and access. It establishes the Catalyst as an identity aligned to that posture. The takeaway is sharper sensitivity to how C-level leaders think and decide, and how enterprise sellers align to that mindset accordingly.

Engagement Example #2

Advisory capacity for sales and marketing teams to build ‘CXO Resonance Pattern Libraries’ that serve a focused set of horizon-based Opportunity Lanes. Use this shared intelligence to systematically reengineer messaging models that help establish Trusted Catalyst® identities aimed at earning consistent CXO access and engagement.

Part 1: The ‘Trusted Advisor’ Was Never Realistic

Part 3: Your C-Suite Pitch Deck

COMPLETE SERIES

Part 1: The ‘Trusted Advisor’ Was Never Realistic (Current)

Part 2: A Strategic Alternative to the Trusted Advisor Identity: The Trusted Catalyst®

Part 3: Your C-Suite Pitch Deck: Stop Storytelling!

Part 4: Your CXO Pitch Deck: Still Not “Vaccinated”?

Part 5: The CXO-level Business Case as Stage One of the Sales Motion

03 // CXO ENGAGEMENT

Part 3 : Your C-Suite Pitch Deck: Why Storytelling Falls Flat

…and What to Build Instead

The mantra is familiar: great pitch decks tell a story.

Unfortunately, that’s where the breakdown begins. While well-intentioned, this guidance is only partially correct. The real problem isn’t the story itself, but how it’s told. Storytelling is ideal in settings that discourage interruptions – think TED Talks, keynotes, or investor pitches – where the audience listens from start to finish and the presenter delivers without disruption.

In B2B enterprise sales, especially in the C-suite, storytelling flips the script in the wrong way. Sellers get trapped in narration, and the dialogue executives expect is replaced by a flat monologue.

This happens because the decks are structured to present, not engage. The slide flow is rehearsed. The outcome is hard-coded. And since the content is engineered for a one-way performance, it squanders the opportunity for an exchange that could transform slides into a shared business case.

A Better Practice

High-performing sellers often credit their biggest wins to meetings where the prospect did most of the talking. That’s no accident. Listening is a consistent trait among top performers. And it shows up in their decks too. The most effective pitch decks aren’t stories delivered at an audience; they’re structured dialogues designed to provoke participation. This approach is called StoryListening

The objective isn’t to abandon storytelling. A well-architected pitch deck carries a logical narrative arc, but does so through tone, rhythm, and framing built to support interruption.

And consider that the deck must work in two modes: 1) as an autonomous leave-behind (see ‘Vaccinated’) and 2) as a launchpad for ideas that evolve in the room. That balance is what separates a good deck from one built for the C-suite.

How to Build a StoryListening Pitch

Design for Dialogue:

Consider how the deck sounds, not just how it reads. If it only works as a monologue, it won’t work in the C-suite.

Engineer the Pauses:

Don’t wait until the Q&A slide to open the floor. Script conversational moments into the pitch content early and often.

Use Reflective Headlines:

Headline narratives should prompt reflection, surface assumptions, and trigger agreement or dissent – not simply summarize or label content.

Word of caution: artificial pauses, such as perfunctory invitations for questions, rarely yield meaningful insights. The most valuable comments and candid input emerge when participants feel they are playing an active role in shaping the conversation.

The Takeaway

Stories are valuable, but storytelling alone can shut down the vital back-and-forth that drives the C-Suite selling experience. The best pitch decks use a narrative structure that facilitates dynamic exchanges at key moments, prompting confirmation and validation along the way.

Storytelling dominates – StoryListening engages

One sells a pitch – The other earns the conversation that makes it matter.

Engagement Example

Hands-on collaboration to redesign Executive Briefing Center sessions as StoryListening conversations that spark executive imaginations and bring emerging bets into the open. The resulting briefing materials and facilitation patterns become a model for more collaborative, co-authored experiences that sales teams can adapt to create fresh storyarcs across the broader enterprise sales environment.

