Your crash course in modern selling!

Driving sales and revenue growth in today’s market is hard!

  1. With budgets being tighter and buyers more distracted than ever before, it’s hard to get their attention.
  2. It’s hard to manifest the authentic confidence and conviction you need to cut through the noise and convert experienced buyers
  3. You’re drowning in all the tactics, advice, and “tried and tested playbooks” you’re being asked to execute and trying to figure out what really works

In addition to the high-growth B2B tech companies I work with in my practice, I used to run small business sales for the Eastern U.S. at Salesforce and managed hundreds of enthusiastic reps all with the same goal; crush their quota and grow their careers.

I know the struggle is real!

The problem is that modern buyers are more empowered, skeptical, and distracted than ever before (and they don’t like talking to salespeople). That’s why it’s never been more important for you to cut through the noise and connect with buyers on a human level.

To do that you need to retool your sales playbook with tactics rooted in science and empathy.

To approach selling in a way that aligns with the way people buy, today.

That’s where I can help! 12 weeks. Tons of content and coaching from me.

One focus: to help you crush your quota and massively accelerate your career development through the power of science and empathy!

Sales Academy program includes:

  • 4 comprehensive online training courses
    1. High-Impact Messaging
    2. Mindful Discovery
    3. Objection Handling
    4. Negotiation
  • A copy of David’s bestselling book
  • Access to live office hours with David
  • Certificate of completion.

Ready to supercharge your sales game?

Start by submitting an application to join the next cohort.

Whether you’re new or seasoned, this is the sales training every seller needs! This blend of psychology, empathy, and selling fundamentals is hard to find but I believe Cerebral has cracked the code with a program that provides tons of helpful frameworks to help you put these powerful principles into practice.

What it is:

The Cerebral Selling Sales Academy is a high-impact, foundational sales education series. Its purpose is to help sellers, sales leaders, and entrepreneurs of all experience backgrounds up-level, reinforce, and deepen their skills across four key disciplines modern sellers need to master:

Messaging

Communicating your value proposition in a powerful, differentiated, and emotionally-charged way.

Discovery

Uncovering your customer’s known and hidden business, strategic, and emotional challenges.

Objection Handling

Understanding and resolving the tactical and emotional roadblocks to winning more business.

Negotiation

Minimize concessions while delivering high levels of satisfaction at each stage of the process.

The program is delivered by David Priemer, Founder and Chief Sales Scientist of Cerebral Selling and author of the bestselling book Sell The Way You Buy.

David started his career as an award-winning research scientist before spending 20 years leading top-performing sales teams at high-growth technology companies including Salesforce, where he was the Vice President of Commercial Sales and creator of the Sales Leadership Academy program. Often referred to as the “Sales Professor”, David’s teachings have been published in the Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Forbes, Inc, and Entrepreneur magazines. He is also an Adjunct Lecturer at the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University and the London Business School.

Enrolling in David’s Cerebral Selling Sales Academy was hands down the best career development decision I’ve ever made. The program material was thoughtfully organized, packed with insight, and is highly actionable. It’s changed the way I approach my sales cycles and is making a tangible impact on my performance. I would highly recommend this program to anyone looking to level-up their sales game.

I’ve participated in countless sales training sessions in the past from great brands like Sandler and Challenger. None could hold a candle to how impactful David’s was!

Who is it for:

The Cerebral Selling Sales Academy program is ideal for professionals in complex selling environments (e.g high-tech, software, business solutions, consulting, and other competitive industries) including:

  • Front line sales professionals – AE’s, SDR’s/BDR’s, Solution Engineers
  • Sales leaders – Managers, Directors, VP’s, CRO’s
  • Entrepreneurs – founders, small business owners

There is no experience pre-requisite for this program. Sellers of ALL experience levels will get tons of value from the content and concepts presented.

David’s clients include some of the fasting growing and innovative companies in the industry such as Salesforce, Shopify, Indeed, and ActiveCampaign.  His unique and engaging approach provides training that is both tactically and educationally rich.

It was an absolute pleasure attending the Sales Academy program! Applying David’s teachings helped me improve my close rates, build stronger client relationships, and bring in more revenue. This has been the most effective sales training I have attended to date!

