Long Story Short
Kristen Bussenger has spent twenty years in sales, and the thing that makes her good at it isn’t the pitch or the close. It’s her curiosity. She finds out what a customer is actually looking to buy, which is almost never the product on the pitch deck, and then she leads with that.
Why We’re Sharing This Story
Libby here!
If you’re reading this article, you probably don’t love Sales. (If you do love sales, please tell me why you’re reading this!) I’ve written here about how much I hated doing sales at Whetstone, the EdTech startup I ran, and how I only learned how to do it because I needed to pay my rent and I was the only employee at the company.
I never grew to LOVE sales, but I did figure something out along the way that made me dread it less: your customers are rarely buying the thing you think you’re selling them.
When I first started selling at Whetstone, I focused my sales conversations on the features we offered to school leaders.
- Digital observation form. We’ve got that!
- Time-stamped note-taker. We’ve got that! (Plus color-coding.)
- An action step tracker. We’ve got that!
These were all the things leaders told us they needed, and here they were in a sleek app. So, why did everyone seem bored on my sales calls?
Nearly a year into selling Whetstone, I had what felt like a pretty awkward sales call. Near the end, the principal asked me, almost as an afterthought, “Why do you work for Whetstone?”
I thought for a moment and said, “Because when I was a teacher, my principal never observed me teach. I really struggled, and I really could have used some feedback. I felt like I was failing my students every day, so I quit. And I joined Whetstone because I don’t want any teacher to feel like I did.”
I was shocked when he got choked up. He went on to tell me that teacher retention is one of his biggest problems. “Our good teachers are leaving and our bad teachers aren’t staying long enough to get good.”
He wasn’t buying a teacher observation and coaching platform. He was buying teacher retention.
An awkward call that normally would have resulted in him ghosting my follow up emails turned into another 45 minutes on how teacher coaching was part of his broader teacher retention strategy, a deep dive into the features he needed to implement his strategy, and an on-the-spot sale.
I had no idea there was a name for any of this. Discovery call? Never heard of it. I just noticed that when I asked more questions the calls went better, so I kept asking more questions.
What I couldn’t have explained back then is WHY it worked. Kristen Bussenger can.
Kristen’s Story
This is Kristen’s story — co-written with Helia and told from her perspective!
I got into sales right out of college. I’d applied for a lot of different jobs, and I saw a listing for a sales associate role at an international translation company, TransPerfect. I’d majored in Spanish and business, so it felt like a good match. Plus, both my parents were in some form of sales, so it’s probably not surprising that both my brother and I ended up on that same path.
But what I love about it, and why I gravitated toward it, is that sales is really about curiosity. Learning about people, learning about different companies. Learning what problems they’re trying to solve and what problems they’re facing trying to do their work.
In that role I learned about pharmaceutical companies and contract research organizations and consumer products companies. I learned about law firms and how they manage litigation. I was fascinated by the work and the people that did it.
Getting to learn about new industries and businesses was what got me excited about work everyday, not getting closer to my quota.
This curiosity made selling natural. I wasn’t trying to artfully craft questions to lead them directly to my pitch. I was just having a conversation: “So, tell me more about your work? I ‘d love to learn more about your role? What are the things you love about it? What are the things that are challenging?”
While my questions have evolved as I’ve grown with experience, there is always a consistent thread: Sales is about building relationships and building trust. People can tell if you’re actually curious when you ask them questions or if you’re just selling them something. I never showed up as somebody who was just trying to make a sale, or trying to hit a number, or trying to hit a quota. I really showed up by just being myself and being naturally curious.
The customers weren’t buying translation
Here’s the thing I figured out at that first job. The thing I was selling — translation services — was not always the same thing the customer was buying.
A contract research organization might be buying translation services because they had a deadline for getting to market. They had a clinical trial coming up and they needed to get information to and from doctors and patients in different countries. So, they weren’t buying translation, they were buying time: How much time could they save? And how many days faster would that get them to market (with the same high quality, of course)?