Part 2: The Trusted Catalyst®

Part 4: Your C-Suite Pitch Deck

COMPLETE SERIES

Part 1: The ‘Trusted Advisor’ Was Never Realistic (Current)
Part 2: A Strategic Alternative to the Trusted Advisor Identity: The Trusted Catalyst®
Part 3: Your C-Suite Pitch Deck: Stop Storytelling!

Part 4: Your CXO Pitch Deck: Still Not “Vaccinated”?

Part 5: The CXO-level Business Case as Stage One of the Sales Motion

04 // DEAL VELOCITY

Part 4 : Your C-Suite Pitch Deck: Still Not "Vaccinated?"

Why Voice-Over-Dependent Presentations Are Slowing Sales and What to Build Instead

A New Reality

Enterprise sales no longer happens only in boardrooms or conference rooms. It increasingly unfolds across virtual links, asynchronous reviews, and dispersed decision cycles—structural shifts that have taken root over the past several years, defining the rhythm of how enterprise decisions are made and showing no signs of reversing. No matter where and how the engagement unfolds—live, hybrid, or remote—what survives is the material that circulates afterward. The leave-behind often matters more than the live meeting itself.

That shift changes the burden.

Today, the content, not the sales executive, shoulders the burden of the decision cycle. And unless the pitch decks have been updated— or ‘vaccinated’—since the structural shifts, it risks slowing the motion instead of advancing it.

A C-Suite based sales motion creates dozens of ‘leave-behind’ moments as business cases move stakeholder-to stakeholder, across corporate functions – like the enterprise version of ‘The Telephone Game’. This is where the concept of a ‘vaccinated’ deck becomes critical: one built to thrive independently, immune to a transformed selling experience.

“Unvaccinated” decks are one of the most overlooked culprits of slow sales cycles.

What Works: ‘CXO-Friendly’ Artifacts

‘Vaccinated’ materials need to demonstrate five key traits. These are the ‘CXO-Friendly’ characteristics that help your deck advocate for the deal when live narration isn’t possible.

Purposeful Packaging:
Structure the presentation around an ultra-specific outcome, not just an agenda. This approach guides both live and offline audiences through a logical flow, eliminating filler and making it easy to connect the dots.

‘Mic-On-Mute’ Design:
Visualize delivering a presentation with the mic off. Then, ensure each slide should communicate a single idea, supported by a headline that answers “So what?”

Flipbook Flow:
Strong decks unfold like a flipbook. Top-line copy should raise a question that the following slide answers. When done well, a reader can skim only the headlines and still grasp the full arc of the storyline.

Choose Understanding Over Brevity:
CXOs are short on time, but fewer slides aren’t always better if they overload content and sacrifice clarity. Instead, structure for comprehension— even if it means more slides. CXOs don’t buy what they don’t understand, so prioritize clarity over artificial efficiency.

Engineer for Scrutiny:
CXOs are trained to challenge assumptions. Rather than avoiding pushback, anticipate it. A deck that acknowledges challenges is more credible than one that ignores them. Include a supplemental section that explores alternative perspectives.

Bottom Line

The days of “walking the halls” to close a deal are long gone. Yet most decks remain unvaccinated — built for an era that no longer exists. Updating them isn’t optional. It’s overdue.

Engagement Example

Partner with sales teams on complex, late-stage motions for must win deals by auditing existing decks, leave behinds, and business case materials against the real demands of distributed decision cycles and asynchronous reviews. From that audit, co design and architect a self-sufficient, CXO ready asset that can move vertically and horizontally through the organization, operate autonomously while preserving clarity as it circulates, and reliably shepherd must win deals toward timely, CXO-sponsored decisions.

Part 3: Storytelling Falls Flat

Part 5: The CXO-level Business Case

COMPLETE SERIES

Part 1: The ‘Trusted Advisor’ Was Never Realistic (Current)
Part 2: A Strategic Alternative to the Trusted Advisor Identity: The Trusted Catalyst®
Part 3: Your C-Suite Pitch Deck: Stop Storytelling!

Part 4: Your CXO Pitch Deck: Still Not “Vaccinated”?

Part 5: The CXO-level Business Case as Stage One of the Sales Motion

04 // Go. Now.

