Welcome to issue 62! Did someone forward this to you? If so, Subscribe here!

Stacy here. Thanks for letting me crash Brian’s newsletter for a minute.

This is a preview of what I write about: buyer psychology, positioning, messaging, and copywriting, and how those pieces shape marketing that actually resonates.

If that sounds like your kind of rabbit hole, you can join my other smart subscribers here.

Now let’s get into it.

Your sales calls are hiding your best marketing insights.

Most people review sales calls for one reason: to figure out why the deal didn’t close.

Which, to be fair, is a pretty important question if you enjoy things like revenue.

When the answer is no, the debrief usually sounds the same. 

These are all worth asking, but there's a question almost no one thinks to ask. And it's the one that affects everything that follows.

What did this conversation actually reveal about how our buyers think?

Every sales call is essentially a live focus group. You're sitting across from the exact person you're trying to attract more of, and they're telling you exactly what's going on in their head.

If you’re reviewing your sales calls, you’re already ahead of most people. (And if you’re not, it will be our little secret.) But they’re also the most underused marketing research tool you have.

A lot of brands collect customer insights to determine Voice of Customer (VoC), the exact words buyers use to describe their problems, hesitations, and what made them decide. In practice, that usually means testimonials, post-purchase surveys, or the occasional feedback form.

Useful, yes. But they all share the same blind spot.

→ They happen after the decision.

By then, people have already rationalized their choice. The language gets polished, reflective, and sometimes even a little aspirational. That makes sense. Nobody wants to sound like they were confused when they bought something. (It’s like explaining a movie plot after you already know the ending.)

But that's exactly what buying actually sounds like before someone commits. Messy, hesitant, and full of half-formed thoughts.

"I'm not sure this will work for our team." "We tried something like this before and it didn't stick." "Honestly, the biggest challenge right now is…"

That's the language that tells you everything. It’s the language of someone actively trying to decide if the problem is real, urgent, and worth solving.

And it's sitting in your sales call recordings right now.

I listen to sales calls for my clients all the time and I almost always notice the same thing. The buyer usually describes the problem in a way that sounds nothing like the language on the business’ website (or any of their marketing for that matter).

Your site says: "We help organizations optimize operational efficiency."

The buyer says: "Our team is drowning in manual work and nothing is talking to each other."

Same problem. Completely different language. (And if we’re being honest, a much more accurate description of the situation.)

When that gap exists, sales calls turn into translation exercises instead of decision-making conversations. You're spending the first ten minutes just getting everyone to agree on what the problem even is.

And that's time, and trust, you don't get back.

When you start looking at call transcripts through a messaging lens, patterns emerge fast.

You notice the exact moment a buyer leans in and starts taking the conversation seriously. You hear the same concern surface across multiple calls. It’s sometimes phrased differently, but always pointing to the same underlying fear or desire.

You notice how buyers describe the problem in their own words, which often sounds nothing like the language in your marketing.

These moments reveal something much deeper than surface-level feedback. They reveal what had to feel true for someone to even consider saying yes.

Not the story people tell after they buy, but what they actually believed in the moment they decided.

The patterns are there. The tricky part is turning them into messaging that sounds like your buyers, not like your industry

Here's a place to start.

Pull up the transcripts from your last few sales calls and look for three things:

1. The exact moment something clicked and the buyer leaned in. 

That moment tells you what actually resonates with buyers, and it's usually the angle that should show up much earlier in your marketing.

2. The concern or hesitation that appeared most often. 

If the same objection keeps surfacing across calls, your marketing isn't addressing it early enough. That’s your signal. Buyers don’t invent objections on the spot. They bring concerns with them into the conversation.

3. The exact phrase they used to describe the problem. 

This one is the most valuable. Buyer language is almost always clearer, more emotional, and more specific than the language in your marketing. 

When you start using it—on your website, in your emails, in your content—people feel understood before they ever get on a call with you. Instead of guessing what to say, you start writing the way your buyers already think.

This is where messaging starts doing some of the work sales usually has to handle on the call.

Most people treat objections like surprise plot twists, something the salesperson needs to handle in real time. 

And yes, handling objections well is a skill worth developing. But even the best sales skills have a harder job when the messaging coming in is off.

When your marketing speaks the way your buyers actually think, objections start showing up earlier. Not on the call, but in your content. Your website answers the question before they book a meeting and your emails address the concern before it becomes hesitation.

Your content helps them articulate the problem better than they could themselves.

By the time someone gets on a call with you, the conversation is less about convincing and more about confirming.

Good messaging doesn't replace good selling. It means your sales skills get to do what they're actually for—reading the room, building trust, closing—instead of spending the first twenty minutes explaining what you do and why it matters.

This is where sales and marketing finally have to talk to each other.

That's the overlap most businesses miss. Sales hears how buyers think in real time. Marketing is trying to attract more of those exact buyers. When those two are connected, everything gets easier.

When they're not? Your marketing sounds good on paper and your sales calls feel like uphill battles.

And if you're a solo founder or running a small team, congratulations. You're both departments.

Which means the language bringing people into the conversation and the language you're using on the call are coming from the same place.

Everything you need is already in your recordings. Most people just don't know what to listen for.

If you want to go deeper on buyer psychology and how to turn these insights into messaging that makes selling easier, that's what my newsletter is for…Subscribe here.

👋🏻 Thanks for reading along. I’m Stacy Eleczko, a positioning and messaging strategist for B2B brands. And yes, that’s me. I take cookies and customer insights very seriously.

And thanks for having me, Brian!

P.S. Did you enjoy today’s issue? There's more where that came from.

Every week, founders and teams get sharper on messaging, positioning, and the disconnects that make marketing feel harder than it should.

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