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In a previous post, we talked about who the subject of your sales questions should be. But most salespeople believe the questioning process is for them. When they ask questions, they become the center of the questioning process, not the prospect.

How many times have you entered into a diagnostic session where the central thoughts in your mind were something like:

I have to ask some sales questions. Let’s get this thing over with.

I have to ask questions to impress the prospect

What do I have to ask to close this deal or move the sale forward

Most of the time, when we start asking sales questions, our attention is almost always focused on us and not on the prospect. In most cases, it’s probably the last conversation you had with your sales manager who told you ‘how much we really need this deal.’

Here’s a tip. If you write down the goals of your questioning session, you are more likely to achieve them. For example, if your goal is to discover information about their operating environment to install technical equipment, put that at the top of your notepad and make that the focus of your attention.

In all of my experiences with salespeople, those who write down the target outcomes of their sessions and take notes during the sessions outperform those salespeople who wing it.

Sales Training Exercise – Focus your Sales Questions by Removing Internal Distractions

So here’s your exercise. In addition to your notepad, get yourself a small spiral bound notebook to serve as a worry notebook.

When you’re preparing for your diagnostic session, write in your notepad the general items you want to focus on – your prospect, their company, their environment. These items will be the focus of your sales questions during your diagnostic session.

Now, before you step into the meeting with your prospect, ideally before you get out of the car, write down in your worry notebook the items that are grabbing your attention. Things like:

1. The conversation with your sales manager telling you they need this deal.
2. You session with your physician who said your blood pressure was too high.
3. Your car payment
4. Shots for the family pet

Anything of a personal nature that you think needs addressing goes into the worry notebook. Then, put that worry notebook in the glove box of your car and give yourself permission to forget about those issues for the next hour. Don’t worry. They will be there when you get back. But for the next hour during your diagnostic session with your prospect, they are in your worry notebook, leaving you free to focus on your prospect.

Remember, selling is an away game. It takes place in the mind of the prospect. That’s exactly where you need to be, in their mind, seeing the world as they see it. And you can’t do that if you are paying attention to your problems.

A Sales Example – Moving Away from Being a CommodityBe sure to get additional ideas on delivering your ideas in our latest publication, Persuasive Sales Presentations here.Early in my career, a moving company that specialized in moving older furniture wanted to work with my mentor and me to boost the effectiveness of their salespeople.

So there we were, at the table with the top leadership of this company. After the preliminaries and some early examination, we started digging in to identify the challenges.

“What’s the biggest objection you get?” I asked the sales manager.

The sales manager, the VP of sales, and the president all responded. “Price. We just get killed on price.”

Then my mentor said, “You guys have been in business this long and you’re just getting killed by the competition. There’s more competition than ever before.”

“Yeah, a lot of people are starting to get in our space,” said the sales manager.

My mentor replied, “So what I understand is you specialize more in antiques, older types of things. You don’t do office moving.”

The president chimed in. “Right. We work with estates and that type of thing. Family members of people who have passed away.”

My mentor and I spent a considerable amount of time with this client performing an exhaustive diagnostic session.  We questioned every process in their sales model trying to identify what was stopping them from getting to where they wanted to be and why they were getting hammered on price. Remember, if you’re focusing on price, you are playing in the commodities pool. And these guys weren’t selling a commodity service.

Discovering the Unique Selling Proposition
I looked at them. “Look, there has to be something about your business that’s different from everyone else. Is it how you do it?”

The VP of sales shook his head. “No. I mean, moving is moving.”

“Is it how you interact with the people?” I asked.

“No,” said the sale manager. “A lot of this stuff is through a request. We kind of find the address. Then, we do a little bit of a diagnostic, and a little bit of an evaluation.”

“Well, what’s your pricing like?” I asked.

“Well, we’re about 15-20 percent higher than everybody else,” said the VP of sales.

“Okay,” I said, giving it some thought. “Well, how much damage is done… typically… when anybody moves? If I just hired Atlas Movers, is there going to be damage to my stuff?”

“Yeah, there’s always damage,” said the sales manager. “At least 5-10 percent of the contents get damaged.”

“Well, that’s interesting,” I said. “So why are you guys more expensive?”

“We have less damage than anybody else,” said the sales manager.

I sat forward. “Can you prove it?”

