Insight-Based Selling: How to Create Aha Moments That Influence How Buyers Think

A young executive was leaving the office late one evening when he found the CEO standing in front of a shredder with a piece of paper in his hand.

“Listen,” the CEO said, “this is a very sensitive and important document, and my assistant has gone for the night. Can you make this thing work for me?”

“Certainly,” said the young executive. He turned the machine on, inserted the paper, and pressed the start button.

“Excellent, excellent!” said the CEO, as his paper disappeared inside the shredder. “I just need one copy…”

[Cue laugh track]

Okay, so what made that funny? You thought it was going in one direction—and at the last moment, it went another way entirely. The surprise is the punch line, and the punch line is what lands. Comedians call it the “left turn.”

This left turn is also one of the most underused approaches in insight-based selling. And if you understand how to build it intentionally—grounded in real data and connected to your solutions—you can influence how buyers think about their own situation. That’s what insight-based selling, done well, actually accomplishes.

When Insight-Based Selling Applies

Effective selling isn’t one method applied universally. It requires matching the approach to the buyer’s state. Buyers show up in four fundamentally different situations or states:

• Some know they need something and want help finding it (Needs)
• Some have a problem they want to diagnose (Problems)
• Some have clear goals and are looking for a capable partner (Objectives)
• Some are operating in what I call the Opportunities zone—a state where you see something meaningful that they don’t yet see.

Insight-based selling is the right method for that fourth state. It’s most powerful when a buyer isn’t actively looking for a solution because they haven’t yet connected the dots between their current situation and the opportunity or risk sitting right in front of them. That’s the moment where a well-crafted left turn can genuinely influence how someone thinks.

The Aha Moment

Wikipedia describes the “eureka effect” as the common human experience of suddenly understanding a previously incomprehensible problem or concept. In selling, we call it the Aha Moment—and it’s both the target and the driver of insight-based selling.

Here’s how I define insight in a selling context: Insight is information or an idea based on credible research, authoritative content, or relevant experience. When personalized to your client’s likely or known challenges and opportunities and shared appropriately, it opens their mind to think about their situation in a new way—and shows them a path toward solving a challenge or capitalizing on an opportunity through your solutions.

That’s a precise definition, intentionally. Insight isn’t just any data point you find compelling. It has to be relevant, credible, timely, and connected to something you can actually help with.

Think of the Aha Moment like an earthquake. They vary in intensity—some topple buildings, others just rattle the china cabinet. But both get your attention, don’t they? Not every insight you share will be earth-shattering, and that’s fine. The goal is to create enough of a shift to open a door that wasn’t open before. The Aha Moment is a means to deepen the dialogue and explore new possibilities together with your client. It’s not the end game.

Creating the Left Turn: Juxtaposition and Resolvable Tension

Here’s the approach. You take a baseline fact—something your buyer would recognize as true and relevant to their world—and juxtapose a second fact against it in a way that creates tension. In comedy, that tension is funny. In selling, it’s resolvable, and the resolution points toward what you can do. It’s more impactful if the data points are new to the buyer, but it may still work if they know or have heard the data before, but not juxtaposed.

So, it’s the juxtaposition itself that has to create surprise—not necessarily the individual facts. Your buyer may already recognize both data points, but if they’ve never had to hold them side by side and reckon with what they mean together, the left turn still lands.

For example, they may recognize that 65% of CROs consider new business development a top priority. They may also have a sense that 67% also feel their sales force needs improvement in developing new business. Put them together for the first time, though, and something special happens. It’s the same thing as knowing that chocolate exists, and peanut butter exists, but when you put them together… Boom!

Also, the tension has to feel real and relevant to them. If they don’t recognize their own situation in the scenario, the whole thing falls flat. To continue the chocolate/peanut butter analogy, if you give both to someone who likes neither, you’ll miss the mark.

That raises the practical question: how do you build this with any rigor and consistency? That’s where COIN-OP comes in.

COIN-OP: Building Insight Messages That Hold Up

COIN-OP is a framework I developed to structure the development of insight messages in a way that’s disciplined and scalable. The acronym stands for Challenges, Opportunities, Impacts, Needs, Outcomes, and Priorities.

Each element plays a specific role:

• Challenges/Opportunities: What are the challenges your buyer faces or the opportunities they could capitalize on? This is where you identify the territory your insight will cover.
• Impact: What happens if the challenge goes unresolved or the opportunity is missed? Impact is what creates urgency—it makes the status quo feel costly rather than comfortable.
• Need: What does your buyer need in order to resolve the challenge or achieve the desired outcome? This is the logical bridge between their current situation and their desired future state, fueled by your solution. How can you help?
• Outcome: What specifically changes for the buyer when your solutions are applied? Outcomes are what buyers are actually purchasing—the ability to resolve the challenges or realize the opportunities.
• Priority: What is the priority of the identified Needs and Outcomes from the buyer’s perspective?

In COIN-OP terms, the left turn lives primarily in the C/O and I layers. You establish a baseline with the first fact, then juxtapose a second fact that sharpens the challenge or amplifies the impact. The N and O layers are where the tension resolves—Need clarifies what it will take to bridge the gap, and Outcome defines where the buyer wants to land. Priority is what keeps the structure honest, connecting the urgency of the issue to what the buyer actually cares about most.

