Critical Selling® Skills
Learn how to engage modern customers by becoming a “Trusted Advisor” and mastering skills to handle the most challenging sales scenarios.
Rethink How You Sell With Critical Selling Skills.
Today’s sophisticated customers just aren’t buying traditional product-based presentations. To engage these buyers, your team needs Critical Selling.
Critical Selling Skills is a proven sales methodology that teaches sales professionals how to stimulate interest, quickly build trust, create value in their offerings, close with confidence, and dramatically improve their effectiveness with modern customers.
Advanced Selling Skills Training Modules
Critical Selling Skills contains five core modules that guide professionals through every stage of sales development. Each module introduces sales techniques that help strengthen relationships, uncover customer needs and advance deals with confidence. Together, these modules form a comprehensive framework for professional selling skills training.
Sales Opening
The opening module teaches sales professionals how to initiate conversations that foster credibility and engagement from the outset. You’ll learn how to craft a clear legitimate purpose statement (LPS) that explains why you’re reaching out and what value you bring to the table. This module also covers the importance of body language, tone and word choice in creating a positive first impression that encourages customers to open up about their challenges.
Discovering
Discovering is where you shift from talking to listening. This module focuses on asking the right questions to uncover what truly matters to your customer. You’ll practice active listening techniques that help you pick up on subtle cues and layer in relevant benefits as the conversation unfolds.
The module also addresses how to handle early price requests without derailing the discussion, keeping the focus on understanding their needs before jumping to solutions.
Presenting
The presenting module shows you how to connect your solution directly to what the customer values most. Instead of delivering a generic pitch, you’ll learn to tailor your message based on what you’ve discovered earlier in the conversation.
This module emphasizes asking for feedback throughout your presentation to ensure alignment and using strategic pauses to allow key points to take hold. You’ll also explore how to address alternative options and use customer testimonials to build credibility.
Sales Closing
Knowing when to ask for a commitment separates good salespeople from great ones. This module helps you recognize the signals that indicate a customer is ready to move forward and how to guide the conversation toward defining clear next steps.
You’ll learn the risks of closing too early or too late and how to summarize key benefits in a way that reinforces the value you’ve built throughout the conversation. The module also covers how to ask for referrals and maintain a positive relationship, even if you don’t make the sale.
Handling Objections
When customers raise concerns, they’re providing you with insights about the issues they need to resolve before moving forward. This module teaches you to use objections as opportunities to dig deeper into their priorities and address what’s holding them back.
Key Benefits of Critical Selling Skills
Program Objectives of Critical Selling Skills
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More information about the Critical Selling Skills program is available in this downloadable PDF
Critical Selling® Skills FAQ
Overall, Janek’s end-to-end training solutions resulted in an average increase of 1188% ROI across the entire suite of sales training services throughout 2023. As one of our flagship programs, Critical Selling Skills ensures sales organizations have the skills they need to respond to buyers needs in today’s market.
Jenius CC provides ongoing feedback and practice opportunities to strengthen outreach messaging, objection handling, and lead qualification skills.
Critical Selling Skills is field proven and data backed, meaning that our sales training methodology undergoes a constant process of optimization based on market trends. At Janek, we routinely revise and optimize our Critical Selling Skills program alongside new evidence.
Everyone, whether they are a seasoned sales professional or junior sales rep, will benefit from the skills taught in Critical Selling Skills. Our proven methodology imparts skills that are universally applicable across your organization.
Our sales training sustainment strategies operate on three primary levels to improve skills within the sales organization: technology, tools and training for managers and sales coaching. This allows us to fully customize a training sustainment and reinforcement solution that will be most effective based on your objectives, budget, and project scope.
A trusted advisor is a sales professional who serves as a strategic partner to their customers. Trusted Advisors make the customers’ needs their number one priority before, during, and after the sales process.
Critical Selling Skills won a 2020 Gold Stevie® Sales Training Program of the Year and a 2025 Silver Stevie® Sales Training Program of the Year award. Critical Selling trains and reinforces the necessary communication skills to improve sales performance in today’s market.
Selling was developed out of the need to provide a field-proven and research-backed approach to sales. It was designed to uplevel sales staff, whether it’s a sales manager, sales professional, or other sales leader.
Examples of the many creative techniques effective salespeople can implement include:
- Needs-based: The salesperson asks a series of open-ended questions to determine the buyer’s needs, then recommends a tailored solution to address them.
- Focus on differences: In many industries, there is substantial overlap between a business’s offerings and those of its competitors. Salespeople should emphasize the unique selling proposition to differentiate their products, services and company.
- Make the customer the hero: Demonstrate how purchasing the product or service will make the buyer a hero by solving a significant problem not just for the company but also for themself.
- Appeal to emotions: While buyers rely on data when evaluating a product or service, they typically make subconscious, emotional decisions and use logic to justify their actions.
- Storytelling: With this technique, the salesperson tells a story to illustrate the benefits of their offerings and how they can solve the customer’s problem.
- Emphasize status quo: When selling to existing customers, it’s important to reinforce their inherent status quo bias to demonstrate that continuing to do business with the salesperson is the safest and most reliable option.
