By Dr. Kryn McClain, Founder & CEO, CatapalloVR
Most sales advice tells you to control the conversation. Follow the steps. Find the pain. Handle the objection. Get to yes.
I spent years as a licensed therapist before I ever sold anything. And the longer I sell, the more I notice something: the best calls I have aren’t rigid in getting to yes at all. They follow the same instincts I used in a counseling session.
Imagine walking into a therapy session and your therapist runs through a script for the whole hour. How would you feel? The answer probably isn’t heard, or validated or any better than when you walked in. As therapists, we’re trained to listen, respond and pivot. You’re always looking for where the real problem is and how you can actually help.
That’s also how I view sales: the person across from me is a human first, with a potential problem I might genuinely be able to solve.
Below are three moves that come straight from the therapy chair. None of them are in any sales book I’ve read. All of them build the kind of trust that closes business. I hope they help you move the needle on your next call, your next conflict or even your next hard conversation.
Move 1: Be willing to say “you don’t need this”
The instinct, and the gold standard in a lot of sales training, is to treat every objection as something to overcome. If the buyer pushes back, you push forward.
My impulse is to do the opposite.
Picture a call where the prospect says, “We looked at your top package, but I think we’d only ever use half of it.” A knee-jerk reaction is to focus on the hesitation and start defending the full price. The clinical move is to agree and get curious. “You’re right. Given what you’ve told me, that package doesn’t make sense for you. Which half would you actually use?” Pushing for less can earn you more in trust over the long run.
In therapy, you never invent a problem so you can be the solution. The client has to actually be helped, or you’ve failed them. Selling is the same. When you’re willing to talk someone out of the wrong purchase, they trust you completely with the right one. And they send you everyone they know.
Move 2: Pain is felt, not hunted
If you’re digging deep on any discovery call, there will be a moment where something heavy comes up. A typical sales methodology tells you to spot the “pain point” and connect it to your product. That framing has always bothered me, because it treats a person’s worst moment like a prize you were hunting for.
Say a safety manager tells you, quietly, that there was a serious incident on the floor recently. Someone got hurt. The team is rattled, and half of them are privately wondering, “Could that be me next? Does leadership actually care whether I go home safely?”
The scripted move is to hear an opening and pivot straight to your solution. Don’t. Take a beat. Stop and say, “I’m so sorry. That’s a heavy thing to carry, and I imagine your people are shaken.” Then let it sit for a second before you go anywhere near business. Validation before positioning.
Pain isn’t a target. It’s something a human being is feeling, right there in front of you, and it hurts. So apply the aloe first. In counseling, you name what’s in the room before you do anything else. If you skip that and jump to problem-solving, the person feels used instead of understood, and they quietly shut the door. The business conversation will still be there in thirty seconds. It will go better because you were a person first.
Move 3: Dig, but don’t interrogate
Good questions are in every sales playbook. But when you plan out all your questions in advance and refuse to pivot, you march the buyer toward a yes built on your assumptions, not on what they’re actually telling you. That’s a manufactured yes. It’s yours, not theirs.
There’s also a wrong way to dig. If you just fire off question after question, you stop sounding curious and start sounding like an interrogator hunting for the location of a secret rebel base. Nobody opens up to that person. They get shorter, not deeper.
The clinical way is gentler, and it has a shape. When someone gives you a surface answer, listen for your next question inside their words. Latch onto the subject of the sentence, or the feeling underneath it and follow it. Think in terms of who, what, where, how and why.
Say a business owner tells you a problem is “costing us money.” Don’t reload and fire again. Just pull the thread they handed you. “Costing you how?” leads somewhere. So does “Who feels that the most day to day?” or “Where does that show up first?” One or two of those, asked like you actually care, and you often land somewhere neither of you expected: the real worry isn’t the money, it’s that a good client is losing patience or that the owner hasn’t had a weekend off in a year.
Notice you didn’t put that answer in front of them, and you didn’t grill them for it. You followed what they gave you until they found it themselves. A buyer who talks their way to the real problem is far more convinced than one you talked at, because now it’s their conclusion, not your pitch.
Trained, not scripted
None of this means walking in unprepared. Go in with a clear framework of what you need to understand. Sales takes diligence, constant monitoring and a willingness to listen. But prepare so you can be more curious for the prospect’s sake, not so you can steer them toward the answer you already wanted.
A framework is a set of tools, not a script to read out loud. The failure isn’t the framework. The failure is rigidity: walking in with an agenda and refusing to move off it while a real person tells you what they actually need.
So go in prepared. Know your prospect. Then put the plan down and do the harder thing: listen, respond, pivot and always look for how you can help.
That’s how we heal. It turns out it’s also how we sell.
Kryn McClain is the founder of a Berks County immersive learning company and a licensed professional counselor who applies clinical frameworks to sales and training. Want to talk about training that actually sticks? Reach out through the GRCA member directory.