Structured Thinking Is A Linchpin Skill, and Your Salespeople Need To Get Better At It

There has never been a time in history when the ability to think has been as critical to complex sales as it is now. Two recent reports, one by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and one from Mercuri Global, highlight this reality.

The 2025 Future of Jobs Report from WEF lists “analytical thinking” as the #1 core skill for 2025, with 69% of employers stating that they consider it a core skill for their workforce. At the #4 spot is “creative thinking,” with “systems thinking” hitting the #12 spot.

Meanwhile, Mercuri Global’s 2025 The Future State of Sales Skills also lists “analytical thinking” in the #1 critical skills spot, alongside “customer insight.” In the #4 spot, they placed “creative thinking.”

Why Thinking is the #1 Most Important Skill Your Salespeople Can Develop

Thinking has always been a critical skill, but it’s even more important now than ever as economic uncertainty and global instability continue to increase. The field of technologies, including software systems, continues to grow explosively. All of this adds up to a sales environment that is constantly shifting, with customer needs that are complex, layered, and frequently changing.

There has never been a time in history when the ability to think has been as critical to complex sales as it is now.

Most organizations face higher volatility, increasing uncertainty, greater complexity, and more ambiguity than ever. Many organizations have used the VUCA concept to understand and explain their challenges and opportunities and make better decisions. VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. Our current environment has ratcheted up every one of those. 

All of this adds up to an environment in which decision-making is growing in complexity. To be effective, salespeople must be flexible, adaptable, analytical, and insightful to help buyers understand their problems and make good decisions. This requires structured thinking, applied thoughtfully.

What Is Structured Thinking In Complex Sales?

Structured thinking is the ability to organize information to reach a deeper understanding, achieve insights, and make better decisions. It involves collecting information, organizing it, understanding and evaluating it, and then drawing conclusions.

In sales, structured thinking begins with listening to buyers, asking questions, and collecting information about their problem, their organization, and their desired outcomes. It includes discovering who the relevant stakeholders are, and their impact on the decision as well as their unique perspectives on the problem and its potential solutions.

But simply knowing all of this information won’t help a salesperson make a sale unless they can structure it in a way that enables them to collaboratively discover and communicate an effective solution, while developing alignment and commitment on the part of the buyer to go through with the decision.

Salespeople must be able to see the problem through the eyes of multiple stakeholders, draw conclusions about which stakeholders matter, and think creatively about how to achieve the desired outcomes. Then they have to be able to get everyone on board with the same decision. They need to become decision-making catalysts.

DSRP Provides The Framework For Structured Analytical Thinking

DSRP is a systems thinking theory developed and taught by Derek and Laura Cabrera of Cabrera Lab. I’ve been studying the theory for some time now, and presented the result of a co-authored research paper at Cornell’s Systems Thinking Conference 2025 on using DSRP to structure sales opportunities to increase wins.

The Cabreras and I believe that DSRP is the foundation that salespeople need in order to develop, improve, and master their thinking skills to win more deals. As I explore more fully here, DSRP stands for Distinctions, Systems, Relationships, and Perspectives.

Distinctions refers to understanding what a thing is, and what it is not. Distinctions in DSRP provides a structured way for salespeople to clearly define problems, systems, and components of a sales project.

Systems refers to the fact that every system is both part of a larger system, and contains smaller systems. For instance, your sales department is a system within the larger system of your organization. Within the sales department are many smaller systems, including the team, the software you use, and the processes you follow. DSRP provides a Zoom In/Zoom Out tool for salespeople to more easily identify what buyer systems are relevant in a sales project, and to zoom in and out among them to see both the big and the detailed picture.

Relationships is exactly what it sounds like. It refers to the relationships between things. For instance, your sales department has a relationship with other departments within the organization, and your organization has a relationship with each organization you serve. Within a buyer organization, each individual has relationship with other stakeholders, and they all have relationships with the problem and the systems involved. DSRP provides a barbell tool that can help salespeople visualize these relationships in order to understand and navigate them.

Finally, Perspectives refers to the recognition that every system and every individual within a system will have a different perspective on the problem. Thinking in terms of DSRP’s perspectives provides your salespeople with the critical tools to get outside their own perspective and desires, and understand the problem through the eyes of the people it most impacts.

Put together, the tools and frameworks of DSRP enable sales teams to develop, grow, and master their systems thinking skills and create the competitive edge that comes only from deeply understanding your customer’s needs, challenges, and opportunities.

Supportive Structures Augment Analytical Thinking

The right tools and support can augment your team’s thinking abilities. For instance, generative AI is excellent at collecting and collating information from many sources and organizing it in a sensible fashion. This can relieve salespeople of the burden of gathering and organizing information, freeing them to focus on gathering deeper information from buyers and structuring their thought process around it.

Likewise, we built Membrain to be a powerful tool for supporting structured thinking on your sales team. We provide distinct workflows that are simple and educational and help your team organize and manage the complexity of prospecting, sales projects, and account growth. We place everything they need where they need it, when they need it, so they can focus on helping buyers learn and make decisions.

To complement the execution platform, our win/loss analytics and built-in dashboards provide feedback and insights on what needs attention and improvement.

Structured Thinking Is a Skill That Can Be Trained and Developed

Structured thinking is not some magical talent that some people are born with and others are not. It can be trained, learned, grown, and mastered. With the right training, platforms,  frameworks, and practice, your sales team can become the most skilled thinkers in the market, and you can create a competitive edge your team needs to win more deals.

What are you doing to develop this critical skill on your team?