Using Visual Models To Win Complex Sales

Most deals don’t die because your price is too high or your competitor is better. They die because the buyer can’t confidently decide what “good” looks like and how to get there. That’s why this conversation with Simon Bowen hit so hard for us. Simon has spent years walking into messy rooms, from government groups to defense stakeholders to massive infrastructure teams, and getting them aligned fast by drawing the right visual models.

We dig into Simon’s “models method” and the idea that every business runs on two systems: a system for thinking and a system for influence. When you can build a shared framework on a whiteboard, you’re no longer pushing opinions. You’re creating a shared mental model that people can test, improve, and commit to. That same approach translates directly into complex B2B sales, consultative selling, and sales enablement because the customer helps build the model, and it becomes much harder to argue with a solution they contributed to.

We also challenge the oversimplified “learning styles” debate and talk about how the brain makes meaning through imagery. Visual communication isn’t a gimmick. It’s a direct route to comprehension and recall, especially when the visual has structure. You’ll hear us break down the moment buyers move from “I see it” to “I get it” and why that shift creates decision confidence.

The biggest takeaway is simple: stop selling and start facilitating. If you want more closed deals, better customer loyalty, and fewer stalled opportunities, focus on helping buyers make a fully informed decision, even when it means recommending a different fit. Subscribe for more practical sales and business growth conversations, share this with a friend who hates “pushy” selling, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway.

Transcript

The 80/20 Foundation Myth

SPEAKER_01 0:00

And the Pareto principle, if you draw the curve of the Pareto principle, it looks like that. And so, you know, everyone says only do the 20% that gives you 80% of the result. Yeah, Maurice, the 80% is foundation, right? You can't go to the Olympic Games and say, I just want to win the gold medal. You need the four feet for preparation.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Welcome again to the Commission Code Podcast. We appreciate you taking the time to listen and join us here today. We're here to help you increase your business revenue and have time to enjoy it. I'm your host, Maurice Sims, and I've been consulting and training business people for, well, let's just say over 40 years. We're focused on increasing revenue and having time to enjoy it. After years as a professional salesperson, I spent 32 years in the corporate world. I retired as Vice President and Chief Learning Officer of the Sales Department of a large insurance company where we designed and built and delivered training for over 12,000 professional salespeople. Now I get to consult one-on-one helping people grow their business and organize themselves to make the most of the time they have. We also build online courses to support business owners in their work as they strive to build the business that they've always wanted. Our objective is really very simple. It's this we're here to help you get what you want from your business and your life. So right now, let's get on with this episode.

Meet Simon Bowen And His Work

SPEAKER_00 1:34

Simon Bowen is our guest today on the Commission Code. Simon is from Perth, Australia. And luckily, he actually is in Arizona today, so he's not uh 12 hours away from us. But uh we're pleased to have Simon with us. Simons, welcome to the Simon, welcome to the U.S. and uh welcome to the Commission Code. Tell us a little bit about you.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Well, thank you for having me. And uh, you know, we're in the US a lot, so um it feels so much more familiar to us. Um I, you know, I started life in, well, actually started my professional life in electronics of all things, but I was an executive manager for a company in Australia, one of Australia's larger manufacturing companies, and I was responsible for the sales division um as well as two IC for the West Australian and South Australian business units. And so, you know, complex high-ticket selling, basically. And um, you know, when I when I decided to leap out of that and start a management consultancy, you know, working with companies on strategic planning, sales enablement, organizational redesign, things like that, I started to get a bit of a reputation. You know, the government would say, we're gonna put 200 people in a room together who don't agree on something. Uh, you've got two hours, can you get them to agree? And I, you know, I I I've I've created a method that allowed me to do that, or or they'd get the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force together along with the Department of Defence Public Servants and say, you know, we're gonna deploy into a theater of war. Can you get them all to play nicely together? And I'd get into a room with these people with no military experience of my own to get them to talk about how they're gonna do that, how they're gonna set up base control and uh things like that. Um, or uh, you know, one of Australia's largest mining companies has seven mines that it's building at $2 billion each, and they want to get the project management community to align. Can you get them to do that? Or we're gonna build a sports stadium for $1.4 billion. We can you get all the stakeholders to agree on what they want in a sports stadium so we can get a brief for the architects to tender against. And, you know, I I had come up with a method for doing this work that I didn't really realize the full power of until it then became the main

