Gap Selling: The Framework, 20 Discovery Questions and a Worked B2B Example

Gap selling is a discovery method. It sells the distance between where a buyer is today and where they want to be, in the buyer's own numbers. Keenan, the founder of A Sales Growth Company, set it out in his book. Diagnose the problem, its root cause and its cost first, and let the product come last.

B2B buyers spend only 17% of their buying time with suppliers, so the method puts that time on the problem rather than the pitch. Below: the framework, 20 discovery questions mapped to current state, future state and gap, and one Spona deal sized in hours a month. It also gives a rule for deals under $500, which most guides leave out.

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What is gap selling? Current state, future state and the gap

A Sales Growth Company (ASG) owns the method. Its definition: a sales technique "that shifts the focus of the sale from your product to the buyer's problem". The gap is "the space between the buyer's current and future states". ASG's diagram labels that space "Here is where the value lives".

Three things follow. You cannot sell a gap you have not measured, so discovery comes before any demo. The buyer supplies the numbers, so the business case is theirs. And the size of the gap sets the price the buyer will accept.

In a blog post quoted by LinkedIn, Keenan put it plainly: "The bigger the gap the greater the return."

The gap matters because buyers give you so little time. Gartner counts six to 10 decision makers for a typical complex solution, and 77% of buyers called their latest purchase very complex or difficult. When they compare suppliers, any one rep may get only 5% or 6% of their time. A rep who spends that slice on a feature tour has told the buyer nothing about their own problem.

Gap selling is not a qualification framework. It does not score a lead; it diagnoses one. Scoring comes after, with whichever framework you use, and our guide to lead qualification covers those.

How does the gap selling methodology work?

The method has three parts, worked in order: the current state, the future state and the gap between them. Gong's guide notes that Keenan "says that you should spend a quarter of the sales cycle on learning your prospects' current and future state". On a six-week cycle, that is a week and a half of discovery before any proposal.

The current state in five parts

Gong's guide lists Keenan's five elements of the current state, quoted here with a sales-team reading of each:

• Environment: "Where your prospect is based and what their environment is like". Headcount, tools, and who builds the target list and how.
• Problem: "The problems or challenges they're experiencing". A missed pipeline target, a reply rate that fell.
• Impact: "The impact that these problems are having on them and their organization". Hours, missed meetings, missed revenue. This is where the numbers live.
• Root cause: "The fundamental issues that are causing these problems to occur". A low reply rate is a problem. A list where few records reach the right person is a root cause.
• Emotion: "How their current state is affecting them emotionally". Frustration at month end is a buying signal, and reps rarely log it.

Most reps stop at the problem. The root cause is what makes your product the answer, and the impact is what makes it worth paying for.

The future state: same unit, a target, a date

The future state is the buyer's "ideal outcome", in Gong's words. Write it in the same unit as the current state. If the current state is 18 hours a month on list research, the future state is a number of hours, not "more efficient prospecting". Add two things the buyer rarely volunteers: what they would do with the released capacity, and by when the change has to happen.

The gap: one unit, with the value logged separately

The gap is the distance between the two states. Keep it in one primary unit: hours a month, meetings a month, or usable records per 100. Log the hourly value or the revenue per meeting on a separate line.

The moment you multiply the two, the buyer's estimate starts to look like a saving. It is not one yet.

The problem identification chart, built before the first call

ASG's Problem Identification Chart, or PIC, is the method's main piece of paperwork. Gong's guide says to create it "before reaching out to a prospect". The chart lists the problems your product fixes, their root causes and their impacts. Every question on the call then has somewhere to land.

ASG's own example problem is "Missing revenue targets", with root causes such as "Inaccurate CRM data, low outbound activity, or lack of training". Build one chart per ideal customer profile, then ask questions that test which root cause is live for this buyer.

Gap selling vs BANT and MEDDIC: diagnose first, then qualify

BANT asks whether the buyer has budget, authority, need and a timeline. MEDDIC lists the evidence a deal needs before you forecast it. Neither tells you how to find the numbers that fill the "need" or "metrics" box. Gap selling does, which is why it sits underneath both rather than against them.

ASG makes the same point about MEDDPICC, which it calls "only a deal management structure intended to connect to a sales methodology".

