MDV Venture Partner Geoffrey Moore recently participated in a Genius.com sales-focused webinar hosted by CEO David Thompson. Their discussion focused on Geoffrey’s recent Harvard Business Review article, In a Downturn, Provoke your Customers, which challenges old consulting-based methods. He shared perspective on why this bold approach is critical to success in today’s tough market and provides tips about how to help sell even when “the budgets aren’t there”.

The conversation prompted many questions, which Geoffrey went on to answer, such as:

Q. If you sell to multiple verticals, should you toggle between solution and provocation?

A. Think of provocation based selling as a pick and solution selling as a shovel. The former is for creating budget, the latter for consuming it. As long as there is budget in play, you do not need to provoke. But wherever the answer is, we don’t have budget for that, then provoking is warranted.

The higher order question may be, how much resource can we devote to provocation-based selling, given that it does not scale the way solution selling does. This is a very real issue, and it could lead you to restrict your focus to a single vertical. In that case, make sure you pick the one that has the biggest upside for your company.

For more on the questions raised and answers shared, continue reading the full Q&A here.