What do I get?

1. Four Comprehensive Training Courses

(full description of each course at the bottom):

  1. Messaging –communicating your value proposition in a powerful, differentiated, and emotionally-charged way.
  2. Discovery – uncovering your customer’s known and hidden business, strategic, and emotional challenges.
  3. Objection Handling –understanding and resolving the tactical and emotional roadblocks to winning more business.
  4. Negotiation –drive more value from each opportunity while delivering high levels of satisfaction at each stage of the process.

Each course includes ~3 hours of online, self-paced instruction (so 12+ hours total) along with a knowledge-testing quiz at the end of each topic.

There are also 24 exercises for you to complete across the program to get you thinking more deeply about how to operationalize the tactics in your business.

The content is self-paced so you can work through it on your own time, but people generally take about 3 weeks to work through each course.

2. Live Sales Coaching

Let David be your personal sales coach!

Working through the course content is important but using the tactics successfully in real-world selling situations is what you’re after! That’s why the program also includes access to 1-hour long live coaching sessions, hosted by David, 2-3 times each month. The purpose is to make sure you’re staying on the right track and have David coach you through the content, concepts, and even specific sales opportunities. Ask questions. Put it all together in the field. Win!

3. A copy of David’s Bestselling Book

Sell The Way You Buy, is a great resource to reinforce and expand on the concepts in the program! The program content also references specific pages and lessons from the book making it easy to find the most relevant content.

4. Certificate of Completion

Proudly include the credential on your resume/Linked profile and showcase your skills to the world!

David’s training was by far one of the best I’ve ever taken. Within days of putting his techniques into practice, I saw an immediate lift in my talk time on calls. David is a fantastic teacher who aspires to foster the type of sales professionals that people actually like to deal with. I can’t wait to learn more from him in the future.

Attending the Cerebral Selling Sales Academy is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made! It challenged me to look at sales differently, change-up my tactics, and had a profound effect on my ability to communicate with clients. David’s approach is engaging and the content was extremely well presented. I wouldn’t hesitate to attend again!

Based on the approach I learned at David’s training I cleaned up my pipeline and started focusing on the opportunities that really mattered. My results were instantaneous. The first month after implementing David’s approach I hit 304% of my quota and the trend continued into the subsequent months as well!

The Cerebral Selling Sales Academy is world-class! David’s method of utilizing empathy-driven tactics backed up by science has made a huge impact on my craft as a sales professional. Since participating in the program I’ve created richer customer experiences while climbing to the top of the leaderboard  3 quarters in a row! Cerebral Selling is my secret sauce and I’d personally recommend it to anyone committed to stepping up their sales game.

David’s approach redefined how our global sales team looked at selling like no other training I’ve seen. His content is superior and his delivery is impeccable and engaging. I have never had sellers come back to me after training and ask “When can we do more?!?” That’s when you know they learned a ton.

Those who take David’s Sales Academy course can’t argue about how effective and unique the content is. I came away with actionable insights, data around the effectiveness of new sales techniques, and complete confidence that I will be better at my job. Although there were so many ah-ha moments, I know exactly what needs to be done to elevate my game!

Session Descriptions:

Session #1: Secrets of High Impact Messaging: ensuring your message breaks through in a sea of sameness

Description: “What is it you do?”. It’s a question our customers ask us every single day. Yet, it’s one we’re often challenged to answer in a way that creates that critical emotional response in the hearts and minds of our target buyers. Most Sales and Marketing teams fail to deliver their company’s message clearly, consistently, and with the intoxicatingly high conviction needed to inspire their customers to act. They speak the language of solutions instead of the customer’s language of pain and purpose. As a result, most vendors find themselves drowning in a “sea of sameness” with poor lead conversion and millions in lost sales.

What participants will take away:

  • the foundational elements of a high-impact solution pitch
  • how to uncover the unseen forces that slow down and prevent our customers from buying
  • a deep dive into the mind of our ideal customer and the hidden emotional-motivators that move them to purchase
  • a formulaic approach to crafting stories and messages that consistently and deeply resonate with our target audience
  • how to develop more confidence and conviction in our delivery of these stories
  • an updated and upgraded product story you can use immediately!

