Sell the unlock,
earn the trust.

How to use this

This is a bench you return to before a senior conversation, a mirror you hold up after one, and a syllabus a sales lead can coach from. Three jobs, one document.

We win on two things: clarity and trust

A confused buyer says no.

The product is genuinely good. The two places a deal like ours is actually decided are earlier and simpler than the product: can they understand it, and do they believe us.

Across three smart, warm conversations, the same two signals kept surfacing. First, clarity. When we explain what we do, the listener cannot always picture it or their part in it. Second, trust. Before anyone engages, they quietly check whether we are real. Here is the market telling us, in its own words, with nothing held against us:

This is not a charisma problem or a talent problem. The team is good in the room. It is a packaging problem, and packaging is the most fixable thing in selling. The rest of this guide does two jobs: it gives you a method to make the value obvious and the credibility immediate, and it protects the thing you already do better than almost anyone, which is turning a warm network into a pipeline.

The 11.2 Sales Method

No single framework fits a long, multi-stakeholder, trust-gated sale. So we borrow the best layer from each of the proven ones and stack them. Think of it as a map, a set of questions, a teach, a meeting shape, and a persuasion layer running through all of it.

The deal, across 3 to 6 months

Before zooming into one call, here is the whole campaign. Our sale is not a meeting, it is a 3 to 6 month, multi-stakeholder cycle that mirrors the company's nine-stage Sales Playbook and is fed by the Go-to-Market front door. The frameworks still apply, they just spread across stages, and the cast widens as you go. The golden rule: the diagnosis is the sales event, the proposal only formalises it.

Stages overlap in practice, and the clock is 3 to 6 months end to end. The golden rule from the company Sales Playbook: the diagnosis is the sales event, the proposal only formalises a decision already made. Two habits keep it moving: widen the threads (a deal that lives only with your champion is a deal at risk), and reinforce after every call with a recap and a dated next step.

Zoom in: a single call

Now zoom into one early call. The same frameworks sequence again, minute to minute, left to right. Two bars never switch off here: the persuasion layer and the underlying arc. Everything else has a season.

Time runs left to right. The value ladder bar runs off the right edge on purpose: the demo and the pilot ask happen in this call, but the pilot delivery and the expansion play out across later meetings, not at the end of this conversation. The two bars below the dashed line never switch off: you are always persuading, and always inside the arc.

MEDDIC: navigate the deal, not just the call

The gold standard for complex B2B, built for exactly our shape: high value, many stakeholders, long cycles. It is not a script, it is a checklist of what you must know to keep a deal moving. The full version, MEDDPICC, adds Paper process and Competition for when procurement and rivals enter.

Who is a fit, and who is not

The fastest way to lift our win rate is to spend less time on the wrong conversations. MEDDIC is qualification, so here is the front-door version: who to chase, and who to thank warmly and move on from.

The three hard gates

From the company Sales Playbook: the gates that protect the proposal. Each can send a deal back to nurture, cheaply, before it wastes a quarter.

• No accepted diagnosis, no advance. If the buyer will not adopt the reframe, recycle to nurture. Never sell into a rejected problem.
• No named budget, no proposal. A problem with no pocket to pay for it is brand, not pipeline.
• No sponsor, no proposal. A proposal into a single-threaded account is a quote, and quotes lose.

Recycling is not failure. It is the cheapest outcome for a deal that was never going to close, and it keeps the account warm for the next window.

SPIN: the discovery engine

Across all three calls, the pattern was the same: we explained more than we asked, and the buyer ended up supplying our best examples. SPIN flips that. The research behind it found that top performers in big-ticket sales ask roughly four times more Implication questions than average performers. They do not pitch harder; they ask better.

Challenger: teach the reframe that only we can

The research on complex B2B found that the top performers are not the best relationship builders, they are the ones who teach the customer something they did not see, tailor it to each stakeholder, and take control of the conversation. For us this is not a tactic bolted on; the reframe is the product.

That is a Challenger reframe: it changes how they see their own world before we ever mention what we do. The discipline is to lead with the insight, not the company. Here is the proven teaching choreography, mapped to our material:

1. Warmer. Show you understand their world. "Most asset owners we meet are heads-down optimising the build in front of them, and rightly so." Earns the right to challenge.
2. Reframe. Introduce the surprising idea. "The expensive part is not the build. It is everything the build could have done and did not."
3. Rational drowning. Make the cost of the status quo concrete. Use their numbers: the $40m removal, the dead-line maintenance over 40 years, the $2m handed back.
4. Emotional impact. Make it personal to the stakeholder. "You will be the one explaining to the board why the asset only ever did one job."
5. A new way. Show the better path, still without selling yourself. "There is a way to make a build pay for itself more than once, decided before the trench is dug."
6. Your solution. Only now position 11.2 as the natural way to do the new way. By this point you are the obvious answer, not a pitch.

