PLAN Selling
Most deals on the forecast are not deals. They are hopes with a close date. Someone liked the demo, the notes look warm, so the opportunity slides to commit. Then a stakeholder you never met kills it in a meeting you were not in, and the forecast was fiction the whole time.
Find the one most pressing challenge, not the list of nice-to-haves. Get there with the 3 Whys.
- Stated problem. What they say is wrong.
- Business impact. What that costs the company in money, time, or risk.
- Personal or strategic priority. Why this person, and the people above them, care enough to act now.
A deal without a pinpointed problem is a tour. If you cannot name the pain in their words and tie it to a number, you have interest, not a problem worth buying out of.
Confirm urgency and fit against everything else on their plate. A real problem they will not fund this quarter is not a deal this quarter. Ask what happens if they do nothing. Ask what this is competing with for budget and attention. If the honest answer is "nothing changes," the priority is not there yet, and no amount of follow-up manufactures it.
Map how the decision actually gets made. Stakeholders and their roles. The criteria they will judge you on. The blockers, the process, the timeline. Name the economic buyer, the champion, the people who can say no. Mark who is engaged and who is still dark. Single-threaded deals die single-threaded. The champion who loves you cannot sell for you if you never armed them for the room you are not in.
Every touch ends with a specific, mutual, timely, valuable, achievable commitment. Not "I will follow up." A named action, an owner on each side, and a date, worked backward from their timeline, not yours. If the next step is only yours to do, the deal is coasting on your effort, not theirs.
This is the Split. The skill does the prep, the scoring, and the draft. You own the conversation. The AI never talks to the buyer. It gets you into the room already knowing where the deal is thin.
Feed it your notes, transcripts, or CRM fields and it produces:
- The 3 Whys laid out, with the gap flagged where you have a stated problem but no business impact or personal priority behind it.
- A priority and urgency read: is there a compelling reason to act now, or are you the thing that gets deprioritized.
- A decision-dynamics map: named stakeholders, their criteria, the blockers, and the threads still dark.
- Mutual next steps drafted with owners and dates, ready to send.
- A Deal Confidence Score across the four PLAN pillars, and the five deal-review questions answered or flagged. If you cannot answer all five, the skill tells you plainly: this is a lead, not a deal.
You walk in with the map. You run the meeting.
Take your top forecasted deal this week. Run the 3 Whys on it, out loud, from memory. If you cannot get past the stated problem to the impact and the personal priority, you found your next call, and probably your real close date.
Add the skill to Claude and run this on your own business.
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