Ask a room of owners who their biggest competitor is and you will get a list of company names. Jorge Chavez, president and co-founder of Topaz Sales Consulting, thinks nine out of ten of those answers are wrong. The competitor that beats you most often is the customer deciding to do nothing at all.
And here’s our favorite question: what happens if you do nothing? What if you don’t change, which is the biggest competitor for everyone, the status quo?
— Jorge Chavez
The move he is describing is not a closing technique. It is a diagnostic. If nothing bad happens when the buyer does nothing, there is no deal to run, and the polite thing is to find that out early rather than after three proposals.
But the real answer is no change.
— Jorge Chavez
He is specific about the shapes it takes. They keep using a competitor. They do it in house. They have been meaning to sort the website out for years and will get to it. Every one of those is the same answer wearing a different coat.
The goal can’t be to sell. It’s a byproduct of right thinking and effectively executing your process.
— Jorge Chavez
This is where the episode stops being a sales talk. He argues that a rep who wants the sale will sell less, because wanting it distorts every question they ask. The alternative is uncomfortable: work out whether the buyer can solve the problem without you, and be willing to say so.
And you have to be not seeking yeses and not seeking no’s, but seeking the truth.
— Jorge Chavez
He is equally blunt about why people distrust the profession. Show up, throw up, pressure, overcome objections, chase the yes. His objection to it is commercial before it is ethical. It does not work as well.
Asked whether empathy is a business superpower, he does not simply agree. He reframes it as a skill with a name.
You have to care. If you don’t care about people, sales, and relationships, you’re in the wrong business.
— Jorge Chavez
Above active listening he puts empathetic listening: suspending your own biases and training long enough to look at the situation from where the other person is standing. His claim is that questions stop being hard to invent once you do it.
We say infinite curiosity is running out of time before you run out of questions.
— Jorge Chavez
His diagnosis is that curiosity is a skill people lose after childhood, which is why so many salespeople freeze when the script runs out. It is also why he prefers a live conversation to any amount of written back and forth.
He has trained over a hundred chief marketing officers, which gives him an unusual answer to the oldest question in the building. Marketing makes assumptions about a market it cannot interview, and its job is to raise curiosity. Sales makes no assumptions at all.
Instead of making assumptions in sales, you make no assumptions.
— Jorge Chavez
The bridge those CMOs described back to him is that modern marketing has started behaving like the sales side: asking questions tied to real pain rather than announcing services. Not here are our SEO packages but do you feel your site is reaching the right market.
The closing-the-loop section is the one to send to anyone running acquisition. Weekly review of lead quality rather than lead count, a first-person narrative writer who actually knows the business, and a tech partner who asks whether a lead was any good. Jeremy’s counter-story is the three-hundred-per-cent lead increase that the sales team experienced as the worst month they had ever had. If you have that problem, the routine for deciding what to ship next when everything looks urgent is a way in.
| Time | What happens |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | Introducing Jorge and Topaz Sales Consulting |
| 01:30 | Where AI stops helping in a sales conversation |
| 03:37 | Why email is a poor way to qualify anyone |
| 10:04 | Why no productivity tool ever fully wins |
| 16:05 | Agencies that never market themselves |
| 21:48 | B2B and B2C: same process, different questions |
| 27:56 | Do you actually have to ask for the order |
| 31:29 | Caring, and the highest form of listening |
| 46:40 | Closing the gap between marketing and sales |
| 53:50 | How Topaz runs its own lead generation |
| 58:52 | The question he wishes buyers would ask |
| 1:01:55 | Closing pitch and where to find Topaz |
| Entity | What it is |
|---|---|
| Topaz Sales Consulting | His firm: sales process, sales hiring and sales management for owner-led companies |
| The status quo | His name for the competitor that wins most deals, and the one nobody lists |
| Buyer facilitators | What Topaz calls its salespeople, because the job is to help someone buy |
| Empathetic listening | Listening from the other person’s position, which he rates above active listening |
| DISC | The behavioural assessment he uses to describe his own high-urgency wiring |
| The hiring role play | The interview step he says almost nobody runs, and the one that exposes a rep who cannot sell |
Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.
topazsalesconsulting.com, where the contact form asks for a conversation rather than a demo, which is rather the point of the whole episode.
Chavez, Jorge. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “The Status Quo Is Your Biggest Competitor.” Unscripted Small Business, 2026. https://unscriptedsmallbusiness.com/the-status-quo-is-your-biggest-competitor-jorge-chavez-on-selling-without-selling/
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