“Yeah,” said the sales manager. “We can prove it a little bit.”

Presenting Your Solution With Evidence and Flair
“So, why do you have less damage than anybody else?” I asked.

The owner proudly stepped up. “Lance, it’s because of how we equip our trucks. We actually have three trucks,” he said. “And we have specially manufactured shocks on our trucks that control things around the cobblestones and winding roads in Philly.”

“Can you show me how,” I said.

“This is the way I used to sell them,” he said. “This is what I do.”

Out of his desk he pulled a balloon. He blew it up halfway. “You know what, Lance? This is how we equip our trucks. Our shock system is like this balloon. If you can imagine your contents, the truck is my top hand, the road surface is my bottom hand, and between is that shock. If we hit any bumps or turns, our system absorbs all these blows and reduces damage significantly. We’ll put our money on it. That’s why we charge more.”

I sat up in astonishment. “Do your salespeople sell like that?”

“Well, they talk about it.”

“No, no, no, no, no! Do they show prospects like you just showed me?”

He laughed. “No. They tell me it’s old-school.”

“You guys need to start doing that in your sales presentations, every time.” I said. “People need to understand the difference you bring to the table. The best way to do that is by showing them, like you just showed me.”

Your Solution Includes How You Present Your Evidence
When you get up to present your solution, your sales presentation isn’t just a session to inform your prospect. Your sales presentation is a performance. You have to present with flair and showmanship to capture your prospect’s attention and imagination. Remember, it’s not just what you say, but how you say it!

That’s using evidence and being persuasive. That’s the salesperson delivering a prescription in a way meant to convince.

Sales Training Exercise – Sales Testimonials Exercise
Here’s your assignment this week. Contact 10 of your best customers and simply talk to them.

Ask them:

First Rule About Social Selling
Here’s an observation I noticed about social selling in our current digital economy:

We live at a time where it’s easy to identify our contacts and decision-makers, and even easier to find relevant information about them, but harder than ever to reach them. If you use LinkedIn and social media to generate leads, you can find more prospecting ideas in my book, Selling is an Away Game, available at Amazon.Think about it. There are lots of people coming at you from all different directions and generating a lot of noise in the process. How often do you get a message in your inbox from a prospector or recruiter? And of those messages that don’t get  trashed by your spam filter, how many of those do you actually respond to?

Here’s a stat to consider about LinkedIn. At last count in March 2017, LinkedIn had over 500 million users. And at that time, LinkedIn’s monthly active user base (MAU) reached 265 million. Now, that’s a lot of users. But you have to remember something that I tell everyone in my programs when I talk to them about making phone calls: No one is sitting by the phone waiting for your call.  Likewise, no one is sitting at their desk, logged into LinkedIn waiting for your inmail.

So if you’re trying to contact a guy who’s (a) busy or (b) doesn’t plan on job-hunting anytime soon, he’s probably not logging into his LinkedIn account regularly. Consequently, it’s not a good way to connect with him about your solution. That’s one of the challenges with social selling. If people are out doing the things they were hired to do, then they aren’t staring at their phones preoccupied with their social media stream.

Social Selling Is a Tool, Not A Sales Strategy
Here’s a personal example. A guy I know, Jim, works for an employee benefits company. He’s in sales and has reached out several times to ask if I could setup a connection between him and someone in my LinkedIn network.

If you want to connect with me and find out the latest in sales training and assessments, you can do so at my LinkedIn profile here. Give it a click!Now, I feel like I’m your typical LinkedIn decision maker –  I use it intermittently. Jim, when he needed a referral, only communicated to me through my LinkedIn inbox. So, by the time I logged in and got to his message, it was too late to help him. Jim should have called me, emailed me, texted me or all of the above versus just putting a message in my LinkedIn mailbox.

And that’s where the rubber meets the road with social selling: It can’t exist on its own.

You have to pick up the phone, you have to take the person to lunch, or you have to get on Skype or Google Meet. Whatever the next step is, you’ve got to initiate the next step in the sales process. You have to take the initiative and make something happen.

I’ve done training with sports teams where younger sales reps will tell me, “Oh, I targeted him on LinkedIn and sent him a message.” That’s a personalized marketing process. That’s not selling! Sending isn’t selling! Sure, LinkedIn is a great platform for conducting a personal social marketing campaign. But it’s still a tool, one of many in your sales arsenal.