The order is diagnose, then qualify. Run the current state, future state and gap questions first. The gap gives you the need and the metric. Budget, authority and process questions then land on a buyer who has already said what the problem costs.

Our BANT framework and MEDDIC guides give each framework's questions. The lead qualification checklist shows where a sized gap fits in that call.

Gap selling example: one B2B deal, sized in hours

Salesforce's survey of 4,050 sales professionals found that reps spend 40% of their time selling. The rest goes on other work, admin and research included, which makes hours a month a usable unit for a gap. Here is one deal from Spona data, with the numbers as the buyer stated them. It is one deal, not a benchmark, and the customer is anonymized.

The buyer was a founder at a UK company with 11 to 50 staff. Current state: about 18 hours a month to research 600 target contacts, the founder's own estimate. Future state: 4 hours a month for the same volume.

The gap was 14 hours a month. The founder put a loaded value of $50 an hour on that time, so the gap came to $700 a month of capacity. That $700 is the buyer's projection. Nobody has measured it, and it is neither revenue nor time already saved.

What it did was make the next step easy to price.

After a free sample for that segment, the founder agreed a pilot:

A $310 pilot against a $700-a-month projection is not an ROI claim, because no one has logged a saved hour yet. It was a gap large enough that a one-off purchase looked small beside it. The buyer's own numbers did the sizing, and a free sample came first.

Which gap selling questions should you ask? 20 for discovery

Not all 20. Gong analysed 519,000 discovery calls and found a sweet spot. Asking 11 to 14 questions in a call correlated with the greatest success. More than that "will likely start to feel like an interrogation".

The best calls uncovered three or four business problems. Top sellers spread their questions through the call instead of front-loading them.

Gong sorts gap selling questions into four types: probing, process, provoking and validating. The bank below is organised by what each question measures instead, so every answer lands in a field of your chart. Five questions, in bold, are the ones Spona's reps ask verbatim on discovery calls. Six are quoted from Gong's guide and linked, and we wrote the rest for this post.

Pick the questions that match your chart. On a first call with a founder, the five bold questions plus question 19 can be enough. That is six questions, one sample, and the buyer's own number on the table. Save the process and decision questions for the second call, when there is a gap worth qualifying.

How do you size the gap without inflating it?

Three Spona reps have used the five bold questions to size the gap for about seven weeks. The questions matter less than the logging rules that go with them. Four rules keep the gap honest, and each one maps to a bold question above.

One primary unit. Hours a month or meetings a month, not both, and never a dollar figure as the headline. The founder in the example gave hours. The dollar value sits on its own line and carries its own label.

Label every estimate. Few buyers have counted how many of their last 100 records reached the right person. Accept the estimate, write "buyer estimate" next to it, then validate it on a sample before anyone repeats the number in a proposal.

The target is a premise, not a promise. Question 11 asks what the team would do if list research fell to four hours a month. Four hours is the question's assumption. You have not promised it, and the log should say so.

Keep opportunity estimates separate. "14 hours a month" is capacity, and a line such as "three more meetings a month" is a guess at what that capacity buys. "$700 a month" is capacity times an hourly value. Each gets its own line, and none becomes a saving until the buyer measures it afterwards.

Before you quote, read the log back to the buyer with question 19. If the buyer corrects the number down, you have the real gap. If they correct it up, you have a champion.

Does gap selling work on small deals?

Gong's guide says gap selling "isn't a good fit for transactional sales and retail environments". That holds for a retail counter. It does not hold for a first B2B purchase under $500, where the buyer can decide alone and a sample can test the claim. Spona's rule for those deals: ask the five bold questions, then let a free sample validate the estimate.

Spona's reps use all five questions on first purchases under $500. Here is why each one works there:

• Question 1 is one concrete workflow question.
• A labelled estimate is enough for the current state. The sample validates it; a long qualification call does not.
• Question 10 sizes a first batch (contacts a month, segment, roles) without a long qualification call.
• Four hours stays a premise, so the small buyer is never sold a result.
• One primary unit, with any opportunity estimate kept on its own line.

A buyer who can approve $310 alone does not need a deal review. They need a number they trust and a cheap way to test it. Below about $500, the gap sizes the first batch. Above it, the gap sizes the business case.

When does gap selling backfire?

