Two Calls and No Demo: A High Ticket Sales Process That Works

You have a product you believe in, a few happy clients and absolutely no idea where the next deal is coming from. When there’s no process for selling, you end up at the mercy of your prospect’s process for buying and that rarely ends well for anyone.

In this episode Dave sits down with Simon Severino of Strategy Sprints to pull apart the high ticket sales process he has spent two decades refining. Simon walks through the daily prospecting reps, the two call close, the eight steps he runs inside those calls and the one rule he never breaks: there’s no demo. If selling in your business still depends on how you happen to feel that morning, this one is worth your time.

In This Episode

• 01:20  The sales process starts before the sale
• 05:05  Five conversations a day
• 07:31  The ICP and exclusion list
• 08:38  Building a dream 100 list with AI
• 10:30  A LinkedIn opener that works
• 17:04  Selling the first 30 minutes
• 25:50  The $12,000 line and modular deals
• 28:30  Call one: visualise, frustration, importance
• 32:30  Call two: cost of inaction and investment
• 37:50  Blue, red and green buyers
• 41:25  Writing the sales playbook with your team

👤 Today’s Guest, Simon Severino

Simon Severino runs Strategy Sprints, where he builds sales and growth systems for founders and their teams. Dave notes in the intro that Simon has created more than $2 billion in additional sales revenue for his clients over the last 21 years and Simon describes himself in the interview as having worked on sales processes and nothing else for 23 years.

He is the author of Strategy Sprints, which lays out the eight step sales conversation he walks Dave through here and he runs a weekly group coaching session his members call the sales gym, where everyone does live prospecting reps together.

Website: strategysprints.com

📋 A High Ticket Sales Process Built on Reps, Not Luck

Based on the interview with Simon Severino of Strategy Sprints.

Ask most business owners where their sales process starts and they will point at the first call. Simon pushes the starting line two steps further back and the whole system only makes sense once you see why.

It starts before you ever open your mouth

One step before sales is the language you use in public: the words you choose when you post on LinkedIn or anywhere else. That is why Simon works on positioning and messaging before he scales anything. One step before that’s how you start your day. He picks a top four every morning, tracks them on the only piece of paper on his desk and checks them off, because what he is really looking for is streaks and the gaps in them.

A streak is simply doing the thing on consecutive days. His own example in the episode is five days running of starting five new conversations with CEOs he has never met. He compares it to a basketball player doing leg work. Everybody knows how to move their legs. The ones at the top do the foundations well.

There are only two jobs in a business

Simon’s view is blunt: an organisation has sales and it has sales support. Inside that first bucket, prospecting sits at the top and prospecting means starting conversations with people you have never met. His number is five a day. That is 25 a week and 100 a month.

“At 100 a month, my pipeline will never be dry.”
Simon Severino, 06:11

The reason the number is small is deliberate. A minimum standard has to survive a time crunch, a resource crunch and a crisis. Lofty goals collapse under pressure. A number you can hit on your worst day is the one that still gets hit when everything is on fire.

Write down who you’re not for

Before the reps come the foundations. Simon’s ideal client profile document runs to 15 levels and every one of those 15 sentences has an opposite written beside it. If the role is CEO, it’s not head of HR. If your clients do a million, you’re not chasing 500 million dollar companies. That exclusion list is what strips the waste out of both marketing and sales, because now the marketing team knows exactly who the writing is aimed at. Simon describes a good email or post as a love letter to one specific person.

From there it becomes a dream 100 list, which in his simplified version is just 100 LinkedIn URLs of people who fit the profile and have never spoken to him. This is the part he says AI handles well today: hand it the written ICP, ask for 100 URLs of exactly these people, exclude the anti profiles. Ten arrive each day as a Gmail draft, ready for the reps.

Do the opposite of whatever is in their inbox

Two principles govern the first message. The first is never go fully cold, because fully cold feels strange. You want a reason. Right now Simon’s best source is the LinkedIn page showing who viewed your profile, where he finds about five people and two or three of them fit the profile. The second principle is to do the opposite of whatever everyone else is sending.