The Shortcomings of LinkedIn and Social Selling
When we ran our demand generation operation and generated meetings for our clients, our research revealed that it takes about 6 to 8 mixed touches to targets to make contact or yield a response. Those touches include LinkedIn, voicemail, email, USPS, and sometimes other forms of social media.

Social selling works as a way to identify leads, target decision-makers, find information when composing your impact statement, and put people in buckets. But it doesn’t work for the close. It’s not where you get the sale — or even where you make the ask.

Hopefully most people know this by now. But I still run into many freshman salespeople who seem to think there’s some magic sauce behind social selling. There’s not. It’s a good first step, or even a first and second step. But it’s not the close.

Now let’s say you start using LinkedIn and are getting some momentum. Prospects are responding and they are taking meetings. This is great news; your pipeline is starting to fill up! But there are few things to keep in mind that we found. There’s a big cancellation rate when you use social channels to set appointments. It’s not as definitive. And this can have a big impact on your time as a salesperson and the opportunities in your pipeline. A high cancellation rate could lead to you becoming a prisoner of hope.

While there is a huge opportunity for social selling in today’s marketplace, organizations still find ROI their big challenge when creating social media marketing and social selling.

5 Ideas for Using LinkedIn in Your Sales Process
Now I’ve outlined a bunch of challenges. What do you do? Here are our top 5 ideas:

Don’t be a professional stalker
Social media is a great way to to identify a target. But you also need to figure out how to engage your prospect. Remember, the first word in social media is social. So start socializing.

Critical selling conversations are not for social media
Never use one way communication for resolving objections, dealing with issues of credibility or talking about critical solutions. Pick up the phone, and have a conversation.

Use a mixed approach
Social media can be great for prospecting and keeping in touch with decision makers in your pipeline. Just make sure it’s not the only way you are prospecting and communicating. Remember, sending isn’t selling. Pick up the phone, send an email, or drop by the office if you can. Whatever it takes to get their attention and to move the sale.

Remember your sales skills
Just because you are communicating via a virtual platform, doesn’t mean you lose the key skills it takes to be successful in sales. Ask good questions, build rapport, and overcome objections. Remember, you are communicating with other people, not machines.

Develop a social  process
One of the key factors to success with social selling is your process. Develop a process for outreach. Test it, tweak it, and perfect it. Make it work for you. And remember, even a solid social selling process is only a small piece of your greater sales process.
Remember, LinkedIn is a great place to run your social marketing campaigns and chasing down your next lead. But you still have to do the hard work of introducing yourself and talking with them. Once you realize that social selling is a supplement to the sales process, not a substitute, you can start using it to open more deals and expanding your effectiveness.

You’ll find more ideas on migrating your sales skills over to your social media platforms in Lance Tyson’s book, Selling Is An Away Game: Close Business and Compete in a Complex World available on Amazon. Get your copy today!

tried a few times to engage a prospect during her sales opening. Yet when she asked a question that cut to the heart of her contact’s problem, her sales starter got her contact’s attention. And it earned her a meeting! Here’s a sales coaching tip: the more generic your sales starter, the less engaged your contact will be and the less effective your sales opening will be.

Instead, customize your sales opening specific to the contact and to their business or industry. Jessica was successful when she created her opening to address her contact’s challenges down to a personal and career-impacting level.To make that happen, Jessica had to do some research on her contact. She had to know something about her contact’s business, and the challenges her contact faced on a regular basis.

Mind you, these aren’t cold contacts. These are people in companies where you think you have a decent shot at driving some business. These are people who have already raised their hand and have in some way indicated that they are in the market for what you are selling. So take a little time to do some discovery work on these people.

Sales Training Exercise – Sales Starter Assignment
Here’s your assignment for the week. During your lunch break today, write down the top five industries that you serve. Then, for each industry, write down five companies that you are looking to break into or are looking to upsell.

Then, when you are back in the office, write down three contacts that are in a position to make a decision for each of the companies you have listed. Now, for each of those three contacts, write down:

The Specific Interest Statement in the Buying Process
To make the right diagnosis, the salesperson must align their sales process to the prospect’s buying process. The salesperson accomplishes this by making interim summaries throughout the process. For example: “Based on what you’re saying, you’re looking to address your number one or number two interest, and that’s going to address your motivation.”