Part 5 : The CXO-level Business Case as Stage One of the Sales Motion

Enterprise sales teams are brimming with ideas for their most important accounts. They map strategies, connect insights, and envision bold scenarios. Yet too often, these plans stay trapped on whiteboards, sidelined in QBRs, or buried in account plans. Teams hesitate, assuming they need more access, better signals, or deeper insight before advancing their approach.

Fortunately, today’s deep research capabilities and associated tools are enabling teams to develop credible, extensive intelligence independently of client input. Yet raw knowledge alone doesn’t move a deal. What’s needed is the conversion of those insights into a logical narrative that fuels a path forward. That’s the role of the Preemptive Business Case: a packaged artifact — part storyboard, part thesis — horizon-oriented with evidence-backed argumentation. Unsolicited. Unexpected. And, compelling enough to inspire the recipient(s) to share among their C-Suite peers.

Stage One: Reversing the Sequence

The Preemptive Business Case doesn’t wait for permission, perfect information, or discovery checklists. It represents Stage One of the sales motion itself. Too often, sales teams adopt a cautious mentality when shaping C-level-type business cases. They assume the audience expects fully defined rationale, so the gaps feel intimidating. The result is delay — preferring the illusion of accuracy to the risk of acting now. This approach is advocating for a mindset that trades small imperfections for forward motion.

Where the conventional sequence is:

discovery → meetings → validation → eventual proposal

…the Preemptive Business Case flips the order:

business case → executive engagement → momentum → discovery that follows on your terms

By leading with the business case, teams:

Bypass back-and-forth discovery
Seize the opening move
Activate the big deal motion most teams struggle to ignite
Promote a sole-sourced sales cycle
Shift power dynamics by framing the deal before it’s defined

‘CXO-Friendly’ Messaging as the Design Mechanics

What gives a Preemptive Business Case its force isn’t just the content. Four attributes supply the structure that makes it work:

Transparent Posture: Avoiding a “know-it-all” tone

Affirmative Story Arc: Acknowledges motion. Capitalizes on momentum.

Autonomous Format: Built to have a life of its own.

Forceful Call to Action: Drives toward an ultra-specific, unapologetic next step.

Paired with a take-no-prisoners mentality, these mechanics are like the ignition system in a high-performance engine.

Unleashing the Catalyst Advantage

The Trusted Catalyst® thrives in this approach. Unlike the advisory identity, which carries the burden of being prescriptive and “right,” Catalysts aren’t paralyzed by the obligation to seek validation. Preemptive Business Cases are their natural instrument because the objective is to win in the arena of ideas.

In practice, that ideation takes the shape of a top down sales motion – whether opening doors to new logos or C-Suite-sponsored upsell/cross-sell in existing accounts. And at scale, they finally make ABM’s broken promise real: converting intelligence into action and injecting the pipeline with the kinds of high-profile opportunities teams were told to expect but rarely saw.

Catalyze With Strategic Intent

Preemptive Business Cases generate gravity. They don’t ask for access. They demonstrate why they belong.

In turn, they inspire C-Suite teams to engage. This is proactive big-deal generation: Stage One of the sales cycle, owned by the seller, defined on seller terms. Why wait?

Engagement Example

Facilitation of a “Reverse QBR”. This working session backward-engineers the account strategy from an envisioned Preemptive Business Case, surfacing the paralysis mindset and the internal logic of “why wait”? In the session, the thesis is framed in a way that requires teams to actively defend the case for delay, then convert those arguments into specific outreach moves, sequencing, and executive engagement. The resulting pattern becomes a practical way to operationalize and scale the concept.

Part 4: Your CXO Pitch Deck

COMPLETE SERIES

Part 1: The ‘Trusted Advisor’ Was Never Realistic (Current)
Part 2: A Strategic Alternative to the Trusted Advisor Identity: The Trusted Catalyst®
Part 3: Your C-Suite Pitch Deck: Stop Storytelling!

Part 4: Your CXO Pitch Deck: Still Not “Vaccinated”?

Part 5: The CXO-level Business Case as Stage One of the Sales Motion