Credits & lineage

Standing on other people's shoulders

Virtual Sales Mastery is a system for applying proven sales research to selling through a screen. Most of what it teaches is built on published work by people who did the original thinking, and this page says plainly who they are and what we owe them.

We give our frameworks internal names so they're teachable as one connected system. A name is not a claim of authorship. Where a framework rests on someone else's research, the credit belongs to them.

The six frameworks and who they're credited to

Our name for it	Credited to
Diagnostic Dialogue	Neil Rackham & Huthwaite International SPIN Selling, 1988
Insight-Led Influence	Matthew Dixon & Brent Adamson at CEB (now Gartner) The Challenger Sale, 2011
The Resonance Roadmap	Jeremy Miner NEPQ
The Trust Equation	David Maister, Charles Green & Robert Galford The Trusted Advisor, 2000
The Value Wedge	Tim Riesterer & Erik Peterson Corporate Visions
The Commitment Ladder	Robert Cialdini Commitment and consistency

These names are ours; the underlying ideas are theirs. If a framework here is useful to you, the primary sources are worth your time — they go deeper than any course summary can.

What is genuinely ours

The Five-Level Digital Engagement Scale is Andrew D. Elliott's own. He built it from a pattern he noticed reviewing his own calls, it became the vocabulary his team adopted, and it is the spine the rest of the system hangs on. The work of adapting the frameworks above for virtual selling — the scoring bands, the checklists, the scripts, the worked examples, and the sequencing that connects them to the Scale — is also ours.

Adapting someone's framework for a new medium is real work. It is not the same as inventing it.

We would rather be the people who say so.

Corrections welcome

If you believe a framework taught here owes credit that is missing from this page, tell us and we will fix it. That is a standing invitation, not a formality — support@thevirtualsalesacademy.com.

The tools

The frameworks, made usable on your next call

Score every call on the Five-Level Digital Engagement Scale, prep with framework-anchored AI prompts, and verify a champion against seven signals.

See the quick-win tools →