After decades of sales transformation initiatives – vertical specialization, business fluency academies, peer-to-peer playbooks – a troubling question persists: Why do 67% of B2B buyers still say sellers don’t understand their business well enough to be helpful?*
The theory seemed convincing: If sellers could master the client’s business, they’d earn a seat at the strategic table. So companies invested heavily in this vision – training sales teams to read 10-Ks, developing acumen to “speak CFO,” and choreographing strategic conversations – all in the hope of producing “Trusted Advisors” who would secure executive trust. Yet consistent CXO engagement remainsas elusive as ever.
The Identity That Never Really Fit
The Trusted Advisor status always sounded aspirational, but it was never truly attainable for most sellers. The harsh reality is that executives already have trusted advisors: board members, deputies, consultants, and former colleagues. They don’t need – or expect – SaaS reps, account teams, or even vertical SME’s to fill this role.
Sellers have been handed an impossible charter: to perform strategic fluency at a level that even internal leaders struggle to maintain. Yes, understanding the customer matters, but expecting salespeople to shapeshift into advisory roles for high-level corporate officials is delusional. Sales execs instinctively recognize this challenge, which is why many retreat to feature-function modes. This isn’t a failure of effort – it’s a failure of expectation.
The CXO Messaging Trap
Those expectations been hard-wired by Trusted Advisor models which framed pitches around deficits, i.e. pain points, gaps, and unmet needs. This approach, imbedded through years of value-selling playbooks, backfires in today’s executive theater. As corporate agendas turned toward transformation and disruption, “deficit-framed messaging” is being rendered obsolete. What once sounded like astute diagnosis now lands as tone-deaf irrelevance.
The Mindset Shift within the C-Suite
Deficit-framed messaging reduces transformation agendas to correction exercises, killing curiosity before it has a chance to form. Worse, it pulls the narrative backward into remediation just as executives are leaning forward into possibility. In executing modernization strategies, CXOs don’t measure progress in problems solved – they measure it in momentum created. Their mindset is forward-oriented, focused on how to leverage past investments and accelerate what’s already working. As a result, messaging that assumes inertia is perceived as dated and out of touch with the executive agenda.
The trap, then, is assuming critique still carries appeal. This sensitivity gap remains one of the most common reasons C-suite access and engagement falls flat before it even begins.
Beyond the “Advisor” Identity
Executives don’t need more advisors. What they’re desperate for is a resource that serves as a catalyst to their biggest ideas. Those who establish that identity earn trust faster than any self-appointed advisor ever could.
*ASG’s 2024 buyer survey – 5 Things B2B Buyers Expect from Sales Reps in 2025
http://www.magis-trustedcatalyst.com