Pings and Echoes
Surface a buyer's hidden fear by voicing your hypothesis and listening for the reflection
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 92%
A sonar-style probing technique used by high performers to get an invisible fear onto the table without embarrassing the buyer. Rather than asking an open-ended question about their decisiveness, the seller states a hypothesis about what is probably worrying them — normalized, self-implicating, and framed as being in service of the buyer — then reads the confirmation or refutation that comes back.
Origin
Discovered by Matt Dixon's team in the JOLT call data after The JOLT Effect was published — it does not appear in the book. The analogy is drawn from naval sonar, where a surface ship pings the water and reads the returning echo to identify what is down there and what it intends.
Core principles
- 01Indecision is 'the carbon monoxide poisoning of sales' — everywhere, but odorless and tasteless. The ping is your detector.
- 02The seller supplies the hypothesis, so the buyer never has to confess a weakness.
- 03Take the blame for the problem yourself ('we probably made this worse') to lower the buyer's cost of admitting it.
- 04Any echo is useful: a yes confirms the fear, a no redirects you to the real one.
- 05The ping is calibrated to the fear you suspect — a choice-overload ping sounds nothing like an ROI-credibility ping.
How to run it
- 1
Form a hypothesis about the specific fear
From the call history, decide which fear you think is live. Signals: they liked every single thing you showed (choice overload); they keep re-running the ROI model with new parameters (believability gap); they keep asking for more reference calls (fear of surprise).
Pro tip The behavior that looks like enthusiasm — loving everything in the demo — is often the tell that they have no idea what they actually want.
Watch out A ping fired without a hypothesis is just a generic open-ended question, which the data shows performs badly.
- 2
Signal the calibration and give a reason for asking
Open with an explicit permission frame: 'I'm just curious if we could calibrate here for just a moment, and there's a reason I'm asking this.' This tells the buyer a hard question is coming and that it is diagnostic, not adversarial.
- 3
Normalize the fear and take part of the blame
Attribute the problem to the situation and to yourself: 'a lot of customers at this point get almost overwhelmed with all the options, and look, I probably made this worse — we're very proud of what we do and I wanted to paint the art of the possible.'
Pro tip The phrase 'at this point most customers are thinking about this' is the load-bearing part — it converts a personal deficiency into a normal stage of the process.
Watch out Never ping in a way that outs the customer as indecisive in front of colleagues. The goal is contextualizing, not exposing.
- 4
Fire the ping as a specific closed question
Ask a concrete question that tests the hypothesis, e.g. 'Are you and your team clear on what would be in and out of the proposal?' or, for an ROI fear, 'Is there a believability gap, or an execution gap you're worried about on your side or on ours?'
- 5
Read the echo and route to the right JOLT move
If they admit they don't know what to pick, go to O (offer a recommendation) — 'what do other companies like us start with?' If they say they're clear but can't defend the ROI to the CFO, go to T (take risk off the table). If they're still researching, go to L (limit the exploration).
Pro tip Listen for who the fear is really about — a mention of the CFO tells you the buyer's blame risk is downstream of you entirely.
In the wild
After demos, partner options, a PoC and a pilot where the customer liked everything, the seller says: 'A lot of customers at this point get almost overwhelmed with all the options, and I probably made this worse. But you told me right away budgets are limited and you can't have it all, so you've got to decide what's nice to have and what's need to have. Are you and your team clear on what would be in and out of the proposal?'
→ Two productive echoes: either 'no, we don't know — what do companies like us start with?' (route to O), or 'we were just being polite about half of it; what really worries me is defending a 10% productivity claim to the CFO' (route to T).
The customer keeps asking for multiple reworks of the ROI calculation, changing parameters, trying to make it bulletproof. The seller names it: 'a lot of customers struggle with that a little bit, because that's a big thing you're putting your name against — so maybe we should have a conversation about whether that's a concern for you.'
→ The seller can now separate a believability gap from an execution gap and set expectations the buyer can defend internally.
Common mistakes
Asking whether they're decisive
Dixon's mock example — 'when you go to The Cheesecake Factory do you leave satisfied or hungry because you can't decide what to order' — is deliberately absurd. Buyers see themselves as decisive; questioning that reads as offensive and ends the sale quickly.
Waiting for the customer to volunteer the fear
They never will. It's embarrassing and career-adjacent. If you don't hypothesize and ping, the fear stays odorless until the deal dies.
Firing one generic ping for every deal
The ping must be shaped to the suspected fear. A ping about option overload aimed at a customer with an ROI-defensibility problem returns a false negative and you'll conclude they have no concerns.
Is it for you?
Best for
Sellers in complex, consultative deals who need to surface a late-stage blocker without triggering defensiveness in a senior buyer
Not ideal for
Early discovery, where genuinely open-ended questions are still the right instrument
From the transcript
“we found a technique this is actually not in the book we found it after we wrote the book called pings and Echoes that high…”
“I've likened indecision to like the carbon monoxide poisoning of sales”
“I'm just curious are you and your team clear on what would be in and out of the proposal”
“it's not designed to embarrass the customer designed to get this on the table so it can be”
“I think that's perfect language at this point most most customers like you are thinking about this”
From the episode
The surprising truth about what closes deals: Insights from 2.5m sales conversations
Matt Dixon (author of The Challenger Sale and The JOLT Effec