Tailor the same insight per stakeholder: the GM hears revenue and reputation, the engineer hears no disruption to the base business, the regulator-facing person hears compliance and community benefit. Take control by always leaving with the next step defined, never "let us stay in touch."

CLOSER: the shape of a single conversation

CLOSER is a clean arc for one conversation. In a transactional sale you run it in a single call. In ours, the arc stretches across the whole campaign: you might Clarify and Label in the first meeting and not Sell the outcome until the third. Use it as the shape of each meeting, and as a map of where the relationship sits overall.

Reinforce: the discipline that protects sales velocity

Reinforce is the most neglected step in a long sale and the one with the most commercial leverage. In a transactional deal it is a thank-you after payment. In ours it is the engine that keeps a multi-month, multi-stakeholder deal moving, and it is the single biggest thing we control that drives velocity.

It works on two layers, and the team should run both, every time:

The Reinforce playbook

1. The dated mutual next step, before you hang up. "So the next step is X. I will do A by Tuesday, you will do B, and we meet Thursday to review. Does that work?" Two named time options beat an open "sometime."
2. The same-day recap message. Send within hours, while it is warm. Five lines: what we agreed, why it matters, the next step, who owns it, the date. This is the artefact your champion forwards internally on your behalf.
3. The mutual action plan for live deals. A shared, simple list of the steps to a decision, with dates and owners on both sides. It makes the path visible, holds both parties accountable, and is the single best tool for keeping a complex deal moving.
4. Momentum between meetings. Deliver the promised thing fast, give a reason to engage before the next touch, keep the champion warm. Speed of follow-through is itself a credibility signal. Authority
5. Reinforce after the yes. Confirm they made a smart call, give them something to be excited about, and give them something forwardable, so the decision spreads inside their organisation rather than stalling with one person. Commitment

Cialdini: the seven principles, pointed at our deals

In a sale decided by trust, the science of influence matters more than the art of the offer. Cialdini's seven principles are not tricks; used straight, they are simply how you make it easy and safe for a careful buyer to say yes. Each one maps onto a moment that already happened in our calls.

The front door and the offer ladder

This is where the bible meets the company's real offer. We do not lead with a pitch, we lead with value: a free, genuine piece of work that proves we understand the problem well enough to build the answer. The paid work follows. The diagnosis, not the proposal, is the sale.

The front door: give value before you invoice GTM

The way in is the Build Review: a 45-minute working session, free, for a COO or head of strategy carrying an idea they cannot get off the ground. They leave with a one-page build read, the verdict, the first move, the biggest risk, and what it would take, theirs to keep whether or not we are a fit. A working session, not a sales call in disguise. Three on-ramps, lightest first:

1. The self-serve read. A ten-question exposure scorecard. Instant, no email. Where are they exposed across AI, the energy transition and geopolitics.
2. The written read. They send the score, or the stuck idea. We send back a one-page read. No call needed.
3. The Build Review. The 45-minute live session, for when they want to go deeper. The Dottie and Spark demo lives here.

Why give it away: we already spend real hours on calls with people who never sign. Productising that into a named, repeatable, free deliverable turns value we leak into the thing that markets us, and it qualifies who we spend the hours on.

The offer ladder value ladder

Every conversation and every piece of content points at the next rung. This is the company ladder, the one to use.

The five rules that make the front door an engine GTM

Borrowed from the best direct-response playbooks and tuned for an enterprise buyer. These are the company's own rules, and they are why the Build Review converts rather than just being a nice freebie.

• Productise the teardown. The Build Review is a repeatable deliverable with a fixed output, the same shape every time, so it scales and the buyer always leaves with something.
• The Value Equation. Maximise the dream outcome and the proof it works; minimise the time and effort to get it. Detail below.
• Risk reversal. The promise carries the risk: you leave with something worth more than the time, or we say so first. No downside to saying yes.
• Name it specifically. Not "a free consultation." The Build Review, for a named buyer, with a named outcome. Specific reads as confident, and converts.
• Give till they ask. Front-load so much usable value that working with us becomes the obvious next step.

Loading the offer with value

Underneath every offer that feels like a no-brainer sits one equation. Learn it, and you can build offers on purpose instead of by accident.

