Graphic Sales: How to Build a Prospecting Playbook With Peter Cleary and Tom Stearns
About this episode
This episode discusses how to effectively build a prospecting playbook using insights from Peter Cleary and Tom Sterns' book, emphasizing the importance of critical thinking in sales.
What this episode is about Most salespeople are pointed at targets without being taught to think about them. That gap — between knowing who to call and understanding why it matters — is what Peter Cleary and Tom Stearns set out to close with their book Graphic Sales: How to Build a Prospecting Playbook. The book is unusual. It teaches through illustrated comic strips drawn from real sales disasters, using the Aesop's Fables principle: story first, lesson second. The goal isn't to lecture. It's to help salespeople recognise themselves, laugh at the madness, and do the work better. What Marcus, Peter, and Tom cover Ideal Customer Profile as a foundation — not a filter. The ICP chapter opens the book because everything else depends on it. ICP isn't just demographic targeting. It's understanding the four to six data attributes that signal your solution is genuinely right for a specific buyer — and then thinking critically about what those signals mean in context. Why AI won't solve poor prospecting judgement. Tom shares a cautionary story: he built an AI-assisted prospecting tool for a team, fed it the right signals, and watched conversion rates fall. The problem wasn't the data. It…
Topics covered
- sales
- prospecting
- customer profiling
- AI in sales
- sales training
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