Visual Models For Group Agreement

SPEAKER_01 3:56

business. And it's the use of powerful visual models as a system for thinking and influence. The two most important systems in any business are the system for thinking and the system for influence. You know, is your thinking better and deeper than others in the market? And what's your system for influence to get people to make choices in your favor? Um staff to work hard for you, customers to buy from you, suppliers to serve you, regulators to let you operate, banks to fund you, and so on. And visual models uh drawn in front of people in a certain way uh really, you know, really uh solve that problem. For example, Morris, I know I'm talking a bit, but if you want to get 200 people in a room to agree to something, um it's it's actually not that hard. Uh if you've got two hours, I'll do that in a better colour. If you've got two hours available, two hours time frame and agreement is the outcome. The 90 minute, the the three-quarter mark, which is magical, is 90 minutes. Most people drop out of the marathon about the three-quarter mark. You know, in endurance events, most people quit at about the three-quarter mark. And the Pareto principle, if you draw the curve of the Pareto principle, it looks like that. And so, you know, everyone says only do the 20% that gives you 80% of the result. Yeah, Morris, the the 80% is foundation, right? You can't go to the Olympic Games and say, I just want to win the gold medal. You need the four years of preparation, right? So if you put a bunch of people in a room who disagree on something and you just frustrate them for three quarters of the time, and frustrating a group of people is not hard. You just listen to everybody equally, right? And uh you frustrate them for three quarters of the time, you capture everyone's ideas, and then you then you go to a whiteboard and say, I think I can draw this, and you start drawing a visual model on the whiteboard and you extract a framework from the room. They kind of go, Well, that's the answer. That makes sense. And so, you know, you use that first three-quarters to actually build enough um energy in the room to want to solve this thing, but then you actually have to be able to give people frameworks. It's interesting, you know. Um, I know this will date stamp this, but Artemis just splashed down, right? It reminded me of uh being a kid watching the Apollo. You would remember the same thing, watching the Apollo capsule splash into the ocean. It felt like back to the future almost. NASA did some really interesting research, and uh, you know, what that showed them was that in high-performing teams operating in harsh environments, the single biggest contributor to success or performance was not teamwork or leadership or team culture. It was that they all had a shared mental model of how they would get this done. An actual framework that everyone had in their head. And what I have done is taken it to the to the next obvious conclusion, which is a shared visual model. So let's get an agreement around a framework and then draw the thing. And so, you know, this method of getting people to reach agreement on strategy on complex things has become what we call the models method, where we use visual models to actually make high, you know, complex high-ticket sales. Think about it, if you're a salesperson and you have a shared model between you and the customer on what the problem is and how to solve that problem, you're much closer to a closed deal than you are if you're just talking to them verbally or in written text. Particularly if the customer helped you build that model because it's hard for them to disagree with something they contributed to. And so, literally, bit of paper, draw something out. And in the world of AI, which is important, um, AI is super useful. It also proves that you know your stuff as well. So the models method emerged out of this work, and it's this simple idea of using really well-designed visual models to um unpack and then explain complex concepts rapidly and quickly across groups of people.

SPEAKER_00 8:17

That's interesting, and it makes really good sense when you think about the fact that when you can get someone to buy into your concept, and to your idea, to whatever's going on there, that that model, that shared model of what's going to happen in the future. When they are bought into that because they contributed to it, that seems to me to always be the way that you're gonna help people come to agreement on something is when they can get to that point, whether it's agreeing to choose to buy my product or agreeing to to what we need to do to build a a 1.4 billion dollar sports arena. Yeah, it it seems like that makes good sense. And if you can draw a picture, we're not all visual people, and and we're not one way or another. We can learn anyway, any methodology, any media. But visual seems to be a good easy pathway for most everybody to understand what you're trying to get across and where you're going to go, and probably leads to better understanding and and thus more complete agreement. Um am I on the right page, Simon?

SPEAKER_01 9:30

Yeah, well, you know, people have preferences, and everyone's aware of visual, auditory, kinesthetic receiving systems and things like that.

SPEAKER_00 9:36

But but they are preferences, they are preferences, they are not locked in, they are not you can't only deal with the visual, you can't only deal with it auditory. That's the biggest. Okay, you hit one of my soapbox issues, Simon. I'm told I can tell. Oh yeah, it's oh well, we've got to do training this way and we've got to do it that way because most of our learners are no, no, research very clearly shows, very clearly shows for decades. We can learn in any of the current media that we teach in, that we that we learn from. Yeah, it's a question of which do you prefer? Yeah, and you can't learn from somebody speaking in a lecture, but I sure

How The Brain Makes Meaning

SPEAKER_00 10:20

as hell don't prefer to learn that way.

