I had a call with my cofounder Tomas tonight. I was prepping for a meeting tomorrow I've been stressed about for a week. High stakes, a relationship to restructure, a set of outcomes I wanted to walk out with. I had bullet points. I had the play.
Tomas didn't engage with any of it.
He does this thing where he deletes your framing and hands you a new one. Not rudely. More like a chess move you don't see until it's already happened. I started laying out my plan: here's what I want, here's what I'll offer, here's the opening line, here's the fallback. He listened. Then he said: don't even think about what you're trying to get out of it.
The next thirty minutes rewired the way I think about walking into a room with an agenda. I want to write it down so I can see if it still holds up tomorrow at 7pm.
Tomas's point is that most of the time, when you walk into a room with an agenda, you've already lost. The agenda puts you in the posture of a seller. You're trying to convince. You're trying to steer. The other person can feel it, whether they can name it or not. And the second they feel it, they're in the posture of a buyer, which means the entire conversation is framed around whether they'll give you what you want.
The move is to stop doing that.
Not "here's what I want to talk about." Not "here's what I've been thinking about our arrangement." None of that. You walk in and describe the world as you see it: what's changing, who wins, who gets wiped, and what you're already doing in response to it. No ask. No pitch. Just: here's the world, here's what I'm building.
If the person across from you is sharp, they'll lean in. They'll start asking questions. They'll start proposing things. They'll say "how does that work" and "where do you see me in that" and "what if we did this." And here's the move most people never notice: they've become the seller.
You ask questions. You let them pitch. And when they land on something interesting, you say the most powerful sentence Tomas ever taught me: let me think about it.
Tomas picked that sentence up from his mom's German partner, some old business guy who used it on everyone. It's not a no. It's not a yes. It keeps the other side engaged and keeps you safe. You're thoughtful, you're considering, but you're not rushing. You value the person and the offer. You're also just not in the business of being cornered at 11:30pm on someone else's clock.
Tomas's framework is basically the Zuora sales deck applied to a room. If you've never seen the Zuora deck, go find it. It's famous for being the best B2B deck ever made. The structure is: name a big change happening in the world, show the winners and losers, paint the promised land, describe your product as the thing that gets people there, and show evidence you can deliver.
What makes that deck work is that it's not actually a pitch. It's a story about the world. The product is almost incidental. You finish the deck agreeing with the worldview, and then you find yourself wondering how you're going to operate in the world it described. The seller never asked you to buy anything. You started asking them how.
Tomas's version is the same thing, except it's a posture instead of a deck. You walk into the room already holding the world. You describe it clearly, confidently, without caveating. Anyone who disagrees filters themselves out. Anyone who agrees starts figuring out how they want to be involved.
The Zuora deck is what you say. Tomas's posture is who you're being when you say it. Together they make the thing Tomas calls aura. He's too old to be saying that, which is why I rolled my eyes. He told me to shut up. It's the right word.
The implication, if this is actually true, is that most selling is backwards.
We spend a lot of time thinking about closing techniques, objection handling, reading the room. All of it assumes you're in the posture of a seller. What Tomas is saying is that the posture itself is the problem. If you're selling, you've already given up leverage. The person across from you knows it. The game from that point on is an unwinnable negotiation about concessions.
The flip is: don't sell the thing. Sell the future you see. Everything else is tactics underneath that.
Tomas tossed a bar analogy into the mix, half joking. You don't pitch every girl. You paint where you're going and see who wants to come. The ones who come, you didn't have to convince. The ones who don't come, you didn't want anyway. Your job was never to convince anyone of anything. Your job was to be clear about where you're going.
Here's what I'm still trying to figure out.
You can't actually fake this. That's the thing that makes it hard, and it's probably the thing that makes most people unable to do it. If you walk in and try to describe a future you don't actually believe in, the other person can feel it immediately. It reads as manipulation. The whole posture collapses back into the thing it was designed to replace: a pitch wearing different clothes.
So the question becomes whether this is a tactic you can learn or a worldview you have to earn. Tomas can do it because he's genuinely convinced of the future he's describing. He's not performing confidence; he's holding a position. When he says "this is how the game is changing," he means it, and you can tell.
I don't know yet if I can hold a position like that. I'm closer than I was a year ago. I think the future I see is real. But the test is tomorrow at 7pm, sitting in someone's living room, watching whether I revert to pitching the second the conversation gets uncomfortable or whether I can actually just describe the world and let him decide if he wants in.
If I do it right, I won't say much. I'll describe the change, paint the winners and losers, show the only way to play, describe what I'm already building. Then I'll ask him what he thinks. And whatever he offers me, whatever it is, I'll say the same sentence I've been turning over for the last four hours.