I'd let him finish our conversation with a warm smile, a vague "send it over and we'll take a look," and absolutely zero commitment to what happened next.
I thought that was being professional. Not pushy. Giving him space.
What I was actually doing was leaving the door completely open for him to walk away and he did.
Over forty years of selling across different industries, coaching sales teams, sitting alongside reps in the room and listening back to recordings, I kept seeing the same pattern.
Good salespeople. Good products. Genuine prospects. Proposals that went nowhere.
And almost every time, the problem wasn't the proposal. It wasn't the price. It wasn't the follow-up.
It was a single conversation skill that nobody had ever properly taught them: how to secure genuine commitment before the meeting ends.
Once I understood that, everything changed. And once I started teaching it, the results for the people I worked with changed too, quickly, measurably, and without any of the pushy tactics that make selling feel wrong. That's what this challenge is built around.