SPEAKER_01 10:22

Yeah. And you know, I spent time in education. I had a I had a uh a misguided view that I wanted to be a school teacher at one point, and I went back as a mature student to get my bachelor of education, and then they sent me to a high school in Perth that's designed to test the vocational fortitude, and I discovered that I was not able to cope with teenagers for the next 40 years, so I just, you know, veered, uh, left and went into the commerce world. But, you know, in education, we know that there's at least 12 different learning systems. You know, visual auditory kinesthetic are not the complete set, and they are preferences, as you say. But let's talk about what goes on in the brain, right?

SPEAKER_00 10:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:00

The human brain is a meaning-making machine and it's largely um imagery-based. So imagination, image, right? And 83% of um the the way the brain processes stuff is attached directly to what it received from the optic nerve. You know, 55% of the brain's reflex system is attached to the optic nerve. You know, an animal will hear a sound and it goes on alert, but then it runs or fights when it sees the danger, right? And so the brain is an image making machine. So if I said to you, hey Morris, tell me about your primary school, you wouldn't get immediately get a list of words, a word stream running through your head. What you get is a picture of your primary school in your mind, and then you would translate that and start describing it to me. So when we work in a visual medium, what we're actually doing is using the language of the brain. So we're not using a visual medium because we think most people are visual receivers. We're just I if I want a customer to get an image in their mind, like for anyone in sales, think about it like this. Your your your number one job is to create an image in the mind of the buyer of them enjoying the thing you sell. That's your number one job, right? Now, if I want to get an image in the mind of my customer, do I do I leave it up to them to create the image or do I create the image and put it in there? And I'd rather create the image and put it in there. And in the complex sale, so I want to give them a visual, um, I want to give them a visual frame of reference, but I also want to give them a structural frame of reference. That's why we use models rather than just photos or you know, um uh, you know, brand design and stuff like that, because a model has structure. And so when I give them an image, they say, Oh, I see, and that's interesting. And when I give them structure in the shape of a model, they go, Oh, I get it. Now I see it and I get it. That's desirable.

Facilitation Over High-Pressure Selling

SPEAKER_01 13:12

I want it. And how do I buy it? And so, and then the other side of that is if you have them help you build the model, you can tell, sell, or facilitate, right? Now, if you just tell a customer something, they're not going to buy from you. If you sell it to them and you've got great sales technique, you can probably get the sale made. But have they become a customer who's who's uh you know, uh a collaborator with you in the purchase, or are they a customer that was sold to? The third option is to facilitate. And I would encourage everyone, um, you know, one of my um pet peeves is the idea of the high pressure um, you know, NLP-based, you know, foot-in-the-door salesperson's style of selling, um which sees customers become captives as opposed to develop the skills of facilitation and facilitate the customer into a purchase that they make a decision about. I mean, you you would have been you would have been you'd be familiar with the um challenge of sale material from about 2010 or 12. And that's now become uh what they call frame making, CEB Global, right? And some so I think some of the best research in selling. And, you know, the frame making idea um comes off the back of some really powerful research that 40 to 60 percent of complex sales result in no purchase at all. The customer just doesn't make a decision because they can't get decision confidence that they could make this thing work, right? But if you facilitate them into the conversation, what are you actually doing? You're not selling your thing, you're building their confidence that they can make this work if they buy it from you. And so, you know, stop selling and start facilitating would be my mantra.

SPEAKER_00 15:08

And then it's so true because last time I checked, I mean, even back in the the I don't know when, the late 60s, Zig Ziggler taught us that you know, these people out there that think a good salesman can or a salesperson can sell anything to anybody in any circumstance, and that's just ridiculous. Yeah, only a con man could do that. Said Zig Ziggler. And he's absolutely right. It's I've even stopped calling it the sales process, Simon. When I teach sales to folks that are not in professional sales, we we don't even call it the sales process anymore, it's the buying process. Because last time I checked, I can't make you buy my product, but I can facilitate putting you in a an environment where you're gonna want to purchase whatever it is that I'm selling. Yeah. And if you choose to do that, then we're all happy and everybody's good, and we have a win-win situation. If you choose not to for whatever reason, that's okay too. Thank you very much. Next, I have to move on because I'm a professional at this. I'm not doing this for one sale, I'm doing this for the long term.

