Gap selling: how Keenan's method works, with questions and a worked example

This page is for account executives, SDRs who run first calls, and sales managers who coach discovery. It explains what gap selling is, gives you questions for each part of the method, and walks through an illustrative deal where the gap is sized in dollars. It ends with a scoring check you can use in deal reviews to decide whether a gap is big enough to pursue.

What gap selling is and where it came from

Gap selling comes from Gap Selling: Getting the Customer to Yes, published in December 2018 by the sales trainer Keenan (he goes by his surname), founder of A Sales Growth Company. The book's central line, quoted on its own site, is "At the heart of every sale there is a gap." The gap is the distance between where a buyer is today (the current state) and where they want to be (the future state). The company's own description is that the method shifts the sale "from your product to the buyer's problem."

Two ideas set it apart from older methods:

• Problems, not needs or pain. Pain alone doesn't move buyers, because, as A Sales Growth Company puts it, buyers "get used to it" and adjust. What moves them is a problem whose cost they can see and a future they want badly enough to change.
• Value is agreed, not claimed. The company's phrase is "Value is an agreement." Your estimate of the gap is worthless until the buyer accepts it as their own.

The practical result is that discovery takes longer and the rest of the sale gets shorter. If the buyer has told you the problem, its cause, its cost and the outcome they want, the proposal writes itself and many objections never come up.

The parts of the gap

The five current-state parts follow the way Gong's and Built In's summaries of the book describe it. A Sales Growth Company's own pages emphasize the first three diagnostic links: problem, root cause and impact.

The Problem Identification Chart

The tool Keenan's company trains sellers on is the Problem Identification Chart (PIC). On its own page, the PIC has three linked parts: the problem ("the high-level business challenge your buyer is facing"), the root causes ("the specific, fixable issues that create the problem") and the impacts ("the tangible business consequences that occur when the problem persists"). One problem usually has several root causes, and each root cause has its own impacts.

Use the chart before calls to form hypotheses and during calls to keep yourself honest. If a column is empty, you aren't ready to present.

ACCOUNT: [company]    CONTACT: [name, role]    DATE: [date]

PROBLEM (the business challenge, in their words):
[e.g. "We keep missing our service-call response targets"]

ROOT CAUSES (specific and fixable):
1. [cause] (do we fix this? yes / no)
2. [cause] (do we fix this? yes / no)
3. [cause] (do we fix this? yes / no)

IMPACTS (consequences if nothing changes, with numbers):
1. [impact] = [amount per year] (buyer agreed? yes / no)
2. [impact] = [amount per year] (buyer agreed? yes / no)

FUTURE STATE (measurable target and date):
[e.g. 95% of calls answered within four hours by 1 March]

EMOTION (who cares personally, and why):
[name, role]: [what's at stake for them]

THE GAP (annual value of closing it): [amount]
COST OF CLOSING IT: [our price, year one]

Questions for each part

Gap selling doesn't come with a fixed question list. Keenan's position, quoted by Built In, is that once you know what information you need, how you get it is up to you. These questions are a starting set, ordered from broad to specific.

ENVIRONMENT
Walk me through how [area] works today, from start to finish.
Who's involved, and what tools do they use?

PROBLEM
What isn't working the way you'd like?
When did it last go wrong? What happened?

IMPACT
What did that cost you, in money, hours or customers?
How often does it happen? What does a year of it add up to?

ROOT CAUSE
Why do you think it keeps happening?
What have you already tried, and why didn't it stick?

EMOTION
How is this landing with [owner / your manager / the team]?
What happens for you personally if this is still true in six months?

FUTURE STATE
If this were fixed, what would be different day to day?
What number would tell you it's fixed? By when?
What would that let you do that you can't do now?

VALIDATING THE GAP
So, if I've got this right: today [current state], which costs about [amount] a year, and you want [future state] by [date]. What did I miss?
Is closing that gap worth [rough cost range] to you?
Who else would need to agree with these numbers?

The validation question is the hinge of the method. Read the gap back in the buyer's terms and let them correct it. A corrected number they own beats a polished one they don't.

The environment questions are the ones you can often answer before the call. Company size, locations, recent hires and news usually sit on public pages, and account research covers where to look. At volume that research is the slow part, and Bebop does it for each account in a list, so your call time goes on problems, impact and root cause.

Worked example: sizing the gap

Illustrative example. The companies, people and figures are invented to show the method.

The seller: Northgate Cyber (northgatecyber.example), a cybersecurity managed service provider (MSP). The buyer: Ridgeline Mechanical (ridgelinemech.example), a commercial HVAC service firm with 140 staff, 85 of them field technicians on tablets. The contact: the CFO, who also oversees IT.

Current state, after two discovery calls:

Future state: multi-factor authentication on every account, endpoint detection on all 160 devices, a call-back rule for payment changes, the insurer's requirements met before renewal, and a passed hospital questionnaire.

Sizing the gap. The rep built each line with the CFO, using his figures:

The cost of closing it: 140 users × $38 a month × 12 = $63,840, plus $6,000 onboarding, so $69,840 in year one. The gap is about 2.3 times the cost, and the year-one cost pays back in about five months ($69,840 ÷ $159,840 × 12 = 5.2).

What made this work:

• The rep didn't mention a product until the second call, when the CFO had already described the problem, its cause and its cost.
• Every number came from the buyer. The biggest line, the hospital margin, was the CFO's own worry, so he defended it to the owner himself.
• The root causes were things the MSP actually fixes (no owner for security, missing controls). The payment call-back rule is a process change the MSP could help write but not run, and the rep said so.
• The renewal date made the current state untenable. Without it, the same gap could have sat untouched for a year.

Is the gap big enough? A scoring check

Use this in deal reviews. Score each line 0 (unknown), 1 (partly) or 2 (confirmed by the buyer).

Decision rules (our guidance, not from the book):

• 10 to 12: write the proposal, and lead it with the gap table in the buyer's numbers.
• 6 to 9: keep discovering. The lowest line is the agenda for your next call.
• 0 to 5: don't propose. Nurture, or walk away.
• Any deal where the gap is smaller than your price: stop, however high the score. Either you've missed an impact or this isn't a fit.
• Root cause scored 0 after two calls: treat as unqualified. You can't close a gap whose cause you don't understand.

When gap selling fits and when it doesn't

How gap selling compares with other methods

Common mistakes

• Stopping at the first problem. "Our response times are slow" is a symptom. Ask why until you reach something specific and fixable.
• Inventing the impact. A number you calculated alone is a claim. A number the buyer worked out with you is a reason to buy.
• Skipping emotion. Businesses don't change; people do. If nobody cares personally, the deal stalls in approval.
• Presenting too early. A demo before the current state is clear turns into a feature tour, and the buyer fills the gap with price.
• Ignoring root causes you can't fix. Say so. Buyers trust the seller who tells them what the product won't solve.
• Treating the gap as fixed. Recheck it when people, budgets or deadlines change. A missed renewal date can shrink a gap overnight.

For the objections that still come up, the objection handling guide has responses that go back to the buyer's problem rather than defending price.

Next step: plan your next discovery call around the current state with the free sales call planning template.