I was able to tailor my messaging. Rather than spending all my time saying “Hey, we have the best quality translation” — which we did — I emphasized, “We can help you get to market faster.” I connected the dots for them and they immediately saw the value (and made the purchase!).
Back then we didn’t call it ‘sales discovery.’ It was just asking questions.
And the way that I got to those messages, to that repositioning, was through curiosity.
- Why do you need this translated?
- What’s your end goal?
- What challenges have you had in the past, if you’ve done translation before?
The goal was to just understand where the prospect or client was coming from, so that you could then position what you were doing in that same frame.
Remember me?
I loved that job, but I really felt like something was missing, I wanted to make more of an impact. Being more mission-focused was really important to me.
That’s how I found my way to Revolution Foods, a healthy school lunch company. I love telling this story, because it comes back to curiosity.
I applied for a sales director role. I had over a decade of sales experience by then, but I’d never worked in education, and I hadn’t certainly been selling food. I ended up as a finalist for the role — me and one other individual. Ultimately they decided to hire the person who had the experience in education and a network in that world.
That’s something you hear a lot. A job description will say, “We want somebody who’s done all these sales things, but only in this specific niche of an industry.”
So we parted ways. I didn’t get the job but I kept following the company.
About a year and a half later, the job was reposted. It hadn’t worked out with that first person. So I reached out to the hiring manager and was sort of like, “Hey, remember me? I still have this great sales experience and I’m eager to learn more about the industry.” I do believe you can be industry agnostic in sales as long as you’re curious.
This time around, they hired me! And even though I didn’t have the network, I did what I said I was going to do — I got curious and learned about the industry and quickly found success.
Whenever I have hired people — from early career to now — I always look for those sales skills, those hard relationship-building skills. Operating with integrity. How quickly can you earn trust. Because I believe that you can learn an industry and you can learn a space much faster than you can learn some of those inherent natural skills.
My new customers weren’t buying the food, either
After my experience at TransPerfect, I shouldn’t have been surprised that Revolution Foods’ customers weren’t actually buying healthy food. They liked that, but most of the time the thing they were buying from us was reliability and customer service.
First and foremost, they wanted the food to get there on time. Beyond that, the Director of Operations didn’t want to spend hours on the phone correcting a food order they had placed — they wanted to get to a human that could help them fix it quickly before the end of the day.
The out-of-the-box pitch for Rev Foods was all about clean food ingredients and our “never ever list” (it’s a Bay Area company, after all). When I was opening the Massachusetts market, I learned quickly to shift my messaging to be more about reliability, consistency, and quality control. People liked that the food was clean, but they bought a lunch company that didn’t give them headaches.
That’s what I mean by the question, “Are you selling what you think you’re selling?” Yes, you have a product or service that’s solving a problem — you wouldn’t be in business if you didn’t! But customers all have different reasons for why they end up buying from you. And especially when you think about the different stages that an organization goes through, that buying reason can also change and shift over time. Your primary value proposition for your customers when they were a $1MM to $5MM company will likely shift as they get larger, because their problems become more complex.
Where founders struggle with this
I’ve noticed this both directly and through scoping conversations for engagements: early-stage founders often have a very narrow point of view on what they’re selling. They have been working so hard on their service/product/solution, which was created from a POV on the problem to solve.
I want to be clear — I’ve never been a founder. And in order to be a founder, you have to be bold. You have to deeply believe in what you’re doing to build, to sell, to get investors, to do all of the things. I’m not saying that’s bad.
What I will say is that their curiosity has sometimes gone quiet by the time they’re selling.It shows up like, We solved this problem with this solution, and you should buy from us.
They don’t lead with questions, they lead with “We’ve solved it this way,” and when they get pushback, the conversation may shut down. And then deals get left on the table, because nobody got curious about why this might not be the right fit for this customer right now.