SPEAKER_01 16:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:24

And a high integrity all of that to say, yes, Simon, I agree.

SPEAKER_01 16:28

Yeah, uh, well, a high integ a high-integrity salesperson would not operate on the basis that they can sell anything to anyone. Right. Because they actually shouldn't. Because not everybody needs your thing, right? Yeah. And um, I, you know, Zig Zidder, I mean, the people, the generations that didn't have him as a feature, like you and I did, I really missed out because you know he knew his stuff. But you know, what is interesting is again, from some of CEB Global's work, 53% of customer loyalty occurs during the buying process. So how they how how they got how they bought it from you, 53% of their loyalty occurs before they've even made the purchase. So if you work on the basis of you could sell anything to anybody, you could sell, you know, ice to Eskimos sort of thing, and and that's your that's your sales pattern, are you going to generate that 53% or are you gonna have high levels of buyer remorse because they felt like they were um cajoled or manipulated into a purchase that was not the right purchase for them, right? The job of the salesperson is to put the customer into a position to make a fully informed decision that will solve their problem for them. And that might not be you. You might reach a point where you have to say, I don't think that what we do is a fit for what you're trying to solve. However, I can point you to something that I think is a fit. That customer will come back and buy off you when it's the right time for what you do because of that. And and it's just you know, selling should be the most noble thing an organization does. Yeah, without question. It should be the most noble thing an organization does, and it's often not,

A Doctor’s Honest Decision Framework

SPEAKER_01 18:21

right? Um you know, I had a pretty ca catastrophic back injury in November of 2019, and uh, long story, it happened in Mexico. I had to get back to Australia, got to Sydney, and um the surgeon after the MRI, the surgeon said, You need surgery on your back. Okay, oh, you know, back surgery, everyone says don't ever let them do surgery on your back. You know, what if I end up in a wheelchair? Yeah. And he said, You could actually. I can't tell you you won't, as a result of this surgery. However, if we don't do this, you could have total and permanent incontinence and a whole bunch of other stuff, and uh, we're gonna protect you from that. And I thought, that's the greatest pitch I've ever heard. Like, I think this is a great decision, right? So he's not saying, hey, you're gonna be fine. You could be in a wheelchair, but you could travel internationally in a wheelchair. Um, but with with what you're facing, this would be the left lesser of two evils. And and I can't tell you that that won't happen, but I can tell you this other thing won't happen because that's my focus on the surgery. You need surgery. And I went, let's go, you know, and three hours later I was on the operating table. Well, I've had a 98% recovery because he put me in a position to make a decision that I had to make at the end of the day, right? Because I'm the one that's going to get cut open and operated on. Now, if he'd said we're taking into this into the theater, let's go. Um, would I have engaged in the rehab process afterwards in the same do you know what I mean? It's just but he's a doctor and he's still selling. Everyone's selling. Yeah. But that's the job of putting the customer into a position to make the most informed decision they can that they can have the greatest confidence in. Facilitate, don't sell. It it if I wish I just wish everybody in sales could learn that one lesson, which means learn what facilitation is, learn what the art of facilitation actually is. It's an art.

SPEAKER_00 20:18

It is an art, it's an art of asking the right questions at the right time. And it it just works so well in helping people learn and understand new things. Whether that's the benefit of uh utilizing my services or my product, or whether it's understanding a new concept that they need for their business, it's still facilitation, it is still the way you get that done better than any other methodology that that I've been able to work with or be a part

Closing And Where To Learn More

SPEAKER_00 20:50

of. Yeah. Simon, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for joining me today on the Commission Code. That's a pleasure. It has been a pleasure, and I I truly have learned some stuff, and I I appreciate you being with us all the way from Australia via Arizona.

SPEAKER_01 21:08

Well, it's winter in Perth, so it's getting cooler. You know, we don't get really cold weather, but it's cooler, and Arizona's beautiful, so you know it is a good place to be.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

Well, enjoy, play a little golf, have a good time. Well, that does it for this episode of the Commission Code Podcast. This is the place where we want to help you find the commission code to success in your business. Remember, go to MorrisTims.com for more information. And in the meantime, hey, have a great week. Get out there and meet somebody new, and we'll see you again next time right here on the Commission Code. Best wishes, I'm Morris Times.