How to Sell to Executives vs End Users: The Ladder of Abstraction
| The ladder of abstraction comes from S.I. Hayakawa, who introduced it in Language in Action in 1939 and developed it in Language in Thought and Action, drawing on Alfred Korzybski’s general semantics. Language runs from concrete sensory detail at the bottom to broad concepts at the top, and a conversation only works when both people stand on the same rung.Chris Dyer, named the #1 Leadership Speaker to Follow in 2026 by MSN.com, applies it to the sales call. You pitch from the rung you know best, the executive is standing three rungs up, and the deal stalls without either of you understanding why. This guide covers the five rungs of a real sales conversation, who stands where, and how to locate someone’s rung in ninety seconds. |
Table of Contents
- What the ladder of abstraction is
- Why sellers pitch from the wrong rung
- The five rungs of a sales conversation
- Who stands where
- Where I got this wrong
- How to find someone’s rung in ninety seconds
- Frequently asked questions
What the Ladder of Abstraction Is
S.I. Hayakawa was a semanticist who later became a US senator. His enduring contribution is a picture of how language works.
Take a cow standing in a field. At the bottom of the ladder is that specific animal, the one you can see and smell. One rung up, she is Bessie. Above that, cow. Then livestock, then farm asset, then capital. Every rung refers to the same reality. Each one strips away detail in exchange for reach.
Hayakawa’s point was that trouble starts when people talk past each other on different rungs without noticing. Someone at the bottom sounds like they are missing the point. Someone at the top sounds like they are avoiding it. Both people think the other one is being difficult.
Chris Dyer’s contribution is not the ladder. It is the observation that a sales call is a rung mismatch happening in real time, on a clock, with money attached.
Why Sellers Pitch From the Wrong Rung
You pitch from the rung where you spend your day.
A rep who came up through implementation lives on the feature rung, because that is where they were competent and rewarded for years. A founder lives near the top, because that is where the vision is. Neither one drifts toward the middle on their own, and both are convincing to exactly one kind of buyer.
Then the room gets crowded. Gartner’s research on the B2B buying journey puts the typical buying group for a complex solution at six to ten decision makers, each arriving with their own independently gathered information. Those people are not spread evenly across the ladder. The end user is at the bottom, the technical evaluator sits just above, and the executive sponsor is near the top holding a commitment they made to a board.
A single pitch delivered at a single altitude will land with one or two of them and slide past the rest. What follows is the stall that nobody can explain: everyone was polite, nobody objected, and the deal went quiet.
The other failure runs in the opposite direction and is more common among experienced sellers. They learn that executives want strategy, so they climb to the top rung and stay there with everyone, including the person who has to use the thing. To a daily operator, high-altitude language sounds like someone who has never done the job.
The Five Rungs of a Sales Conversation
Chris Dyer teaches five rungs because five is enough to be useful and few enough to hold in your head during a live call.
Rung 1: Feature
The thing itself. Buttons, fields, the physical object. Language here is concrete and testable, and the honest test of whether you are on this rung is whether you could demonstrate the claim on a screen right now.
End users live here permanently. They are asking one question underneath everything else, which is whether their day gets harder.
Rung 2: Function
What the thing does, in mechanical terms. Integrations, throughput, security posture, failure modes.
Technical evaluators live here, and they are the group most often insulted by an executive-level pitch. They have specific questions and they can tell within a minute whether you know the answers. Say what breaks. A vendor who names a limitation gets believed about everything else.
Rung 3: Workflow
How work changes. Who does what differently, what gets retired, who has to be retrained, and how ugly the transition is.
This rung is the most commonly skipped and it is where most deals actually die. Directors and program managers stand here, and they are the ones who will personally absorb the pain of a bad rollout. They are not asking whether it works. They are asking what happens to them in month two.
Rung 4: Outcome
The number. Cycle time, cost, retention, revenue per rep.
CFOs and any VP who owns a metric live here. The move that works is naming one number, giving a believable range rather than a heroic single figure, and saying plainly what your product will not fix. Chris Dyer has watched more deals close on the second half of that sentence than the first.
Rung 5: Strategy
What becomes possible. Where the company is going and what this makes true about that direction.
CEOs and division presidents stand here. The thing to understand about this rung is that they are usually defending a position they have already stated publicly. Connect what you sell to a commitment they made in an earnings call or an all-hands, and you stop being a vendor and start being useful to a promise they are already carrying.
Who Stands Where
| Rung | Who lives here | What they say on a call | What actually convinces them |
| 5. Strategy | CEO, board, division president | “How does this fit what we told the board in March?” | A short story about what becomes possible, tied to a commitment they already made publicly |
| 4. Outcome | CFO, COO, VP with a number | “What does this do to the number I own?” | One metric, a believable range, and an honest statement of what it will not fix |
| 3. Workflow | Director, ops lead, program manager | “Who does what differently on Monday, and who has to be retrained?” | A before and after of the actual process, including the ugly transition period |
| 2. Function | Technical evaluator, IT, security | “Does it integrate with what we already run?” | Specifics, constraints, and a straight answer about what breaks |
| 1. Feature | End user, daily operator | “How many clicks is this going to cost me?” | A demonstration, not a description, of the part they touch every day |
Read that table upside down for a group meeting. When six people are on the call, the executive is listening for rung five and the end user is listening for rung one, and you have to touch both inside forty minutes without sounding like two different presentations.
The move that handles it is climbing on purpose. Start one rung below the most senior person, deliver the outcome, then drop to the workflow rung and stay there. Executives tolerate a descent into detail far better than operators tolerate an ascent into abstraction.
Where I Got This Wrong
I once spent days fighting about ten dollars.
