Beyond the pitch: co-create to transform sales relationships

Most sales people approach customer conversations with a similar agenda: present the product, highlight features, overcome objections, close the deal. Sure, the salesperson asks discovery questions, listens for pain points then positions their solution as the perfect fit. But even in consultative selling, the flow remains largely one-directional: gather information, propose solutions, handle concerns.

 

This approach has limitations. Customers often feel like they’re being sold to, rather than collaborated with. They may share surface-level challenges but hold back deeper concerns. And when prospects don’t see how the solution directly addresses their specific context, objections multiply and deals stall.

 

But what if there was a fundamentally different way to engage prospects to move beyond pitching to true partnership?

 

Co-creation in sales flips the traditional dynamic. Instead of selling to customers, you’re working with them to solve problems and explore possibilities. This collaborative approach doesn’t just improve close rates. It builds the kind of deep, trust-based relationships that drive long-term business success.

 

Structured co-creation: a different approach by design

 

To make the shift from pitching to true partnership, a structured methodology can guide your collaborative efforts. In a previous breakdown on design thinking with a customer, I connected with Ashley Welch (a proponent of the “sell by design” approach) on how to blend design thinking with sales to create a focused approach, often empowered by visual tools such as Mural. She focused on three key areas for transforming sales:

 

Discover. Focus on truly understanding your customer and their customers beyond surface-level pain points. This means having deep empathy to learn what they genuinely care about.

 

Insights. Translate those discoveries into conclusions that are meaningful to your customer, not just to you. This involves making sense of the information and getting feedback from them to validate your understanding.

 

Acceleration. As early as possible, start co-creating solutions. Get your customers’ fingerprints on the solution from the outset, building their buy-in and trust as you go. This stage is about moving from understanding to joint creation and ultimately, winning the deal.

 

From problem discovery to building trust

 

Working alongside a prospect uncovers far more nuances than traditional discovery questions. Instead of surface-level answers to “What are your biggest challenges?”, collaborative mapping can reveal real-time insights such as hidden friction points, unspoken concerns and even the emotional and political dynamics at play.

 

This process doesn’t just deepen understanding; it builds trust. By investing your time and expertise to explore your customer’s world, you’re showing true partnership. Prospects see themselves in the solution, creating a sense of ownership that transforms them from a buyer to a collaborator, making the outcome as important to them as it is to you.

 

Practical co-creation techniques

 

Customers are often confronted with complex business challenges that we try to talk through or document as bullet points in a PowerPoint deck. Why not just get the pieces out on the table to solve the challenges? That’s where visual co-creation comes in.

 

Getting to co-creation with clients doesn’t have to be hard. Here are a few simple things you could do to get started:

 

Success metric development. Don’t just ask how they’ll measure success – build the measurement framework together, which you can do during the discovery call. In this initial conversation, dive into what metrics matter most, how will they track progress and what would constitute a win six months from now. In doing so, you’re able to deeply understand the customer’s current state; where they’ve been and where they’re trying to go.

 

Invite participation. Using a Mural, you can gather feedback on a customer pitch while also inviting your audience into the board to provide suggestions. In doing so, this work will go beyond a quick poll among your stakeholders. Instead, you can actually build and get work done together.

 

Collaborative mapping. Instead of asking prospects to describe their process, map out their journey or their customer’s journey together on a visual collaboration tool. Ask them to walk you through each step while you capture it visually. Better yet, map out their customer’s journey together for a deeper understanding of how they create value. This often reveals gaps, redundancies and pain points that wouldn’t emerge through questioning alone.

 

Storyboarding. Use storyboarding to bring ideas to life by showing them in action through simple, sequential images. Focus on conveying the experience rather than creating polished artwork – rough sketches are enough to communicate meaning. Leverage storyboards as a shared visual language to align teams and make ideas clearer and more engaging than words alone.

 

Solution sketching. Rather than presenting your standard demo, involve prospects in sketching what their ideal solution would look like. Start with their requirements and collaboratively design an approach, incorporating your capabilities where they fit.

 

Scenario planning. Work together to explore different what-if scenarios. What happens if their volume doubles? What if regulations change? What if a key stakeholder leaves? Building these scenarios together helps identify requirements and success criteria that traditional needs-analysis misses. To liven things up, capture the future scenario together in a cover story mockup – a fun exercise to represent your future vision as the cover of a magazine.

 

Making the shift

 

Moving from pitching to co-creation requires a mindset shift. You need to see yourself less as a solution provider and more as a thinking partner. This means coming to conversations with frameworks and tools for collaboration, not just slides and demos.

 

It also requires comfort with uncertainty. Co-creation conversations are less predictable than traditional sales calls. You might discover unknown roadblocks or misalignments. But far from being a drawback, this transparency builds trust. It ensures you’re spending time on the right opportunities – ones where your solution is a genuine fit – and it often surfaces adjacent needs that strengthen the partnership over time.

 

The long-term payoff

 

Co-creation doesn’t just improve individual deal outcomes, it transforms customer relationships. Prospects who engage in collaborative processes see you differently. You become a trusted advisor, not just a vendor. When they have future needs or encounter colleagues with similar challenges, you’re the person they think of first.

 

In a world where customers have access to more information than ever, the sales advantage goes to those who can offer something Google can’t: genuine collaboration, creative thinking and the kind of partnership that helps customers solve problems they didn’t even know they had.

 

Co-creation isn’t just a sales technique. It’s a relationship-building philosophy that recognises something fundamental: the best solutions emerge when customer insight meets vendor expertise in collaborative partnership.

 

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If you’re ready to move from the why to the how, see how visual collaboration and methodologies can differentiate your sales process and transform your sales conversations at Mural.co. To learn more about human-cantered design from experts such as Ashley Welch and others, visit the LUMA Institute.

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by Jim Kalbach, Chief Evangelist, Mural