This live recording of Sales Today: Procurement Special goes back to fundamentals as Fred Copestake breaks down the anatomy of a great sales conversation so procurement professionals can spot the good ones, steer the wobbly ones, and borrow the best bits for their own internal selling.
With 25+ years in the field, three books (including Ethical Selling), and over 10,000 salespeople trained across 38 countries, Fred shares a practical, step-by-step structure you can use immediately - whether you're evaluating a supplier's approach or building support for your own initiatives. In this episode, you'll discover:
• Why objectives matter: set a primary and secondary outcome before the meeting, then signal preparedness with a short agenda.
• "Ask before tell": why prescription without diagnosis is malpractice and how great sellers make it about you before talking about themselves.
• Reading the room: tailoring style to personalities (analytical, amiable, driver, expressive) and how tools like DISC profiling can help you prepare.
• AIDA done right: Attention → Interest → Desire → Action as a clean flow that mirrors how people think.
• Strong openings: craft an attention-grabber (value proposition) that hooks into your world—industry issues, goals, and likely friction points.
• High-gain questioning: use open, probing, and TED prompts ("Tell me… Explain… Describe…"), thoughtful hypotheticals, strategic summaries, and silence.
• Consultative depth: map current state vs desired state, then explore impact and consequences to build a compelling case for change.
• From ask to tell: when to pivot from questions to a tailored response - not a boilerplate pitch - linked to the problems uncovered.
• Progress checks: small "trial closes" to confirm fit and keep momentum without pressure.
• The Perfect Close (James Muir): "Does it make sense for us to… [next step]?"- an elegant, ethical way to agree the action or surface the right alternative.
• Internal use: how procurement can repurpose the same structure to win support for projects and decisions inside the business.
Expect straight-talking guidance, usable language patterns, and a simple framework you can run tomorrow- whether you're buying, selling, or building alignment across stakeholders.
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Connect with Fred on Linkedin
https://linktr.ee/fredcopestake
