INTRODUCTION

What Is Decision Confidence?

Brent explains it this way: decision confidence is the customer’s belief in their own decision, not in you as the salesperson. It’s not about how great your product or service is — it’s about whether your customer feels confident making the choice.

When customers feel uncertain, they delay. They choose not to choose. But when they feel confident in their decision, they buy bigger, move faster, and feel better about it afterward.

That’s why, after studying hundreds of buying attributes, decision confidence stood out as the single biggest factor in driving high-quality, low-regret sales.

The Psychology Behind the Purchase

Carl shared that this insight came from over a decade of research — including a massive study with Google. What they found was eye-opening: psychological needs are even stronger in B2B buying than in consumer purchases.

It turns out that when those psychological needs aren’t met — when buyers don’t feel secure in their decision — everything stalls. The key isn’t just getting customers to trust you; it’s helping them trust themselves and the process they’re leading inside their organizations.

Helping Customers Navigate the Chaos

Here’s the truth: today’s buyers are overwhelmed. They’re dealing with more complexity, more stakeholders, and more information than ever before. Brent calls it a crisis of confidence.

Your job as a salesperson isn’t to take control of the process. It’s to guide it — to help customers make sense of their decisions, align their teams, and move forward with clarity.

That’s what frame making is all about: helping customers build a structure, or “frame,” around their decision so they can see the path forward.

Selling to a City of Decision Makers

Remember when buying committees were small? Those days are gone. What used to be one or two decision-makers is now a city of stakeholders.

Carl shared that when his team first studied this, they discovered the average B2B buying group was 5.4 people. And the more people involved, the less likely a decision would be made.

But there’s a twist — adding a third person actually helps (hello, tiebreaker!). Beyond that, though, the complexity skyrockets. The question becomes: how can sales and marketing teams help large buying groups align and act with confidence?

From Salesperson to Decision Coach

Here’s where Brent’s perspective flips traditional selling on its head. What if your job isn’t to pitch, persuade, or prove ROI — but to act as a decision coach?

That means helping your customer navigate internal misalignment, manage competing priorities, and overcome uncertainty. When buyers feel unified and confident, deals move forward.

When they don’t, everything stops.

The Three E’s of Frame Making

Carl breaks frame making into three steps — what he calls the Three E’s:

Establish the Frame – Help make the complex more manageable. Give customers a structure for thinking clearly.Engage the Customer – Don’t tell them what to think; guide them to make sense of it themselves.Execute – Enable your champion inside the account to bring others along. Without this, you win one person, but lose the group.

The last “E” — execute — is where so many deals stall. You might have your main contact sold, but if they can’t sell it internally, the deal goes nowhere.

Coaching Customers Toward Alignment

Brent describes this as helping customers “ladder up.” You connect one person’s objectives to someone higher up, showing how each layer’s goals align.

This gives your customer language and structure to have better internal conversations — the kind that lead to action. You’re not selling to them; you’re selling through them, helping them align their own organization.

A Real Example: Inviting Procurement Early

Carl shares a great story from the book. A top-performing seller named Tara would purposely invite procurement to early-stage meetings.

Why? Because she knew procurement would get involved eventually — and she’d rather deal with their objections early than have them derail a deal later. Plus, procurement knows better than anyone how buying actually happens inside their company.

That’s the power of frame making: anticipating the customer’s internal challenges and helping them navigate with confidence.

Confidence Creates Growth

At the end of the day, The Frame-Making Sale is about shifting our mindset from selling products to building confidence.

As Brent puts it, “What if we took everything we know about sales and rewired it — not to solve for customer-supplier perception, but customer self-perception?”

That’s a powerful question. And it’s one every great salesperson should be asking.

Final Thoughts

If you want to sell with integrity, help your buyers make confident decisions. Guide them, coach them, and give them the tools to align their teams.

That’s the shortest path to growth.

The Frame-Making Sale is available now, and you can find Brent and Carl at A2BInsight.com or on LinkedIn.