This is where the salesperson makes a Specific Interest Statement. They can apply the product or service to the prospect’s needs and appeal to both the prospect’s logical and emotional reasons for buying.

As salespeople, when we ask questions, we’re going to categorize the gathered information. During that process, we’ll discover the prospect’s number one, number two, and number three interests. At the same time, our questions establish our value. They help the prospect see our eventual diagnosis and prescription as priorities.

As we noted before, we use our questions to first discover what the prospect wants. Then we discover why they want it. Why they want it is their motive, the emotional hot button. Essentially, the salesperson is selling to what the prospect wants and why they want it. If you need a reminder, go ahead and sing the sales song here.

The prospect will also have absolutes, such as price. Those absolutes shape the prospect’s priorities. For example, a prospect may want something with all the bells and whistles. But if price is an absolute, they’ll sacrifice what they see as only influential, like the bells and whistles, for something they see as necessary.

Also, remember the prospect can have several motives as well as several absolutes at play. As the salesperson, it’s your job to discover their dominant motives and absolutes, and prioritize them as necessary.

So, lay the proper groundwork by maintaining rapport and asking the right questions in the right order.

Identifying the Criteria in the Prospect’s Buying Process – An ExampleLet’s go back to the car lot example we used previously. While you are browsing the new and used models, you have your buying criteria in mind. You also have the main reason you’re buying a car. Maybe that reason is to get to work, or to shuttle your family about town. If you need a car to get to work, you’re buying that car for survival.

However, if you’re buying because you want to taxi your family around town, you might be place safety features over something that is cheap and convenient.

You also have absolutes in this car buying process. There are certain things you can and can’t afford. Pricing, monthly payments, interest rates, or a combination of those things can make the difference in the buying process.

This knowledge allows the salesperson to talk specifically to the prospect’s needs. If the prospect’s priority is safety, for example, they might be willing to forego a Bluetooth connection between their phone and the car in favor of a specific safety feature.

The Buying Process in the Sales Diagnosis
But remember, most unsolicited prospects don’t go into a sales situation realizing that they have these issues the salesperson is diagnosing. So, that means the diagnosis is about our ability as a salesperson to look somebody in the eye no matter what kind of sale it is and say, “Listen, based on what you’re saying, you’re trying to address this, and this will allow you to get your payout or impact your life in this way as a result of solving the problem.”

And that is what helps us tailor what we do. That’s what a diagnosis is: It’s our best-educated suggestion after a comprehensive investigation.

It’s up to the salesperson to get the prospect to acknowledge that the factors they outlined are correct, and then get the prospect to a point where they would be willing to listen to specific suggestions for addressing those factors. The diagnosis is about getting somebody to say, “Yes, I’ll allow you to present further, because what you say makes sense to me.”

Once the prospect says that, the salesperson can move the sale forward. But remember, the right solution for the wrong problem is worse than the wrong solution to the right problem.

Get your diagnosis right!

You’ll find more ideas on matching your sales process to the prospect’s buying process in Lance Tyson’s book, Selling Is An Away Game: Close Business and Compete in a Complex World available on Amazon. Get your copy today!

previous post, I gave an example where I coached a member of my sales team on how to resolve common sales objections at the start of the sales process before the prospect brought them up.

Here’s a tip: If you review your past sales calls and you find you’ve repeatedly addressed a particular class of sales objections, don’t become a prisoner of hope. Don’t run through your sales process *hoping* your prospect won’t bring up that particular objection.

Instead, create a general response to those objections and offer it as a solution at the start of your sales process. In the past post, time was a big issue when we sold training. I turned it around by transforming the time spent in training into time invested in personal and team improvement, a win for the company as well as the individual.

Sales Training Exercise – Sales Objections Assignment
So, here’s your assignment. Sit down at the end of today and review your calls from the previous week. Identify and write down all of the objections you faced. Keep a tab of your most popular sales objections; i.e. the ones you encounter multiple times throughout the week.

Next, create a solution, or solutions, to address those sales objections, and create a general response based on those solutions.

Then, when you deliver your presentation, lead off with your solution to address the problem before they bring it up. You’ll reduce your sales cycle time and your prospects will perceive you as a forward-thinking business consultant.

I spoke about empathy and sympathy and how it’s better to be sympathetic to the client’s situation vs being empathetic and joining them in the situation. Let’s delve a little deeper into that and see how we can use this to influence the sale process.

Diagnosing is a delicate business. Doesn’t matter if I’m solving a need or creating an opportunity when I’m selling my product or service. I need to be sympathetic to the prospect’s conditions and help them face their situation. In other words, I have to do something I said previously I would never do. I have to tell the prospect in a nice way that “their kid is ugly.”

Diagnosing is a delicate business. Essentially, we need to tell our prospect in a nice way that their kid is ugly.
Find more ideas on influence in the sales process in my book, Selling is an Away Game, available at Amazon.As salespeople, we are identifying that gap between where a prospect is and where they want to be. Essentially, we’re telling them that they have a problem, need to make a change, or need to make a commitment. And we have to be careful when stating our diagnosis. We don’t want to make the prospect feel the pain or imply that they are incapable of taking action.

Remember, we are selling to people. And people are creatures of emotion. Now, your prospect is stuck at an impasse that they can’t or don’t want to address. Otherwise, they would already have moved from where they are to where they want to be. There would be no gap and no reason for you be talking with them. So break out the velvet before using the hammer. Be respectful and sympathetic to their situation, but also be firm and dedicated to addressing the problem.

Influence is not Manipulation
Picture this: you are at a nice restaurant with people you want to impress. So you order a fine Napa Cabernet. After a few moments, the sommelier comes back with an alternative bottle because the one you ordered was out of stock.  There’s that moment of sheer panic when you see the bottle they’ve selected is way out of your price range. And addressing the situation at that moment is just awkward. So what do you do?

Well, a good salesperson would have read the situation and presented you with a comparable bottle. A bad salesperson, however, might take advantage of the situation to stick you with a $400 Merlot that has been sitting in the cellar for twenty years. They are banking on the fact that you wouldn’t ask the price in front of your guests. Or they believe they can easily guilt you into buying it if by chance you did happen to ask.

Manipulating and guilting someone into a buy is just a sucky way to do business. Period. Don’t do it.

The key to good diagnosing is leading the buyer to the gap. Ultimately, if you asked the right questions, you can actually make it their idea. It’s a lot harder for someone to walk away from their own idea than it is from your idea.

Achieving Influence by Aligning Your Ideas with Theirs
Here’s an example. We had an opportunity to pitch to an iconic pro-sports team, the Boston Red Sox (Fenway Sports Management). We had initial meetings with senior-level executives and got to meet with their EVP of Sales and Operations, John Clark. In this meeting, John did a wonderful job describing the historical significance of Fenway Park, how his business ran at all levels, their sales philosophy, how they were managed, how they sold and marketed, and how the marketplace perceived them. As we guided him through the questions about his current and past situations, he found it easier to talk about what needed to change and what needed to get better.

We also asked him, if he were in our position, how he would approach training his sales team and coaching his sales managers. He was then able to talk about the same things, but in the frame of the desired situation. He told us where he was, where he wanted to go, and how he would approach things if he were us.

We came back to him a few weeks later. But instead of submitting a run-of-the-mill proposal, we presented a tailored discussion document.

Our first two pages listed what he said about his current and desired situations. Essentially, we showed him the gap between where he currently was and where he wanted to be.

When we presented our recommendations, we based them all on his ideas. Remember, it’s hard to argue against your own ideas. Guess who was influenced to act by the recommendations?

Sales Debrief: Achieving Influence in the Sales Process
Let’s revisit the doctor visit analogy. You go into the doctor’s office for an exam. You review all of your vitals like weight and blood pressure. Then, you review your symptoms to find out how sick you are, and comparing everything to what they should be. The remedy is more of a realization of what it will take to get well. Eventually it becomes your idea.

The skillful salesperson designs questions that lead buyers to realize there’s an opportunity to fill a gap or address a need. Don’t let your questioning process be a haphazard collection of curiosities. As you lead your prospect through the sales process, use your questions to reach a diagnosis with your prospect that’s going to solve their problem.

You’ll find more ideas on achieving influence through your questioning process in Lance Tyson’s book, Selling Is An Away Game: Close Business and Compete in a Complex World available on Amazon. Get your copy today!

