If you saw my Baseline Selling posts on LinkedIn this week (week of July 4th 2025) then this is a far more comprehensive version of three of those short posts.

The 3-minute video rant below answers the question, “Why don’t more companies follow a systematic, scientific, strategic, tactical, consultative sales process?”  I think it’s one of my best rants ever.

On the 20-year anniversary of Baseline Selling – How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know about the Game of Baseball I will answer to the single question I am asked more often than any other. “How did you come up with Baseline Selling?”

During the winter and spring of 2005, Red Sox nation was still on a high after the Red Sox won the 2004 World Series, their first world series victory in 86 years. They had broken the “Curse of the Bambino” and in doing so, won their first championship in my lifetime.

If you love baseball like me, life didn’t get any better. But I have four loves. Of course my wife and son who was 3 years old at the time, baseball, and sales. Oh yeah, I love sales the profession, the sport, the game, the challenge, the science, the strategy, the tactics, the wins, the losses. All of it. And it was 20 years ago that it hit me. Baseball and Selling are SOOOO similar, I should combine them.

That’s how Baseline Selling was born, and during the spring and summer of 2005, I worked on the book, the courses, dozens of analogies, and readied it for publishing and prime time.

My goal was for Baseline Selling to become the most read book on Selling. While we are not quite there yet, there is still time. After all, most of the sales books I read (to make sure I had my sales history correct) were written fifty to eighty years before that! And I’m really proud that unlike a lot of books, even 20 years later, Baseline Selling is still the most complete book on selling. It’s the only sales book/course with a complete sales process AND methodology, including sales psychology, strategies and tactics with sample conversations.

With its consultative sales methodology, the cornerstone of Baseline Selling is its staged, milestone-centric, buyer-focused sales process, a framework for predictive, repeatable outcomes.

We customize Baseline Selling by layering a company’s existing process on top of the Baseline Selling process. Other popular sales programs, like Sandler, SPIN, Challenger, Strategic Selling, Solution Selling, PSS, MEDDIC, and others, are methodologies first, and their key milestones most often take place within one (and sometimes two) of the four Baseline Selling stages, which can be clearly seen when they are layered. See below.

Slide deck showing most of the comparisons:

Video showing some of the comparisons:

The Baseline Selling sales process is:

• Staged
• Milestone-Centric
• Buyer-Focused
• Repeatable
• Predictable
• Logical
• Customizable
• Scalable
• Mappable
• Memorable
• Complete
• Sequenced

Most importantly, the Baseline Selling sales process builds upon itself while avoiding the recurring mistake that other sales programs make, where steps, events and/or milestones occur before it’s appropriate to execute them.

For example, early qualifying is a feature of Solution Selling but it occurs before a prospect has a compelling reason to answer any qualifying questions.

Some outbound teams use BANT. Premature qualification causes too many prospects to be inappropriately disqualified.

The SEQUENCE of stages, steps/milestones is THE MOST IMPORTANT element of a effective and repeatable sales process.

Nearly as important is a predictive Scorecard, which we build for clients with every customized sales process and that’s the thought process that went into the development of Baseline Selling.

One of the critical outcomes of a great sales process is how well it integrates into CRM.  Nowhere is that great integration more apparent than with Membrain, powered by Baseline Selling.  CRM should guide salespeople through the sales process, include an embedded milestone-specific playbook, provide advice where needed, include methodology-specific content for each milestone of the process, and help salespeople close the business. This is what Membrain does for salespeople and for leadership, Membrain provides out of the box, ready-to-view, relevant, real-time insights on the pipeline so that you not only know where you are, where you are going, where you will be, and when you will be there, but you will also understand why.

We love conducting live training for sales teams, either virtually or face-to-face, but we also offer several budget-friendly, online self-directed courses and can blend our live and self-directed courses to better leverage your investment.  Everything Baseline Selling on one page.

Savvy sales professionals, who don’t need traditional sales training, enjoy our online, self-directed course, Movie Night for Salespeople.