I want you to picture the saddest scene in B2B sales: a Zoom discovery call.

Your eager sales rep is 17 slides into a deck they’ve rehearsed a dozen times. They’re passionately explaining features, benefits, and the revolutionary power of your "synergistic, paradigm-shifting solution."

Meanwhile, the prospect’s eyes are so glazed over you could sell them as artisanal donuts. They’re nodding, saying "Mmmhmm, interesting," while mentally replaying last night’s episode of The Bear or wondering if it's too early to check their email.

We’ve all seen it. We’ve all been it.

The issue isn’t the script. It’s not the deck. It’s the entire damn game. We train sales teams to be parrots, armed with talking points and objection-handling matrices. We teach them to listen for pain points they can slap a feature on, like a cheap band-aid on a gaping wound.

This is why 90% of discovery calls feel like a trip to the dentist. They’re clinical, transactional, and everyone just wants it to be over.

The uncomfortable truth? The most important information on a sales call is the stuff that’s never said out loud. It's hidden in the invisible rules, the unstated beliefs, and the cultural assumptions that dictate how your prospect sees the world.

And unless your sales team is staffed with a bunch of rogue cultural anthropologists (ahem), they’re flying blind.

From Glazed-Over to Leaning-In

I was chatting with a Head of Sales at a fast-growing scale-up recently. She was tearing her hair out. "My team is great at talking," she said, "but they’re terrible at listening. They hear the problem, but they don't understand the person."

She was watching her reps lose deals they should have won, all because they couldn’t get past the surface.

So, I built her a simple, two-step habit designed to turn any sales rep into a linguistic detective.

🔄 Habit #1: Ask the One Question That Changes Everything

Forget, "What keeps you up at night?" It’s tired. Instead, open your next discovery call with this:

“What do you believe about your industry (or the specific space where our product lives)?”

This question is a pattern interrupt. No one expects it. It forces them to pause, move past their rehearsed problems, and tap into their actual worldview. Their answer is the key that unlocks their entire mental model—what they fear, what they value, and what they secretly desire.

🧠 Habit #2: Read Between the Lines (With an AI Assistant)

Now, you have their answer. It’s packed with linguistic gold—metaphors, qualifiers, and hidden assumptions that reveal their invisible rules.

You could spend years studying social sciences to decode it. Or, you could just feed the transcript into the ChatGPT prompt below.

When you combine both habits, you achieve sales nirvana:

1. Train your team to consistently surface a prospect's core beliefs on every call.

2. Use AI to decode their language, instantly inferring the hidden fears, desires, and priorities they’d never tell you directly.

3. Mirror those insights back to them in your pitch, making your solution feel not just helpful, but inevitable.

Try it today. I dare you.

The Prompt: Your New Secret Weapon 🚀

Copy and paste this directly into ChatGPT.

You are a sales-linguistics analyst. I will give you:

1.  The question I asked my prospect (for example, “What do you believe about this industry?”)
2.  Their exact answer (or a transcript excerpt)

Your task:

Step 1: Extract Linguistic Cues
• Pull out up to 5 standout words or phrases (metaphors, modal verbs, qualifiers, presuppositions).

Step 2: Infer Invisible Beliefs
• For each cue, infer the hidden belief and phrase it as “The speaker believes that …”

Step 3: Positioning Recommendations
• For each inferred belief, suggest how to frame your solution to mirror that belief.

Output as JSON with these keys:
• question
• answer
• linguistic_cues (list of {cue, type})
• inferred_beliefs (list of strings)
• positioning_recommendations (list of strings)

Stop Selling, Start Decoding

When you run a transcript through this prompt, you're no longer just a vendor; you’re a mind reader. You stop selling a product and start speaking directly to their unstated reality.

Your prospect won't just feel heard; they'll feel seen.

So, what are you going to do? Keep training your team to be parrots squawking about features? Or will you give them the keys to unlock what a prospect truly believes?

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