In practice that means shorter, less formal and closer to how you would write to a friend. His own opener is a joke about his hair: he tells the person there are two reasons they might have visited his profile, either his beautiful hair or they need help with sales and asks them to please say it is number two. People answer. That’s the entire job of the first message.

The sequence he is running this month is four steps: the joke with two options, a powerful question, a deeper powerful question, then an invitation to talk. He is careful to say that specific sequence will date quickly, which is exactly why his group tests new openers live every week.

Sell the 30 minutes before you sell anything else

Most people treat the booking as an afterthought. Simon treats it as its own sale. Everybody is in a time crunch, so the question is why those 30 minutes are a worthwhile investment: what is the worst case, what is the minimum they walk away with, what is the maximum. Not “hey, let’s talk” and not “pick a time from my calendar”.

Underneath that sits the distinction he keeps returning to.

“You always start talking on what they want, but then you have to transition to what they need. Otherwise, you’re not an expert.”
Simon Severino, 17:35

His example from that morning: a food business sitting fourth on market share that wants to be second by the end of 2030. He knows what they want, so the first message is about that. The expertise shows up in the next message, where he names the two walls that kind of strategy usually hits and offers 30 minutes to plan a way through them.

Price decides the shape of the process

Simon puts the line in the sand at $12,000. Below that he sells from the website, masterminds included. Above it, people want a call and he is honest about why: would you send somebody $30,000 or $200,000 without talking to them first?

The trouble with large tickets is the cycle. He has a client selling $200,000 engagements where the process runs 18 months, which plays havoc with cash flow. His fix is to modularise. The same large transformation gets broken into pre built modules by length or by depth, so a diagnosis module might be $5,000 and one week, small enough to come out of a department budget without having to ask anyone for it.

Inside the Two Calls

The close is usually two calls. Simon notes that 2025 behaved like a recessionary year and pushed it out to four or five and that occasionally a deal closes in one, but two is what he builds for. Call one covers the first three steps of his eight step pyramid. Call two finishes the job. There is no demo in either of them.

1 Visualise, in their words not yours

The first five minutes are spent writing down every word they say, on a literal whiteboard, a sheet of paper, a shared screen or a Google doc. Someone says they want more leads, so he writes down “more leads” and then asks what more means and what leads means. His point is that “leads” can mean 25 different things and assuming you know is how deals quietly go wrong. Do that for five minutes and the person realises you’re actually listening. He watches for the eyebrows and the body posture to relax.

2 Frustration, until it’s real

Then he digs: what makes you angry about this, what have you tried, what else, have you given up, what is the one thing you will try next. The test is physical. “I want more leads” isn’t a reason to move on. “I hate this manual pasting of the LinkedIn URL into an email” is, because he can feel it in the way they say it.

3 Importance, on a scale of one to ten

Everything competes with everything else, so he asks where this sits from one to ten.

“If it’s below eight, we shouldn’t start.”
Simon Severino, 32:10

Sometimes people recalibrate their own number mid conversation, which is fine. When it clears eight, he offers the second call, 45 minutes and books it there and then.

Call two is about cost of inaction, then commitment

He opens by reading back the frustration and the importance and checking nothing has changed, because sometimes it has. Then come the questions nobody enjoys answering: what happens if you do nothing, what other options are you weighing, what are your decision making criteria right now, are you going for speed, safety or quality and how do you define quality.

Only then does he stop asking and start summarising. He reads the three deliverables back off the whiteboard, in the client’s own words and waits for the yes. He names a duration. And then he asks what they’re willing to invest to get those three things, in money and in time, theirs or their team’s.

Price never comes up before that moment, no matter how hard it is pushed.

“I would make you a disservice by making you an offer right now.”
Simon Severino, 35:20

The document is already with them. It goes out by email between the two calls, runs to two pages, four in heavily regulated industries and carries one dollar amount, the three deliverables in their language and the legal detail at the back. Sometimes there are two numbers, a base and a results based percentage tied to milestones. In that second call they either sign it or they don’t.

Two details are easy to miss. Objections are welcome: three or four of them is a sign of a good conversation, not a stalling one. And when there’s more than one buyer, every single person goes through all eight steps. You can’t run the CEO through the process, drop the CFO in at the end and expect them to be aligned.