Two things lift the value: a bigger dream and more belief it will happen. Two things crush it: how long it takes and how much it costs them in effort. Everyone competes on the top, the bigger promise. The real edge is the bottom, and in our world the bottom is not price, it is time, risk, and internal politics. Cut those to near zero and we make offers nobody else can touch. Here is how we load each lever:

• Raise the outcome. "A build that pays for itself more than once." Quantify with their own numbers (MEDDIC Metrics, SPIN Implication). Outcome
• Raise their belief. Proof, then the pilot itself is the proof. Authority Social proof
• Cut the time. "Weeks, not the 24-month feasibility study. Hours, not days." This is our sharpest contrast with the incumbent way; hammer it.
• Cut the effort and risk. "Hands off your poles and wires. No IT integration, just a report. We do not tell you how to run your core." Make do-no-harm the headline.

Risk reversal an asset GM respects

• The paid pilot replaces any money-back gimmick. The size of the prize versus the size of the pilot is the real maths.
• Do no harm, in writing. "Nothing we do touches your base business or your regulated returns."
• Speed as a guarantee. "If we cannot show you three costed opportunities in X weeks, you owe us nothing." Real, specific, and it weaponises our actual advantage.
• Success-linked upside where it fits. Carrying risk alongside them is credibility money cannot buy.

It is already named

The free front door is the Build Review; the paid first engagement is Discover. Use those names, not invented ones. The job in an infrastructure conversation is to make clear what Discover produces here: three costed, ranked second-use opportunities on one asset, hands off the base operation. The product is named, we just point it at their world.

Pricing the engagements

We have not locked the numbers yet, so this is the pricing logic, not a rate card. Set the actual bands with leadership before quoting, then hold them so the team quotes with one voice. The principles matter more than the figures.

• Price against the prize, not the hours. On a $100m and up asset, the Discover fee should look trivial next to the value it can surface. State the prize first, then name the price, so the number lands as small.
• Fixed fee, never hourly. Hourly billing caps our value at our time and invites scope-policing. A fixed fee for a defined deliverable keeps everyone focused on the outcome.
• Do not discount to win, reduce scope instead. Cutting price signals low confidence to a GM. If budget is tight, narrow the number of assets, not the rate.
• Not too cheap. Priced too low, a serious buyer reads "not serious." The number must carry enough weight to be respected, while staying tiny against the prize.
• Use success-linked terms where you can. Where value is measurable, tie part of the fee to value identified or unlocked. Carrying risk alongside them is credibility money cannot buy.

Dollar figures left deliberately blank. Set the bands with leadership, then keep them consistent across the team.

The one-liner and the pitch Hook, Story, Offer

Tim Sherry, the ICN Northern Territory manager from call 02, told us exactly what the market needs: "we want to know straight away, hands on the shovel or consultant." Here is the answer, structured as Hook, Story, Offer, at three lengths. Memorise the first. Everyone should say it the same way.

The next move: show, do not tell

"Can I show you three of those on your network?" is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the handover into a demo of Dottie and Spark, and the demo is where abstract value becomes visible. Government buyers are happy with frameworks and process; private-company buyers want to see it. The demo is how we give them that, and it doubles as live proof that we can actually do the thinking we claim.

The discovery question bank SPIN

Organised by SPIN stage. The goal is to talk less than the buyer until you have the full picture. Print this; take it into calls.

Situation, orient quickly

• "Before I tell you about us, what made you take this call? What did you hear?"
• "Walk me through how this asset is set up and who owns what today."
• "Who else cares about this internally, and what do they each need to see?" finds the economic buyer

Problem, find the accepted cost

• "Where is value leaking that everyone has accepted as just the cost of doing business?"
• "What is sitting on your books that you have to maintain but cannot use, or cannot remove?"
• "What is the item that everyone agrees should happen but nobody has time to own?" the DMIS pattern

Implication, make it hurt (spend most time here)

• "Over the full regulatory horizon, what does that maintenance actually total?"
• "When that decision lands without this thought-through, what does it cost you to unwind later?"
• "If a neighbour builds the same infrastructure you could have shared, what was the price of not asking?"

Need-payoff, let them voice the value

• "If that asset paid for itself instead of just costing you, what would that change?"
• "Who would that make a hero internally?"
• "What would it be worth to have this de-risked before the board sees it?"

Surface the real friction, the denominator

• "What would have to be true for your risk and legal people to be comfortable?"
• "What is the smallest version of this we could prove without going near your base operation?"
• "Is there a deadline that makes this matter now rather than next year?" find the real clock

Objection handling

Every one of these came up, or nearly came up, in the three calls. Each response is built to reduce risk, not to push. Click to open. Tags show which principle is doing the work.

The gatekeeper and referral playbook

This is our superpower, so treat it like an asset, not a happy accident. Our buyers rely on peer recommendations and do not attend conferences or read journals. The warm intro is the primary channel, and two of these three calls exist only to feed it.