Watch for four failure modes. Call data puts a number on the first three.

The interrogation. Past 14 questions, Gong says the call will likely start to feel like an interrogation. The effect "greatly harms your sale when selling to the C-Suite". A chart with twelve root causes invites this, so pick three to test on the call.

The fear pitch. The gap is a measurement, not a threat, and Matt Dixon's study of about 2.5 million sales conversations shows why. Between 40 and 60% of deals go to the buyer doing nothing, and piling on the cost of inaction does not fix that. In the same data, pushing harder against the status quo has an 84% probability of making the buyer more indecisive.

The monologue. Across 326,000 sales calls of ten minutes or more, reps talked 60% of the time on average. Low performers talked 54% of the time in deals they won and 64% in deals they lost. A rep who explains the gap back to the buyer at length has swapped a diagnosis for a pitch.

Your number in the buyer's mouth. The gap only works when the buyer supplies it. A rep who reads "$700 a month" off an ROI sheet has built a case the buyer will not defend internally. "It's not your job to overcome objections, it's your buyer's", says the book's description, and the same goes for the gap.

Where Spona fits in gap selling, and where it does not

Spona fits one current state: list research, the first step of sales prospecting. Question 1 comes back as hours a month on target lists. Question 3 comes back as a low count of usable records. That root cause is the one Spona addresses.

You describe your ideal customer in a chat. The AI searches 40+ sources, verifies each contact and returns a scored list in about 4 minutes. Question 11 uses four hours a month as an assumption, not a result Spona promises.

The pricing fits the small-deal rule: credits cost $0.008 to $0.01 each, depending on the plan. Each new search session costs a one-time 1,000 credits. A lead costs from $0.008 on Bulk Search to $2.00 on Deep Search, and the price shows at checkout before you commit. That is how the pilot above came to $0.50 a contact.

Every search starts with a free sample of leads, so the buyer can validate the estimate before paying for the full list. That is the "validate on a sample" step in the logging rules.

Where it does not fit. Spona does not run the discovery call, build your problem identification chart or size a gap for you. If the root cause is a weak close rate, a pricing problem or slow onboarding, Spona has nothing to do with that gap. Claiming otherwise would be the inflation the method warns against.

Teams that want call recording to measure question counts and talk ratios need a conversation intelligence tool such as Gong. Teams that want sequences and a dialer in one seat-based platform will find Apollo or ZoomInfo closer to that brief. ASG teaches the method itself, and its course prices sit in the FAQ.

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Gap selling FAQ

What is the Gap Selling book about?

Gap Selling: Getting the Customer to Yes is a 262-page book on what its subtitle calls "Problem-Centric Selling". Keenan argues that every sale is the gap between a buyer's current and future state, and the rep's job is to expose and shape it. Goodreads readers rate it 4.26 from just over 2,000 ratings.

Who created gap selling?

Keenan created it, and the book credits him by that single name. He is the founder of A Sales Growth Company, the training firm that sells the method, and the book came out in 2018. ASG marks the Problem Identification Chart as a trademark.

How does SPIN selling differ from gap selling?

SPIN selling comes from Neil Rackham's research on more than 35,000 sales calls, ordered as Situation, Problem, Implication and Need-payoff. Gap selling adds root cause as its own field. It also, in ASG's words, "requires the buyer to produce specific numbers that make the cost of inaction calculable in writing". SPIN rests on a 12-year study by Rackham's team; gap selling's evidence comes from its owner.

How much does gap selling training cost?

ASG's online course costs $59 a month for one person, with a minimum 12-month commitment. Teams of two or more pay from $53 per user per month, billed annually. The subscription also includes more than 26 hours of recorded masterclasses.

Is a sales gap the same as gap selling?

No. A sales gap, or sales gap analysis, usually means the distance between a revenue target and actual results in your own plan. The gap in gap selling belongs to the buyer: the distance between their current and desired state. The first is a planning number for your team, and the second is a discovery number for their business.

Is there independent evidence that gap selling works?

Not that we found. ASG cites a 61% win rate when reps fill 75% or more of the gap selling fields. The data comes from Noted Analytics, which ASG acquired, so it is the vendor's own. Gong's call data backs the discovery habits, not the method, so measure your own win rate before and after you adopt it.