One practical test: if you can’t complete the full COIN-OP logic, the insight isn’t ready to share. A left turn that doesn’t resolve isn’t insight—it’s just an uncomfortable fact.

One more consideration: which value driver does your insight speak to? Buyers respond to value framed in four ways—Business (revenue, cost, risk), Execution (how work gets done), Purpose (mission, culture, meaning), and Personal (what’s in it for this individual specifically). Matching your insight to the right value driver for the right stakeholder makes it land where it needs to—and keeps you from presenting a financial argument to someone whose primary concern is their team’s daily experience.

Two Examples

Let’s make this as concrete as possible.

Example 1: The Coaching Gap

Here’s a left turn built for a sales enablement or sales leadership audience.

• Set A: Research consistently shows that 74% of leading companies cite sales coaching and mentoring as the most important role frontline managers play.
• Set B: Yet 47% of sales managers spend less than 30 minutes per week coaching each rep. Some data puts it even more starkly—73% of sales managers spend less than 5% of their time on coaching.

The tension is visible. The thing leaders say matters most is also the thing managers do least. If you offer solutions that help organizations build a genuine coaching culture—through manager development, structured coaching frameworks, or enablement programs that make coaching more consistent—this juxtaposition creates exactly the kind of resolvable tension that opens a real conversation.

The Aha Moment in the buyer’s voice might sound something like: “We say we prioritize coaching. But looking at where our managers actually spend their time, we clearly don’t. What would it look like to change that systematically?”

That’s a door opening, not a sale closing. But it’s the right door.

Example 2: The Sales Technology Paradox

This one resonates with sales leaders and enablement professionals who’ve lived through multiple technology rollouts.

• Set A: Organizations spend an average of $1,200 per rep annually on sales tools, with the average seller now using 8 tools to close a deal.
• Set B: Despite that investment, 67% of purchased features go unused, and 42% of reps feel overwhelmed by their tech stack. Overwhelmed sellers are 45% less likely to attain quota.

More investment. Less adoption. Worse outcomes. If you help organizations drive technology adoption, rationalize an overloaded stack, or build enablement programs that integrate tools into workflow rather than pile them on top of it, this is the tension you’re designed to resolve.

The Aha Moment: “We’ve been measuring success by what we purchased, not by what our reps actually use. Those are very different numbers—and the gap might be costing us more than the tools themselves.”

Building Your Own Left Turn

The process is straightforward, but it requires discipline and honest assessment.

Start with your solutions—what challenges can you actually resolve? Work backward to identify the relevant challenge or opportunity, then find data that establishes a baseline and a juxtaposition that sharpens the impact. Connect the tension back to what you offer and what makes you genuinely different. Validate the structure against the buyer’s Priorities—what’s guiding their decisions and what validates the urgency of acting now.

Then, before you share anything with a buyer, define the Aha Moment you’re aiming for, written in the buyer’s voice. If you can’t write that sentence, the insight isn’t focused enough yet.

A few honest notes. Not every insight creates an earthquake. Some left turns open a window rather than a door, and that’s enough. The goal is to create curiosity and resolvable tension, not to close a sale in a single move. The approach only works if the insight is genuinely relevant to this buyer, in this situation, at this moment. A compelling juxtaposition applied to the wrong audience is just noise.

If you’re building this at scale—developing commercial insights and writing insight messages your entire sales team can use—COIN-OP gives you a repeatable structure, and the value driver messaging adds weight. That’s how you maintain the quality and credibility that make the approach work, regardless of who on the team is delivering it.

Closing Thoughts

Comedians figured out something about human attention that most sales professionals haven’t fully absorbed: surprise creates engagement, and engagement creates openness. When you take someone in one direction and then turn—sharply, credibly, with something they didn’t expect to see—you’ve done something truly valuable. You’ve helped a buyer think about their own situation in a new way.

Insight-based selling, done well, isn’t about impressing buyers with data. It’s about respecting their intelligence enough to show them something real, and trusting that a well-built left turn—grounded in COIN-OP logic—will open more doors than a polished product walk-through ever will.

So here’s the challenge: identify one solution you offer where the gap between what buyers say they prioritize and what they actually do creates genuine tension. Find the data. Build the left turn. Define the Aha Moment. Then go have a different kind of conversation.

Selling is no joke. But the best salespeople and the best comedians have at least one thing in common: they both know the punch line only works if the setup earns it.

Man: “Did I ever tell you that my uncle Bob was a magician?”

Woman: “No, you didn’t! Really?”

Man: “Yup. Every time he walks down the street, he turns into a bar.” 

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About Mike

Mike Kunkle is an internationally recognized expert on sales training, sales effectiveness, and sales enablement. He’s spent over 30 years helping companies drive dramatic revenue growth through best-in-class enablement strategies and proven-effective sales systems—and he’s delivered impressive results for both employers and clients. Mike is the founder of Transforming Sales Results, LLC, where he does research and publishes thought leadership, designs sales training, delivers workshops, and helps clients improve sales results through a variety of sales effectiveness practices, sales systems, and advisory services. His book, The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement, is available on Amazon, and The CoNavigator Method for B2B Sales Mastery will be published in 2026.