Have you read The Challenger Sale? A lot of people have... and a lot of companies are excited to use the Challenger approach to driving impactful conversations with their clients. There are some gems in the book: the relative impact of teaching vs. building relationships, using an insight to teach, creating urgency, etc.
The (cough) challenge for many people is to come up with commercial insights that change the way the client perceives the risks their business faces… and that lead to your own unique solution.
From what I’ve seen, too many practitioners:
make insight generation way more difficult than it needs to be (Data driven! Very client-specific!)
develop too few insights (What are you going to share at the next meeting?)
do a poor job delivering those insights (Scary as hell! Numbers!).
What’s the alternative?
I believe an insight is fairly simple:
What do you know about your client’s business that they don’t?
Or if you’re not in sales, what do you know about your audience’s situation that they don’t? Think of it as their A ha! moment.
Then you need to link how they can benefit from that insight based on your product, idea or solution. Though preferred, the insight doesn’t even need to lead uniquely to your solution. It just has to be compelling enough to get them to agree to your immediate goal (a meeting with the CFO, a demo, download the paper, a second date?).
It sounds easy. It's not. But it's easier than many make it out to be.