There’s a stubborn, toxic myth lingering—often unspoken but always deeply behavior-shaping—in too many sales teams today: the idea that the best sellers don’t need to prepare. This is false.
The myth claims that confidence, experience, and product knowledge should be enough if you’re a professional. Reality is far less forgiving. After enough post- mortems, a pattern becomes clear: most sales calls don’t fail because the product is wrong or the salesperson lacks talent. They fail because someone, at some point along the line, believed that bravado could substitute for discipline. It can’t.
This “wing-it” mentality is often framed as toughness or instinct—especially among more seasoned sales professionals. Toughness and instinct have their place, of course. But that’s not what is happening here. What is really happening is something far more irresponsible: unmanaged risk.
From a sales leadership perspective, a “wing-it” sales culture represents one of the most costly behavioral liabilities a team can carry. When preparation is, by default, optional or non-existent, bad things happen. Outcomes become inconsistent, coaching becomes fuzzy, and pipelines fill with deals that feel good, but go nowhere. That’s why pre-call planning matters, and why the Sandler Pre- Call Planner is such a practical, enduring tool. This tool replaces ego with intention, and guesswork with structure. And here’s the best news: the teams who use it can still be tough and still follow their instincts. They’ll just be much better directed, better disciplined, and more effective as they do so.
First things first. Effective pre-call planning begins with our mindset. Before we invest any time thinking about things like slides, pricing, or objections, we must decide who we’re planning to be as a person in this meeting. Are we showing up needy, hoping this deal rescues the quarter? Or are we showing up curious, composed, and focused on uncovering whether a real problem exists that we can help solve? Buyers can sense that difference almost immediately. Effective planning forces that internal posture to be clarified long before the meeting starts—and that alone can change the trajectory of a conversation.
From there, structure matters. Every professional sales meeting deserves an Up- Front Contract: a clear agenda, mutual agreement on how time will be used, and a shared understanding of how success will be measured by the end of the call. Without this contract, meetings and commitments drift. With it, they stay focused, bound, and outcome-driven.
The Sandler Pre-Call Planner prompts sellers to define not just what they want to talk about, but what decision or commitment they’re seeking by the end of the discussion. Just as important, it encourages realism. A “home run” outcome is rarely a closed deal. More often, it’s access to another stakeholder, agreement on next steps, or permission to explore deeper. And if the answer is “no,” that’s still a valuable outcome—because it creates clarity. And if the “no” happens early enough in the process, we save ourselves boatloads of time and energy! So we never want to be afraid of, or hesitant to hear, a “no” response.
Clarity really can be the rule, not the exception. It’s a hallmark of strong sales- process execution. Pre-call planning requires sellers to routinely identify (for instance) a desired base hit -- in the event the home run doesn’t happen. That kind of discipline keeps reps from clinging to stalled opportunities or mistaking pleasant conversations for progress. For sales leaders, this kind of clarity improves forecast accuracy. And from a leadership perspective, clean “nos” are far preferable to soft “maybes,” because they free time, attention, and coaching energy for deals that actually deserve it.
Another critical planning element is question strategy. The difference between average and exceptional sales conversations is almost always the quality of the questions asked. Strong questions don’t simply gather information; they create contrast. They signal that the seller thinks differently from competitors and understands the buyer’s world well enough to challenge assumptions. The Pre- Call Planner creates space to develop those questions and think them through in advance, so sellers aren’t improvising under pressure or defaulting to surface- level discovery. That level of preparation shows up as confidence without arrogance—a combination buyers trust.
This tool’s great strength is its simplicity. This one-page download isn’t a time- consuming exercise or a complex, multi-tiered bureaucratic form. Done properly, it takes five minutes to complete. But those five minutes dramatically increase the likelihood that a call produces a real, measurable, mutually understood outcome.
Like pilots, surgeons, and elite coaches, sales professionals perform better when preparation becomes habitual – as opposed to optional.
The leadership benefits of normalizing pre-call planning by means of this simple tool are hard to overstate. When everyone plans conversations the same way, coaching improves. Pipeline reviews become grounded in evidence rather than optimism. Wins and losses can be diagnosed with precision instead of guesswork. Preparation becomes a shared cultural standard. That level of habitual discipline becomes even more critical in complex, multi-stakeholder enterprise sales environments, where no single call stands alone. In those deals, the Pre-Call Planner functions as a coordination and alignment tool—capturing key contacts, relationships, communication styles, anticipated questions, and shared goals on a single page.
If we want better conversations, clearer decisions, and stronger revenue results, the answer isn’t more hustle or more ego. It’s better preparation. And if our goal is to move teams beyond the myth that “real sellers don’t need a plan,” it’s our job as leaders to provide a tool worth using. The Sandler Pre-Call Planner does exactly that. Contact me to receive your free tool.
