The Book

Diagnostic Sales™

11 chapters that dismantle everything you've been taught about sales — and rebuild it on a foundation of systems thinking, empathy, and diagnostic logic.

Miroslav Ćurčić · Serbian edition: Mikro knjiga, Belgrade, 2026 · ISBN 978-86-7555-483-7. This is not a collection of motivational quotes. It is a technical manual for selling: a repeatable process from first contact to decision, three models for finding your way through complex conversations, and a system you can hand to a new hire on day one.

Read the excerpt Talk to the author

About the book

Trust is the biggest currency in sales.

This book shows how trust is built: with a system, not with charm.

Diagnostic Sales™ starts the moment a seller takes responsibility for the quality of the buyer's decision. Not the one signed in the meeting, but the one that has to survive implementation, everyday pressure and time. Buyers feel it straight away: someone here is working for their result. That feeling creates trust, and trust creates decisions that last and customers who come back.

The book records a system that grew out of practice, from trying to pass one salesperson's way of working on to others without losing quality. That effort produced the Sales ARC™, a four-phase conversation framework (Agreement, Root Cause, Choices, Soft Landing), and the Sales Meta-ARC, three layers above it: inner stance, checking assumptions, and the system the decision lives in. Alongside them comes the Sales Growth Wheel, a development model for the diagnostic seller, and a clear picture of what changes when artificial intelligence joins the conversation.

It offers no scripts. It offers a way of thinking that stays relevant when tools, markets and technologies change, because trust cannot be copied.

What is Diagnostic Sales™?

Inside the Book

What You'll Learn

Written for practitioners, not theorists. Every chapter connects to real-world situations across industries — from IT and construction to finance, retail, and education.

Part I: Foundations

The basic concept of diagnostic sales. Why the shift from persuasion to diagnosis is not just ethical — it's more effective. Output vs. Outcome explained.

Part II: The System

Introduction to Sales ARC™.

Part III: The Practice

Diagnostic conversations, objection reframing, partnership building. Practical tools for implementing diagnostic thinking in your daily work.

Part IV: The Myths

12 widely-held sales beliefs that damage relationships and reduce effectiveness. Each myth examined, challenged, and replaced with diagnostic alternatives.

Part V: The Future

AI as infrastructure for diagnostic sales. How artificial intelligence amplifies human judgment rather than replacing it. The diagnostic sales professional of 2030.

Part VI: Application

Case studies from real organizations. Templates, frameworks, and conversation guides you can use immediately with your team.

Contents

Eleven chapters

Plus a glossary of technical and foreign terms, references, an index and a note about the author.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chapter 2

The core concept of Diagnostic Sales

Chapter 3

System and context: B2B, B2C and systemic reality

Chapter 4

The sales conversation cycle and the Diagnostic Sales ARC™

Chapter 5

Sales Meta-ARC: three layers above the operational Sales ARC™

Chapter 6

Sales Growth Wheel: the professional identity of the diagnostic seller

Chapter 7

Self-mastery: the centre of professional stability

Chapter 8

Myths in sales and why they matter

Chapter 9

KPIs of Diagnostic Sales

Chapter 10

Diagnostic Sales and artificial intelligence

Chapter 11

The Diagnostic Sales manifesto

This book is for anyone who has ever felt that the traditional sales playbook doesn't match how real decisions are made. Whether you're a seasoned sales leader looking to transform your team's approach, a founder who wants to build a sales culture rooted in genuine understanding, or a consultant seeking a framework that works across industries.

It's particularly relevant for sales professionals, organizational consultants, agile coaches, and anyone who works at the intersection of complex systems and human decisions.

In particular: salespeople, account managers and consultants who sell complex solutions in processes that take time and involve several decision-makers; owners and leaders who know that the way a company sells is the way it thinks; marketing, product and support teams, where one promise and a different delivery quickly burn trust; and innovators building new products, processes or AI agents that lead part of the conversation with a customer.

Who it is not for

Anyone looking for quick tricks, pressure scripts or a way to “close the deal” regardless of the consequences. If getting the offer accepted matters more to you than a decision that holds up over time, this approach will feel too demanding.

From the Introduction

What Diagnostic Sales is

Diagnostic Sales is what good doctors do when you walk into their office. They do not hand you medicine the moment you say you have a headache. They ask where it hurts, since when, what you ate, how you sleep. Only once they have a picture of your condition do they prescribe a treatment.

A doctor who answers “I have a headache” with an aspirin is a medicine vending machine. A seller who answers an enquiry with an instant quote is a price vending machine.

This book teaches you to be a diagnostician: to ask the right questions, in the right order, of the right person, so the customer gets a recommendation they trust because they feel the seller understood their system.

And most important of all: the system has to work without you in the room. Your employee has to master it, or your AI, or ideally both, because a system that depends on one person always comes with limits.

A warning before you go further. Diagnosis is not a shortcut. It takes patience, genuine interest in someone else's problem, and the integrity to say “I don't have a solution for you” when that is the truth. If you are looking for a trick to “close” a client quickly, this is not the book for you. If you are looking for a system that moves knowledge out of your head and into the structure of your company, you are in the right place.

— Diagnostic Sales, Chapter 1: Introduction (Serbian edition, translated)