The sales framework I taught at NACE Asheville

The best salespeople I know are still learning. That’s the whole point.

Hi y’all,

This week, I had the privilege of speaking to the NACE Asheville chapter — and as tends to happen whenever I teach something, I walked away having learned just as much as I shared.

That’s the thing about sales: there is no “done.” No certification you earn, no book you finish, no quota you hit that makes you a complete salesperson. It’s a craft. And like any craft, it rewards the people who stay curious long after they feel like they know what they’re doing.

I say this as someone who has been selling in some way or another for over a decade. First in my family’s manufacturing business (where I still show up as an informal consultant, some clients you never retire from!). Then, producing events at the highest levels (client wrangling is selling!). Now leading a sales team at Goodshuffle Pro, coaching reps daily. And still, I learn something new every week.

What I’ve noticed, though, is that the most powerful frameworks aren’t always the most sophisticated ones. In the age of AI — where clients move faster, compare more vendors, and expect near-instant engagement — the sellers who win aren’t necessarily the ones with the most charisma. They’re the ones with the best systems. Speed, structure, and predictability are the new competitive advantage. The “sales guy” era is over.

That’s what I brought to Asheville.

The framework I shared is called STAGE — five phases that together build a client experience that’s consistent, repeatable, and doesn’t depend on whether you’re at your best on a Tuesday morning or your newest team member is working their first solo event.

It’s not novel. It’s built on a decade of experience, my own entrepreneurial journey, and a lot of reading — namely Go-Givers Sell More, The Challenger Sale, The Transparency Sale, and years of partnership with The Maestro Group. If any of those are on your reading list, bump them up.

Here are two things I talked about that I keep coming back to:

• The five-minute window is real. CALLING a lead within five minutes of them reaching out makes you 100 times more likely to connect, and 21 times more likely to convert. Not 21% more likely. 21X.
• Your job in a discovery call isn’t to pitch. It’s to find the gap. The distance between where a client is right now and where they want to be is where the sale actually lives. And it almost never surfaces when you ask “so what are you looking for?” It surfaces when you ask better questions and then get quiet enough to actually hear the answer.

If you operationalize them, those two ideas alone will change how your pipeline performs.

I’d love to come share the framework at your local chapter (here’s a link where you can find your chapter) or host a virtual session. If that’s of interest to you, just hit reply to this email!

See you next Monday,

Mallory Mullen

Le remue-ménage