Frictionless Sales flashcards
Frictionless Sales · Build recall with a focused review session.
32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.
- SPICED acronym
- Five discovery checkpoints: Situation, Pain, Impact, Critical Event, Decision. Each must be filled before a deal is treated as qualified.
- Situation in discovery
- The buyer's current context: tools, team, process, and baseline metrics. It grounds every later question and reveals gaps between current and desired state.
- Pain confirmation test
- A pain counts only when the buyer states it in their own words and agrees it matters. Seller-assumed pain is an assumption, not qualification.
- Impact quantification
- Expressing the pain as a number: money lost, hours wasted, risk exposure, or missed opportunity. It becomes the baseline for any ROI or business case.
- Critical Event defined
- A dated, buyer-owned reason to act now, such as a contract expiry, audit, or regulatory deadline. Without one, urgency is manufactured and deals slip.
- Decision mapping
- Identifying the economic buyer, champion, blockers, and approval path including legal, security, and procurement. Missing this is a leading cause of stalls.
- SPICED disqualification rule
- If any SPICED letter is empty, the deal is not qualified. Empty Decision or Critical Event most often signals a deal that will not close.
- Impact math formula
- Annual cost of pain = hours lost per week x loaded hourly cost x 52. The result anchors ROI claims and the size of the problem being solved.
- Bowtie versus funnel
- A funnel ends at closed-won. The bowtie continues past the sale through onboarding, adoption, expansion, and advocacy, where much revenue is earned.
- The bowtie knot
- The closed-won moment at the center of the bowtie. It is a handoff point between sales and post-sale teams, not the end of the customer journey.
- Left side of bowtie
- Pre-sale motion: awareness, marketing-qualified and sales-qualified stages, opportunity, and closed-won. Measured by conversion rates and acquisition cost.
- Right side of bowtie
- Post-sale motion: onboarding, adoption, expansion, and advocacy. Measured by retention, expansion revenue, and referral volume rather than new logos.
- Net revenue retention
- Revenue from the existing customer base after churn, downgrades, and expansion, divided by prior-period base. Above 100% means the base grows without new logos.
- Expansion signals
- Post-sale buying signals such as usage growth, new teams, seat saturation, or a new executive sponsor. They trigger expansion plays inside existing accounts.
- Advocacy stage
- The final bowtie stage: satisfied customers become references, case studies, and referrers, feeding new demand back into the left side of the bowtie.
- Time-in-stage metric
- How long deals or customers stay in each bowtie stage. Slow right-side stages often predict churn before revenue decline appears.
- Revenue architecture definition
- The designed system of segments, roles, coverage, compensation, and data that converts go-to-market strategy into predictable, measurable revenue.
- Segmentation before coverage
- Accounts are grouped by potential and buying behavior first; each segment then receives a matching sales motion, coverage model, and cost-to-serve.
- Coverage model options
- Named accounts, territories, inbound or self-serve, and channel partners. The chosen model must fit deal size and how the segment prefers to buy.
- Specialization tradeoff
- Splitting roles by function or segment adds capacity and expertise but creates handoffs. The split must buy more capacity than the coordination it costs.
- Pay mix design
- The base-to-variable ratio in a compensation plan. It should reflect the role's influence on the sale and the segment's sales cycle length.
- Quota capacity planning
- Total quota should follow from available selling capacity times a realistic productivity assumption. Over-assigned quotas make the plan unachievable from day one.
- Territory stability rule
- Account and territory assignments should be written and held for the period. Mid-year reassignment damages trust and degrades forecast accuracy.
- Stage definition discipline
- CRM stages need written, shared entry and exit criteria. Inconsistent definitions make conversion rates, forecasts, and attribution unreliable across the team.
- 3X Seller premise
- Top sellers produce roughly three times the output of average sellers through a repeatable operating system, not simply longer hours or more activity.
- Three multipliers
- Pipeline creation, deal execution, and account expansion. Each lever compounds with the others, and coaching targets whichever is weakest for a given rep.
- Pipeline multiplier
- Generating more qualified pipeline per unit of time by targeting the right accounts and using personalized, multi-channel outreach rather than volume alone.
- Execution multiplier
- Disciplined discovery, multi-threaded buying committees, and fast disqualification. It raises win rates and shortens cycle time at the same time.
- Expansion multiplier
- Treating closed-won as the start: driving adoption, upsell, and referrals in existing accounts, which lowers acquisition cost and increases lifetime value.
- Time allocation diagnostic
- Comparing how reps spend hours across customer conversations, deal strategy, and admin. Top sellers shift hours toward high-value activities.
- Deal inspection habits
- Checking SPICED completeness, next-step dates, and committee coverage on every deal. These habits are the practical mechanism behind the execution multiplier.
- Multiplier coaching method
- Managers diagnose which of the three multipliers is weakest for each rep and coach that specific lever instead of applying uniform activity pressure.