The 2-4-8 Sales Strategy Framework: How Legendary Consultants Drive Deals & Revenue Growth

A proposal is not a coward’s way of asking for money.

Arrrrr! 🏴‍☠️ Welcome to a paid edition of Category Pirates. This foundational series shares category design principles, strategies, and actionable frameworks to help you design new and different categories. Thank you for reading. And of course, forward this mini-book to anyone who needs to hop aboard the Pirate ship.

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Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,

There are many legendary salespeople in the world, but a consulting partner is a rare breed of salesperson. 

That’s because consultative selling is extraordinarily effective—and fabulously difficult. 

Most salespeople have a tangible product or service to sell. You can touch it, feel it, see it. You know what you’re buying and can put a value on it (a $20 book, a $20,000 coaching program, a $200,000 software platform, etc.)

Consulting partners sell the intangible. (Ideas)

Consulting partners sell answers, analytics, and actions. (Slides)

And the greatest consulting partners sell questions and quests. (Missions)

An elite consulting partner takes the question a client thinks they want solved and re-directs it to a more important question. 

They frame, name, and claim a problem.

Sometimes, it’s not the question the client is asking that matters. It’s the question underneath, or adjacent to the question, that matters. This question points to an underlying quest deep in the heart of a client—a quest so important that the client either 1) doesn’t know it is there or 2) is afraid to say it out loud. 

A great consultant listens. Thinks. Reject the premise. And draws out that quest. 

They then frame, name, and claim a more powerful question to deliver on that quest.

The craziest part of consulting is there’s no certainty of outcomes or money-back guarantee. 

That’s why there are many stories of consulting projects gone bad. (Just google McKinsey + Enron, Swissair, or Purdue Pharma!) But perhaps the worst was McKinsey’s work for AT&T sizing the prize of the cell phone market at 900,000 units. They missed the mark not by millions, but by billions.

(There are now more cell phone subscriptions in the world than people.)

Despite this, clients spend over a quarter trillion dollars a year on management consulting. Consulting is a bit like venture capital. Not all projects generate ROI, but the ones that do generate so much of a return that clients keep coming back. 

Make no mistake—legendary consulting leaders are legendary salespeople. 

The reason selling consulting scares the 💩 out of most people is because to sell consulting, you have to sell you. The first thing consulting buyers must buy is the person selling the consulting. And selling software is a lot less daunting than selling yourself. 

That’s why most consultants don't have clients bashing down the door to drop off large bags of cash.

So instead of turning down potential customers who are (potentially) wrong for their business, they cling tight to any opportunity. They have “happy ears.” The client is signaling “not now,” and the consultant is hearing “will buy soon.”

So the consultant SELLS.

Maybe they send lengthy proposal after proposal. They follow up again and again and again. They leave voicemails. They send texts. They offer end-of-quarter discounts, freebies, compressed timelines, extra deliverables, and any number of other Scooby Snacks.

It's the exact opposite approach of The No-Sell Sell.

In this mini-book, we’re niching down on how you (as a Category Design consultant) can become a strong salesperson by leveraging the most helpful consulting sales frameworks and strategies.

These tactics have helped many category design consultants and advisors, including us, turn casual conversations into 6-figure and 7-figure projects.

Before we dive into the specifics, here’s a story to show how this happens:

Category Pirates readers sometimes write us notes wanting to connect. Recently, Pirate Eddie saw one of these notes and didn't know the sender (let’s call him Matt). But it’s not every day you get thank-you notes with no strings attached. So Pirate Eddie Googled Matt, and what you know! This somebody was a legendary somebody. Matt built a nine-figure business out of nothing and is doing wonderful things for his category. 

Naturally, we Pirates became curious—especially because Matt said he could learn from us. 

So, we decided to hop on a quick call with him.

Matt asked to work with Category Pirates formally. Pirate Eddie, being missionary-minded, suggested a few other high-value near-term things he thought this person ought to do first: 

1. Go on Pirate Christopher’s podcast

2. Let us write about him

3. And a few other fun, low-hanging fruits that didn't cost anything

He followed through on every suggestion.

The conversations kept going until Matt asked if he could drive out to meet Pirate Eddie in person (This is unusual. Most potential clients want you to come to them, wine and dine them, yada yada.) Pirate Eddie met with Matt, jammed on his business, and learned about his success as a category designer. Throughout the conversation, Pirate Eddie realized Matt wasn't a "normal" entrepreneur—he and his colleagues were also all strong executives. 

These casual conversations eventually led Pirate Eddie to make a business suggestion:

"Maybe all you’re missing is some category science. Just a hypothesis." 

Matt got curious about what “category science” meant. He had great data on his brand, but the category? Not so much—another cue for Pirate Eddie to put on his missionary badge. He told Matt, "Send me some of your data. I'll take a look and give you some suggestions for free." (Category Science is Pirate Eddie's category superpower!) After reviewing the data and giving his perspective on what category data he’d want to know if he were king for a day, Pirate Eddie came up with a few questions he knew the weird data could answer. 

"Answer these," Eddie said, "and your distribution partners will open up the world to you." 

Now, this wasn't the original problem Matt wanted to solve.

Instead, Matt thought he needed to solve an innovation problem. But Pirate Eddie showed him the real problem was understanding the category potential. Until Pirate Eddie put the data in the context of category design and illustrated the potential of the category, Matt hadn’t seen it that way. 

He was talking about taking revenue from A to B. But Pirate Eddie showed him how to increase the category—and be the only company casting a vision for an exponential market cap. 

Six weeks after starting a conversation with Pirate Eddie, Matt became a paying client. 

How did Pirate Eddie go from a LinkedIn message to a mid 6-figure consulting project?

There’s a ton of strategic selling, thinking, and action behind this story. But we’re going to break it all down so you understand what he did, why it worked, and how you can apply the same process to your consulting or advising business.

(If you haven’t read The No-Sell Sell mini-book, we recommend reading that immediately after this. It explains the different thinking behind how you get clients to come to you, instead of chasing them.)

Now, let’s dive in. 🤿

The 2-4-8 Sales Strategy Framework

This framework is rooted in sales fundamentals, category design principles, and missionary business relationship building. 

It combines a consulting lens that Pirate Eddie learned in two decades as a partner at a super ding-dong growth strategy consulting firm (driving billions of dollars in incremental revenue for clients) and a category design sales lens that Pirate Christopher learned while leading hundreds of sales training sessions, closing billion-dollar deals as a 3x publicly traded company CMO, and advising 50+ VC-backed startups.

Said differently: It’s worked for us—and we hope it helps drive the same exponential outcomes for you.

The 2-4-8 Sales Strategy Framework has three core parts: