If there is one thing that I have discovered after mentoring thousands of small business owners, it’s that nearly all of them have no formal sales experience and generally suck at it. Poor sales conversions are not a result of a lack of effort on the part of the small business. Most recognize the value of sales to keep their pipeline full and work pretty hard at it, but most have never been exposed to a selling system and, as a result, work hard but not smart. Too many small businesses spend too much time talking and not using sales discovery questions to get the prospect to give them the data needed to analyze the opportunity and propose a target solution.
As consumers, we are exposed to pitches from lots of small businesses. Most small businesses have no roadmap to convert a passive lead or active referral into a sale. As consumers, we so often experience bad sales encounters that we think this must be how sales presentations are done. Moreover, many small business owners come from a technical background, and sales techniques are foreign to them.
Ask Questions, Don’t Pitch
Brian Tracy, a sales maven and the author of The Psychology of Selling, shares how he got into sales and a nugget of sales wisdom that changed everything.
When he started working for a Fortune 500 company as a junior salesperson, Brian said he was handed a stack of brochures and told to start cold-calling prospects. Brian shared that after six months of working nearly every waking hour, he could barely make a living from sales.
One salesperson Brian observed came in late and left early, yet he was the top salesperson in their office. So, one day, Brian approached this top salesperson and asked him what he did differently to be as successful with less effort.
The top salesperson asked Brian to share his sales presentation so he could provide him with some feedback. Not having a sales presentation of his own, Brian asked the star salesperson to share his. Brian discovered that the presentation was not about sharing the features and benefits or even trying to sell the product. The sales presentation consisted of a series of sales discovery questions, from general to specific, ideally suited for the target prospect.
The top salesperson never tried to convince his prospect to buy anything. Instead, he used the sales discovery questions to take the prospect on a journey of discovery so that at the end of the sales presentation, the prospect convinced themselves that they needed the product he was selling.
Brian learned from that single encounter that rather than using push-energy to persuade the prospect to buy, which is so common in sales, he could use pull-energy to engage and attract the prospect with a series of sales discovery questions to guide the prospect on a path of self-discovery. Moreover, the answers gained during the discovery session gave him the ammunition to overcome any potential roadblocks that might prevent the sale from reaching fruition later in the process.
Too many small businesses see sales presentations as an opportunity to vomit up every conceivable reason a prospect should buy what they are selling. Unfortunately, that process is ineffective because it is not about you and your business but the prospect’s needs, challenges, and goals. Therefore, I recommend that small businesses delete their sales presentation where they talk about the features and benefits of their solution and instead use their first encounter with the prospect as a discovery session to understand more about the prospect’s needs, challenges, and goals. So instead of using that first meeting as an opportunity to talk about you and your company, get the prospect to do most of the talking as you explore the opportunity further.
Uncovering the “Why”
One problem with using a sales presentation to pitch your product or service without a clear understanding of the prospect’s needs, challenges, and goals is that you will not know how to position your solution and respond to objections later in the process. As a result, many deals will fail to come to fruition and get stalled during the process. Therefore, every new prospect should be given a discovery call right from the start, using a series of sales discovery questions to uncover the prospect’s pain points and challenges so you can understand the “What.” Once you discover a pain point or challenge, the questioning needs to probe deeper to find the “Why” so you can thoroughly analyze the opportunity.
Most small businesses encounter a prospect who wants a demo and pricing information during the first meeting to qualify you and your business as a potential solution provider. The prospect often wants to control the meeting, which too many novice small business salespeople are happy to relinquish to appease the prospect. However, according to Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson’s study, which resulted in their book titled “The Challenger Sale,” they suggest that the challenger archetype, which incidentally is responsible for most sales, embodies what they call the three-Ts Teach, Tailor, and Take Control.
Therefore, great salespeople resist the urge to allow the prospect to take control of a sales meeting and instead use the meeting as a discovery call to better understand the prospect and their company.
Discover Session Pre-Work – Understanding the Emotional Drivers
Before you ever meet with a prospect, recognize that they have gone through a series of emotions to get to the point where they agreed to meet with you. As the salesperson, your need to do a bit of introspection before any meeting to define what emotions the prospect is likely feeling now and how you want the prospect to feel after your meeting. Without the ability to understand the prospect’s starting point emotions and how you want them to feel after the meeting, you can’t guide them on their buying journey to achieve an emotional transformation that will lead them to take action and accept your offer.
In his book, Sell Different! Lee B. Salz recommends that you make a list of all the emotional states of mind that the prospect may have pre-meeting. Below is an alphabetical list of some typical states of mind a prospect may experience, which he has provided in his book and from which you can choose:
Accountable
Afraid
Angry
Anxious
Behind
Competitive
Complacent
Concerned
Confident
Confused
Creative
Defeated
Disappointed
Disrespected
Empowered
Energized
Envious
Euphoric
Excited
Exposed
Fearful
Frustrated
Happy
Informed
Inspired
Interested
Intrigued
Invested
Nervous
Optimistic
Overconfident
Overwhelmed
Pessimistic
Responsible
Sad
Satisfied
Scared
Skeptical
Supported
Sympathetic
Terrified
Timid
Trumped
Understanding
Unempowered
Uninformed
Unsupported
Worried
Next, list the emotional states of mind that you want the prospect to feel after your meeting, indicating why you expect them to feel that way.
For example, you may assess that the prospect may feel confused and overwhelmed, having been asked to implement a solution they have only a cursory knowledge of before your meeting. But, after the meeting, you want the prospect to feel confident that you are the right provider because you helped educate them and supported them, knowing that you will help coach them to present your solution to the other decision influencers.
Identifying the start and endpoints of the prospect’s emotional state of mind is easy. Now you need to define a plan during your discovery call to transform their emotional state of mind from what you think they feel before your discovery meeting to how you want them to feel after it.
The goal of your meeting is to get the prospect to have an emotional transformation during the meeting. If the right questions are not asked upfront, you will not know where you need to probe a bit deeper to find the root cause of their emotions to share the part of your solution that will address their root issues.
Ask Open-Ended, Not Close-Ended Questions
One problem with many small businesses is that they have never been taught how to construct good questions that yield quality data about the prospect. As a salesperson, you need to be unrelenting in your curiosity to uncover the depths of the prospect’s issues. Therefore, you need to use open-ended and not closed-ended questions during your discovery session.
When constructing questions, I avoid the following initial words that tend to precede a closed-ended question that a prospect can simply answer with either a yes or a no response, providing limited value and failing to keep the prospect engaged.
Do…
Is…
Did…
Can…
Could…
Are there/you…
Instead, I rely on the following initial words that tend to precede an open-ended question that will cause the prospect to pause and can’t be answered with a simple yes or no response.
Who…
What…
Where…
Why…
Tell me…
How…
Describe…
Horizontal vs. Vertical Questions
There are two types of sales discovery questions you should use during your discovery call: horizontal and vertical questions.
Initially, horizontal questions are designed to uncover the “What.” Horizontal questions are used to discover pain points and challenges the prospect may be experiencing. Most salespeople only ask horizontal questions. When they discover a pain point or challenge, they stop asking questions and revert to pitching their solution before fully understanding the pain point or challenge.
However, when you discover either a pain point or challenge that the prospect is feeling, you should switch to asking a series of vertical questions to discover the “Why” behind it so you can determine the parts of your solution that can address them. Failure to do this prevents you from fully understanding the problem.
For example, rather than simply asking the horizontal question, “What is the date that you will need the solution implemented?” and stopping there to ask another horizontal question, use their answer to probe a bit deeper to discover why that date is important. You might follow up by asking, “What is the reason that date is so important? What are the ramifications if, for some reason, the solution is not fully implemented on that date? What has to happen on your end to achieve that implementation date? And so on. According to Lee Salz, you need to be absolutely insatiable and unrelenting in your use of vertical questioning to gain the information to analyze the opportunity fully. Remember, your use of vertical questions is designed to collectively uncover the “Why” behind the “What.”
One thing you are trying to ascertain by asking a series of vertical questions is whether the pain point or challenge is just an inconvenience or a real problem. Few prospects will respond to an issue that is simply an inconvenience, but they will take action when it is a problem. People solve problems with solutions.
As an Invisible Fencing dealer, we asked horizontal questions such as “Why are you looking for a fence” to uncover a pain point or challenge. If they answered to keep their dog in the backyard, we would always ask vertical questions such as why is that important? How big is your yard? Is your dog an escape artist? Is your dog a digger? Do you have a garden or flower bed in your backyard that the dog gets into? Is maintenance free important? Does your dog ever escape out the front door, and so on.
If the only goal was to keep the dog in the backyard, the prospect had the option of installing a wooden stockade fence that could keep the dog contained and provide a degree of privacy while keeping other dogs out. In some cases, a stockade fence might be more cost-effective given a small backyard. Most of my competitors simply stopped when they heard the challenge of keeping the dog in the backyard, measured the yard’s perimeter, and provided a quote.
But by probing the prospect with a series of vertical questions, we were able to position our solution against the prospect’s other options and were even able to address gain points that the prospect was not aware of, such as our ability to encircle the entire yard including across the driveway and creating interior zones to keep their dog away from gardens and such, creating the necessary energy to bring the sale to fruition. With our deeper understanding of the prospect’s problem, we were able to take what the prospect saw as an inconvenience and inject energy into the deal by exposing it as a problem and creating a sense of urgency that our solution could solve in a way that their other options could not, so they took action.
Do you use sales discovery questions to control the buyer’s journey and uncover their needs, challenges, and goals?
