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The Saturday email your competitors hope you never find. (One coffee. Zero fluff.)

#158: "Digest" is the kiss of death (and the 4 words that kill it)

Published 12 days ago • 1 min read

Issue #158

Reader

One word kills more deals than any objection, any pricing complaint, any "we went another direction."

That word? Digest.

"Hey, I'm going to need a little time to digest what you just told me. Circle back in a couple of weeks?"

John Barrows calls it the kiss of death.

After 25+ years inside Salesforce, LinkedIn, Google, Amazon, and Okta, after 250+ podcast episodes and 1.2 million downloads, John's seen it happen more times than he can count.

John had me on his podcast, Make It Happen Mondays. We went deep. Brand, risk, AI, why most design is illiterate, and the single question that changes every sales conversation you will ever have.

And I am sharing the entire episode in this brand new article, The 4-Word Question That Unlocks Every Sale.​

Four words. That's it.

Four words that replace the instinct to pitch with the instinct to uncover. Four words that turn a monologue into a discovery. Four words that make "digest" impossible because you never dumped information in the first place.

I just dropped this article this morning. The full conversation with John is embedded right there on the page.

→ [READ THE ARTICLE + WATCH THE FULL EPISODE]​

Here's what you'll walk away with:

• Why most pitches die before they start and the exact moment they go wrong

• The sales skill I never learned in design school (and why flipping one ratio transformed my close rate)

• How one salesperson selling the exact same product gets an entirely different outcome than the person in the next cubicle

John's verdict on this point is brutal: "Sales has nothing to do with what you sell. It has everything to do with how you sell."

Commoditized sales is the wall of beige in a different suit. Same product. Same features. Same demo. Every team running the same playbook, asking the same questions, getting the same "we'll circle back."

And then one person asks a question the other never thought to ask. That's how you stand out.

Not with a better pitch. With a better question.

Watch the full episode. Then ask yourself whether you're still dumping information on people who just need to "digest."

Or closing deals to drive growth.

→ [READ THE ARTICLE + WATCH THE FULL EPISODE]​

Talk soon.

David

The Saturday email your competitors hope you never find. (One coffee. Zero fluff.)

by David Brier, Bestselling Author and Rebranding Expert

I'm David Brier—the guy CEOs call when they've burned so much cash on marketing, their spouses think they have a coke habit. I'm like rehab for your brand, except instead of getting you clean, I get you profitable. Think of me as the Betty Ford Clinic of branding, but with better ROI and no group hugs. (Explains why I wrote the bestseller Brand Intervention that Daymond John calls "Genius.")

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