Maybe it’s not that they don’t think it’s the best, it’s that they can’t visualize how your product/service fits into their day. Maybe training and implementation feel overwhelming. Well, you can’t know that if you don’t get curious. When you finally ask questions and learn this, you might realize that other folks you’re having sales calls with may also see implementation as a barrier, and so you go create a 1-pager that demystifies it and now you’ve overcome that barrier and the rest of your deals start closing faster.
The work allows you to get really creative and thoughtful about how to help solve problems. But it only can do that if you start with that curiosity, and if you’re really open to listening.
What Made This Work
Kristen didn’t change a single product in any of these stories. The translation was excellent. The food was good food. What changed was the sentence she led with, and she only found that sentence by asking.
The questions weren’t a sales technique. She’s direct about this: she wasn’t crafting questions to walk somebody toward her pitch. She actually wanted to know what a person in that job does all day. That’s the part that’s hardest to fake and hardest to copy — people can tell which kind of question they’re being asked, and they tell you more when it’s the real kind.
The second time, she went looking for the gap. At TransPerfect she found it by accident — customers kept talking about deadlines instead of quality. By Revolution Foods she expected they had a different reason for buying. Here’s your permission to start asking your customers what they’re buying instead of leading with what your deck is selling.
She heard pushback as “I can’t picture this,” not “no.” That’s a completely different problem, and a solvable one. And the fix usually isn’t a better rebuttal — it’s something that doesn’t exist yet. A one-pager. An implementation walkthrough. Which then works on every other deal.
Try one thing this week: call three customers who said yes in the last year and ask them, plainly, why they picked you — then hold their answers up against your pitch deck and see how far apart they are.
If You Need Help
Kristen Bussenger partners with leaders and doers running sales and revenue at mission-driven organizations, usually at the exact moment a founder-led or scrappy sales motion has outgrown the person carrying it. Her approach: get curious about what customers are actually buying before touching the pitch deck, then build the comp plans, territory logic, and operating cadence that let the function run without her in the room
She’s a good fit if:
- You’re leading sales or partnerships at a mission-driven organization and you’re not totally sure the pitch you’re using is the reason people actually buy
- You built (or inherited) a sales process that ran on relationships and hustle, and it’s starting to strain as the team or the ask gets bigger
- You know you need to get curious about your customers again, but you don’t have the time or the outside eyes to do it
- You’re ready to hand sales off to someone else, but there’s no real system yet for them to step into
- You care about building the revenue engine the right way, not just the fast way
Connect with Kristen!
Questions to Sit With
- If you called three of your customers today and asked why they picked you, do you already know what they’d say — or would you be guessing?
- What’s the thing you lead with in the first two minutes of a call? When’s the last time you checked whether it’s still the right thing?
- Think about the last time a prospect pushed back on something. Did you treat it as an objection to handle, or as information about your market?
- Who on your team has stopped poking holes in your ideas? What happened to make that stop?
- What worked when you were smaller that you’re still doing now — just because it worked then?
Not sure Kristen‘s the right fit? Talk to Helia directly!
This story comes from a conversation with Kristen in June 2026. These conversations form the heart of the Helia Library — because we’ve learned the most from doing and from talking with other doers willing to share their wisdom. We don’t need to start from blank pages or do everything alone.
As always, take what’s helpful, leave what’s not, and make it your own.
About Kristen
Kristen Bussenger has spent twenty years building revenue engines inside mission-driven organizations. Most recently at Ignite Reading, she came in on a fractional engagement to transition a founder-led sales motion, building toward a relationship-driven sales approach and streamlined process. Before that: building the K–12 schools business at Invo Healthcare, and opening Revolution Foods’ Boston market to $8M in 3 years. She now works as a fractional operating and revenue partner, helping leaders and doers get curious about what they’re actually selling, then building the systems that let the work outlast her involvement.
Work with Kristen