Session #2: Secrets of Mindful Discovery: uncovering critical insights through science, trust, and empathy

Description: discovery is arguably the most critical step in any sales professional’s selling process. It not only helps you understand your customer’s functional, business, and strategic needs but also whether it makes sense to do business together. Unfortunately, many of the most critical discovery insights go unspoken and unshared due to lack of alignment, trust, and focus. Salespeople aren’t always clear about the insights they seek or how they intend to get their customers to share them. This is especially true with younger sellers trying to connect with older, more experienced buyers whose job they’ve never done. As a result, most sellers spend more time losing deals than we do winning. The key to discovery success; listening, adopting the right mindset, building rapport, asking the right questions, and putting yourself in your customer’s shoes.

What participants will take away:

  • How to overcome the experience/tenure/age imbalance with your customer
  • Establishing credibility and trust required to maximize disclosure
  • Your customer’s “pain spectrum” and the critical discovery insights they hide from you
  • How to ensure you come out of every discovery call with the insights you need to move the deal forward and forecast it accurately
  • The science of disclosure: how to build trust through science and empathy to uncover your customer’s functional, strategic, and emotional challenges
  • How your mindset, approach, and tone impacts discovery success
  • A framework to maximize the value of the discovery to both buyer and seller through proper discovery planning and follow-up.

Session #3: Cerebral Objection Handling: Understanding The Concern Beyond the Spoken Word

Description: the ability to handle customer objections on the road to securing a sale is a core part of a sales professional’s role. Unfortunately, many of us fail to recognize and address the true underlying concern veiled behind some of the most common objections. This results in unnecessarily long sales cycles, missed forecasts, and a poor customer experience. The key to mastering this critical sales competency is to recognize the main types of objection categories we most frequently encounter so you can disarm them quickly with the most effective approach.

What participants will take away:

  • how to identify the secret meaning behind your customer’s objections
  • a simple framework for assessing and responding to objections of all types
  • matching your tone and approach to your customer’s objection
  • 10 high-impact objection handling tactics
  • how to combine these tactics into an objection handling narrative you can add to your sales playbook immediately.

Session #4: Negotiating for Success: Truths and Tactics That Drive High-Impact Outcomes

Description: in the modern marketplace, negotiation is about more than just commercial terms and numbers. Time, speed, information, the resources we control, and even feelings, all factor into the bargaining situations we find ourselves in with our customers. That’s why if your goal is to secure a deal that drives a mutually beneficial outcome with a high degree of satisfaction, you need to meet the emotional, temporal, and operational needs of both parties. This session will cover the core tactical and emotional principles of negotiation needed to drive high-impact outcomes. Hands-on role-plays will help participants explore and apply their newfound knowledge and tactics throughout the session.

What participants will take away:

  • examining how emotions play into negotiation interactions and how to navigate them
  • a framework for assessing the things that each party values in a negotiation, often in unequal ways, and using these values to craft and mutually beneficial outcome
  • how to consider the balance of power in any negotiating situation; how much do you want and which people, systems, processes, or other entities should have it
  • tactics to maximize value to both parties while minimizing concessions.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Since this is proper training and not Netflix, we don’t recommend binge-watching 🙂  The lessons and exercises spread throughout each course are designed to be consumed over time. So we recommend spending about 1 hour per week working through the program and then taking some time to try the tactics in the field before coming back to learn more. If you follow this cadence, most students finish each course in about three weeks, making the program about 12 weeks long.

Access to the online course content will be available to you for 4 months after you start the program.

It’s perfectly natural to have questions about the content, approaches, and tactics covered in the program as you work through it. That’s why David Priemer hosts regular LIVE office hours sessions. These optional, drop-in-style sessions (held over Zoom) provide a fantastic opportunity to not only connect with David but with your fellow program participants as well. You will get access to the office hours calendar once you join the program.

Absolutely! In fact, it’s very common to have teams work through the program together to share insights and promote some good old-fashioned mutual accountability. To register your team, please send an email to training@cerebralselling.com.