Three Kinds of Buyer, Three Different Answers

Part of why the same process can feel bespoke to everyone is that Simon reads how the person in front of him makes decisions and adjusts what he shows them.

Red is the only one who buys in a single call. They are usually the founder or the CEO, they have pattern recognition, they have no patience and they either believe you in the first five minutes or the call is already over even if they stay politely on the line. Green buyers ask a question that sounds like a feature question but is really a request for proof, so Simon answers it with people: this client had your situation, this one started with zero employees and wanted the business to stop depending on him.

Turning It Into a Team Sport

Week one with a new team is always the same job: write the sales playbook together. Some teams call it a cookbook. It covers how we do marketing, how we close, how we deliver, how we retain and refer and how those things compound. If the team has been in their industry ten years, they already know the answers and it’s mostly a documentation exercise. Six months in, it’s harder, because the answers aren’t there yet. If you want a second take on that exercise, Dave covered the same ground when he sat down to build a sales playbook with Jack Daly.

Then comes the rhythm. Monday is pipeline review across both pipelines, prospecting and deals: what is real, what is dreamy and should be kicked out, where has nothing moved in more than three days. Tuesday is deal review and role plays, run in trios of seller, buyer and observer, recorded and dialled up in difficulty as the team gets better. Simon is clear that this is where the teaching actually happens.

“We don’t talk about trainings. We do the training, right?”
Simon Severino, 43:35

On hiring, he is refreshingly honest. After 23 years he has been wrong too often to claim he can spot a great salesperson in advance and he doesn’t believe anyone can. So he builds the process instead, with a modular onboarding that gives new people a clear next climb: find five who fit the profile, then get meetings with two of those five. The good ones stay and keep climbing. The others leave on their own.

Customised and Standardised at the Same Time

The thread running through all of it is one that will sound familiar to anyone who has systemised a business. Every client Simon works with says they felt understood and that he really knows their industry. His answer is that he just does a good job researching, every time, because the research is part of the system rather than a flash of brilliance. Hand a fully custom project to your team every time and you will drive them mad and kill your margin. Build the modules once and the tailoring costs you almost nothing.

That is the whole game. The customised layer is thin and sits on top. The standardised layer underneath is what lets you repeat it, teach it and eventually hand it over.

If your sales results still swing on who happens to be having a good week, you don’t have a sales problem. You have a documentation problem wearing a sales problem’s clothes. Pick one piece of Simon’s process, the daily five, the exclusion list, the one to ten question and write down how you do it. Your business isn’t broken. Your systems are.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many prospecting conversations should I be starting each day?
Simon’s number is five new conversations a day with people you have never met, which works out at 25 a week and 100 a month. He says that’s enough for most of his clients and for his own business when the offering is high ticket. The point of a small number is that you can still hit it in a bad week.

What is an anti ideal client profile?
It is the opposite of your ICP, written down with the same care. For each of the 15 sentences describing who you’re for, Simon writes the opposite: if the role is CEO it’s not head of HR, if your clients turn over a million you’re not chasing 500 million dollar companies. He says it strips a lot of waste out of marketing and sales.

Why does Simon never run a demo?
Because in his method pitching destroys your win rate. No presentations, no screen shares, no feature walkthroughs, in either call. Both conversations are built on powerful questions and a whiteboard where he writes down the client’s own words.

At what price point do you need a sales call?
Simon puts the line at $12,000. Under that figure he sells straight off the website, including his masterminds. Above it people want to talk to a human first and he points out that most of us wouldn’t wire $30,000 or $200,000 to someone we had never spoken to.

When should I talk about price?
Not until step six, which lands in the second call. If a prospect pushes earlier, Simon tells them that making an offer now would do them a disservice because he doesn’t yet know enough to make a good one. He asks for permission to ask one more question instead.

How do you train a sales team without running training sessions?
You do the reps in front of each other. Simon’s teams review the pipeline on Monday and run recorded role plays on Tuesday in trios of seller, buyer and observer, turning the difficulty up as the team improves. The coaching happens in the moment, when someone sounds needy or defensive and gets stopped mid sentence.