The Most Important Word in Sales

One word changes the quality of every sales conversation. Most reps underuse it.

Don't forget to check out last week's top tip: One Contact Won't Cut It!

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If you prefer to read - here is the transcript:

So I was recently reading a report that talked about how executives view salespeople. And in that report, there were two things that really stood out to me.

One of them was that they wanted us to show up as trusted advisors, but we show up as tacticians. And two, we don't nearly know enough about their business. We don't ask enough questions. And I found that a little disheartening, because I would guess that 99% of sales training out there is all around asking questions. Yet we haven't seemed to absorb that as a seller.

So what kinds of questions should we be asking? You know, I think that we need to get to the reasons why a customer wants to make a change. Oftentimes, we jump too quickly. The customer comes to us and they say they want to do X, and we say great, how many do you need? We think we've asked questions. We instead need to be asking questions around why.

Why is it that you want to accomplish that? What is causing problems in your organization? When did you first notice those problems? What improvement would you like to see? What else have you looked at? So truly digging in around that one point when they say they'd like to improve.

workplace productivity..” Why? What is it today? What should it be? Who is driving for that change? Who stormed into your office and said we need to improve workplace productivity? Should we get those people involved? You can see how many questions that you can dig into all along that one piece of improving productivity.

We need to improve the quality of our own products, if the customer said that. Or we need to improve our own sales.. Why? It's a great question, right?

We're seeing too much waste. Where are you seeing that waste? How long has it been happening? Did something happen that caused you to notice this? Did other people come into the organization?

Really dig in and ask the questions around why a customer is trying to make the change? What change they're hoping to make. What metrics they're hoping to use to measure that, and how it would improve the organization. And that's a great start to asking questions. Now there are hundreds more questions that you could be asking.

And I encourage you to visit engage selling.com, type in the word questions in our search bar and you will come up with tens, if not hundreds of articles or videos that I've written that detail thousands of questions that you could be asking in the sales cycle.