Advanced Sales Techniques

A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing

The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Advanced Sales Techniques course, in the Sales, Service & Revenue category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.

Selling at the advanced level is not louder selling. It is more exact selling. The beginner's problem is coverage: enough calls, enough questions, enough asks. The experienced seller's problem is precision: the one question that reaches the fact the buyer has been protecting, the thirty seconds of silence that lets a real concern surface, the single piece of evidence that matches the single doubt actually in the room, the written proposal that a buyer can defend to a partner who never met you, and the closing move that converts goodwill into a dated, owned, real next step.

This is a second-level course. It assumes the basics are already yours — preparing for a call, opening it cleanly, asking basic questions, presenting basic features, asking for basic business — and it teaches what experienced sellers actually get wrong after the basics stop being the problem: discovery that stops at the first polite answer, proposals that read beautifully and decide nothing, objections answered too fast and therefore answered twice, and accounts won once and never grown.

One firm, one seller, one quarter. The whole course runs on Armitage Commercial, a fictional seller of commercial kitchen systems, its lead seller Maren Cole, and one quarter's pipeline stated in full — every worked dialogue and both capstones draw on that firm and that cast, in figures that never change from concept to concept, so you can recompute every number yourself.

It works in two movements. First, Module 1 — Reaching the Truth: Discovery, Questions, and Proof — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The Case Before the Ask; then, Module 2 — Converting the Truth: Presentation, Objections, and Commitment — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Commitment and Growth Plan.

Both capstones produce real artifacts — The Case Before the Ask, a discovery and case plan for a live Armitage deal, the document a senior seller builds before asking anyone for anything; and The Commitment and Growth Plan, proposal logic, objection handling, closing steps, and the growth and referral moves that follow a win, for a second deal.

The honesty discipline is part of the course. No commercial selling system or branded method is named, and no research percentages, win-rates, or close-rate benchmarks are cited as findings: every figure is the running firm's own fictional ledger figure, stated once and restated identically, or arithmetic shown in full so you can check it with a pencil.

The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.

This is the one hundred and ninety-eighth course in The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.