A contact at our largest client, a big staffing firm, called our customer service rep about a ten dollar charge on an invoice. Her exact words were: what the heck is this charge, we are leaving, close our account. I will call her Maria.
Our rep could not close the account, so it escalated. Maria sent emails. Then letters. Then she started shutting down user accounts inside her own company so her colleagues could not use PeopleG2 at all. I tried to reach her boss and her boss’s boss and they were both at a conference. My team was furious, and honestly, so was I.
Every one of us was arguing on the bottom rung. Ten dollars. Was the charge correct, and had it been disclosed. We had a perfectly good case and it was worth nothing, because the ten dollars was never the subject.
I sent everyone out for coffee for an hour. When we came back I told them we were going to solve this by assuming Maria was a good person who loved us, and that we needed a completely different angle.
So I called her, and I never mentioned the charge. I asked, “In a perfect world, what would we do differently to be a better vendor?”
She went quiet. Then she said we were sending her multiple invoices, it made reconciling the charges hard, and she was getting in trouble for it. One comprehensive invoice would make her job easier.
“We can do that.”
“You can? That’s great.”
The war was over in about ninety seconds. Maria became one of our strongest advocates, gave us consistently high ratings, and referred us to others. I estimate that fight over ten dollars eventually produced about $100,000 in business.
What I got wrong was not my temper or my patience. I had climbed nothing. Maria was standing on the workflow rung, where a messy invoice process was making her look incompetent to her manager, and she reached for the only concrete thing on the invoice to express it. I spent days litigating the symbol instead of asking one question at the altitude she actually lived on.
How to Find Someone’s Rung in Ninety Seconds
Locating the rung is faster than most sellers expect, and it is almost entirely a listening problem.
- Count the nouns. Concrete nouns mean a low rung. Screens, forms, tickets, hours. Abstract nouns mean a high one. Position, capability, risk, direction. The nouns give it away before the third sentence.
- Listen for the pronoun. “I” and “my team” means rung one through three. “We” and “the business” means four or five. This one is close to reliable.
- Ask what happens if nothing changes. The answer arrives at their native altitude. An operator describes a bad Tuesday. A CFO describes a miss. Nobody translates when they answer that question.
- Match once before you move. Say one thing on their rung so they know you can, then climb or descend deliberately and say where you are going. “Let me take that up a level for a second” costs you nothing and prevents the sense that you dodged.
- Write the rung on your notes next to each name. In a six-person buying group you will not remember, and the follow-up email is where most rung mismatches happen. The same recap sent to everyone reaches almost nobody.
On that last point, send two versions. One paragraph of outcome language for the people up the ladder, and one of workflow specifics for the people who have to live with the rollout. It takes four extra minutes and it is the highest-return four minutes in the whole cycle.
Book Chris Dyer for Your Next Event
Chris Dyer delivers Strategic Selling to sales kickoffs and revenue teams, where the ladder of abstraction is one of five field-tested moves built for how reps already sell rather than a methodology they have to adopt wholesale. Named the #1 Leadership Speaker to Follow in 2026 by MSN.com, the #1 Leadership Speaker on Culture by Inc. Magazine, and ranked #15 on the Global Gurus Top 30 Organizational Culture Professionals for 2026, Chris Dyer has delivered more than 300 keynotes across 20 countries for organizations including NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Southwest Airlines, General Motors, and MetLife, with a 4.9 out of 5 average audience rating.
To check availability for your sales kickoff or conference, visit chrisdyer.com/speaking.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you sell to executives versus end users?
Executives buy at the outcome and strategy rungs, meaning one number they own or a commitment they have already made publicly. End users buy at the feature rung, meaning whether their daily work gets harder. Chris Dyer recommends starting one rung below the most senior person in the room, delivering the outcome, then descending into workflow detail and staying there, because executives tolerate a descent into specifics far better than operators tolerate a climb into abstraction.
What is the ladder of abstraction in sales?
It is S.I. Hayakawa’s model of how language moves from concrete detail to broad concepts, applied to a sales conversation. Chris Dyer teaches five rungs: feature, function, workflow, outcome, and strategy. A stalled deal is frequently a rung mismatch rather than a pricing or product problem, because both people were convincing and neither was standing where the other one was.
Why do deals stall when everyone seems interested?
Because a pitch delivered at one altitude lands with one or two people in a buying group and slides past the rest. Gartner’s research puts the typical buying group for a complex B2B solution at six to ten decision makers spread across the ladder, so a single-altitude pitch leaves most of the room unconvinced and too polite to say so.
How do you know what level to pitch at?
Count the nouns and listen for the pronoun. Concrete nouns and “I” or “my team” put someone on the lower rungs. Abstract nouns and “we” or “the business” put them higher. Chris Dyer also recommends asking what happens if nothing changes, because people answer that question at their native altitude without translating.
What is the most commonly skipped rung?
Workflow. Sellers move from what the product does straight to what it will produce, skipping who has to do what differently and how painful month two is. Directors and program managers stand on that rung, they absorb the cost of a bad rollout personally, and they can quietly stall a deal that everyone above and below them liked.
Sources
S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Action (1939), revised and expanded as Language in Thought and Action (Harcourt, Brace, 1949), which develops the abstraction ladder and credits Alfred Korzybski’s general semantics as its foundation. Full text: archive.org
Gartner, “The B2B Buying Journey.” gartner.com/en/sales/insights/b2b-buying-journey
Go Deeper
The Maria story appears in Remote Work, and the framework for recognizing which conversations carry disproportionate weight appears in Moments That Matter: See, Shape, and Scale What Counts, the fourth book from Chris Dyer. The companion workbook is free with no email required at chrisdyer.com/moments.
To bring Chris Dyer to your sales kickoff or leadership event, visit chrisdyer.com/speaking.