The five rules of running champions Reciprocity Social proof

1. Make them look good, every time. Their reputation is the currency they are lending you. Never make an intro regret it. Do-no-harm matters to the gatekeeper too.
2. Always close the loop. We did this well with Tim. Report back on every intro, win or lose. It is the single biggest driver of the next ten.
3. Hand them a champion kit. Brad offered to write our "skinny" for us. Never make a gatekeeper invent your words. Give them a forwardable paragraph, a one-liner, and one example.
4. Ask for names, not categories. "Who specifically should we talk to, and would you introduce us?" beats "do you know anyone." We did this with Tim and it worked.
5. Give before you ask. Share intel, make an intro back, send the link first. Reciprocity is the whole engine.

The champion kit, hand this to every gatekeeper

What to offer the gatekeeper in return

• Make their network look active. Every good intro that lands is a win they can report. Say it: "every intro that works is a story you can tell your board."
• Bring them deals, do not just take them. When you meet someone who needs ICN, send them back. Affiliates who receive, give more.
• Feed them intelligence. You see things across states they cannot. Share it, and you become the most valuable name in their contacts.

First-touch outreach: getting the meeting

The champion kit is for when a gatekeeper forwards us. These are for when we reach out ourselves. Keep them short, lead with proof and one specific, relevant hook, and ask for one small thing: a short conversation. Long messages get skimmed; specific ones get answered.

1. The warm-intro follow-up Reciprocity Social proof

Highest-priority channel, since our buyers act on peer recommendation. Send within a day of the intro.

2. The cold email to an asset owner Hook, Story, Offer Authority

Use a real trigger: an announced project, a regulatory decision, a decommissioning. No trigger, no send.

3. The LinkedIn note Liking

Shorter again. The goal is a reply, not a sale. Connect first with a one-line reason, then this once accepted.

Three calls, coached

Each call is read for what it was for, scored on the six things that decide an early high-stakes conversation, and coached: what is working, where to sharpen, the exact rewrite, and notes for Jason and GP. The scores are a profile to track over time, not a report card. Be honest with them; the point is to watch them climb.

Drills and role-play

Clarity and discovery are muscles, not memos. They are built with reps. Five quick drills, then four role-play scenarios a sales lead can run live.

Role-play scenarios

Run a 60-minute coaching session

A ready-to-run agenda for a sales lead. Repeatable weekly or fortnightly. No prep beyond picking one real call to review.

1. Warm up, 5 min. Each person says the one-liner cold (Drill 01). Note who wandered. This alone tells you where clarity sits this week.
2. Review one real call, 15 min. Pull up a recent recording or notes. Score it together on the six dimensions (Section 16). Lead asks: what is working, where would we sharpen, before giving an opinion.
3. Teach one layer, 10 min. Pick a single layer of the method that the call exposed (often SPIN Implication or front-loading proof). Walk the relevant section. Do not try to cover all six.
4. Role-play, 20 min. Run one scenario from Section 14 that matches the gap. Rotate who plays the buyer. Stop and reset whenever the rep reverts to old habits; reps over realism.
5. Objection ping-pong, 5 min. Fire five objections from Section 11. Under fifteen seconds each. Keep it fast and a little fun.
6. Commit, 5 min. Each person names one specific behaviour to change on their next real call, and which dimension they expect to move. Write it down. Check it next session.

Run the call, then score it

Section 02 lays out the anatomy of a call: the eight phases and which layer leads in each. This is the coaching companion to that map: the step-by-step to run a first conversation, and the scorecard to grade it afterwards. Same eight phases, now turned into habits.

The shape of a first call

1. Frame and clarify, first 5 min. "Here is what I hope we get to, and I want to understand your world first." Ask why they took the call. Do not pitch yet. Clarify
2. Proof in one breath. Since 2018, embedded in Santos, champions in three states. Pay the credibility toll early. Authority
3. One-liner plus one picture. Lane answer, then a single vivid example, then stop and ask "does that land?" Hook, Story
4. Discovery, the longest part. Work the SPIN bank. Quantify the prize. Listen more than you talk. SPIN
5. Teach the reframe. Lead them to see the cost of the status quo before positioning us. Challenger
6. Show visual value. Walk them through Dottie and Spark on something close to their world. Private buyers want to see it, not hear about it, and the demo is live proof of capability. Visual value
7. Sell the outcome and name the first engagement. Reflect their own numbers back as the prize. Offer
8. Handle the concern actually present (Section 11), then lock the dated, owned next step. Hand over the champion kit if it is a gatekeeper. Reinforce

The post-call scorecard

Score every real call out of 10 on each. Anything under 6 is the coaching focus for the next one. Track the profile over weeks; you are watching it climb.

The field card

The whole guide on a single card. Pin it next to the phone.