The Role of Sympathy and Empathy in the Sales Process

Here’s something I learned in my past about the roles sympathy and empathy play in the sales process. Keep in mind, you are sitting across from your prospective buyer because you want to help them solve their problem, not become a part of the problem.

When I went to college, the only way I could get a scholarship was by becoming a resident assistant, or an RA.  I learned if I became an RA, the system picked up my room and board. At the time, I thought it was a great gig. However, I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into.

They taught a program called Counseling 302, where we had to understand that we might have people on our floor who could be dealing with some major issues. At the start, I didn’t take it seriously. My attitude was more like Mel Gibson’s from the first Lethal Weapon movie.

Remember in the movie when Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Murtaugh (Danny Glover) had a jumper on top of a building? The dude was going to commit suicide and Riggs went up there and was like, “just jump.” The guy was taken aback. After a lengthy conversation, Riggs handcuffed himself to the guy and called his bluff by saying, “You wanna jump? We’re going to jump.”

I was Riggs before I went to Counseling 302. I didn’t quite grasp the concept that there were people who had some real mental challenges. At that time, I based everything on my own experiences. I would have told the poor guy to jump. Or said something like, “Just stop eating, man. You’ll die. Mission accomplished.”

The Challenge with Empathy in Sales

After going through Counseling 302 though, I realized that people have real issues they have to deal with, and some of those issues can be overwhelming. Through this program, I gained a healthy respect for the counseling process. In one project, we had to do counseling which involved asking all the right questions. That’s when I learned the importance of empathy.

Here’s the challenge. Empathy requires a deep connection, and it’s hard. You and I would need to jump off the side of the building together, hold hands, live, and ask each other how we felt afterward. It’s hard to do. In many sales situations that I’ve seen over the years, empathy is not something you want to do, and here’s why.

If a salesperson is being truly empathetic, they won’t challenge the buyer when an objection stalls the process, or the sales process enters the negotiation phase. When you empathize with your prospect, you take on their mindset and their emotional state. You start identifying with their challenges and you start to buy into the reasons why they haven’t reached their desired situation.

One training insight from the sales profession is that somebody is gonna get sold. Either you’re gonna sell the prospect on why they need what you are selling, or they’re gonna sell you on why they can’t buy it. And if you empathize with your prospect, you’ve just been sold.

Leave the empathy for the practicing clinicians and counselors. There’s just no room for empathy in sales.

In Sales, Being Sympathetic to Your Prospect’s Ideas Pays Dividends
Instead, be sympathetic to their ideas, thoughts, and situation. When you are sympathetic to their situation, you can understand their problem without becoming a part of their problem.

If you can see the world through your prospect’s eyes, you can sell your prospect what they want to buy. However, immediately following that, he states that you should be sympathetic to your prospect’s ideas and desires.

I think you should be sympathetic to people’s ideas and desires, because, after all, they gave birth to them. You wouldn’t tell someone who just had a newborn baby that their kid was ugly. I’ve seen some ugly kids, but I would never tell a new mother that her kid was ugly. Why? Because she gave birth to that baby.

When selling, managing, and leading our teams, we spend a lot of time callously telling our people that their ideas are wrong. But we never stop to consider that they actually gave birth to them. I think the concept that we can always revisit as salespeople is to try to honestly see things from the other person’s point of view. For me, that’s the most important rule out of the thirty rules in the book How to Win Friends and Influence People. And once we have that perspective, we should always be sympathetic to their ideas and desires. It’s one of the best ways to win their trust and support.

Sales Process Debrief
So, to review, in sales and in sales management, try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view, but be sympathetic to their ideas, thoughts, and situations. You want to be able to help them through their challenges, not become a part of their problem.

You’ll find additional ideas and methods for achieving rapport with your clients in Lance Tyson’s book, Selling Is An Away Game: Close Business and Compete in a Complex World available on Amazon. Get your copy today!

last post, I wrote of using your questions not only to get your prospect’s attention but to also keep their interest by selling to the gap. I also wrote that your meeting is shaped by the questions that you ask, the order you ask them and how you ask them. As I’ve said before, sales is an away game – it takes place in your prospect’s mind. So, you control the pace of the sale by getting in your prospect’s mind, focusing their attention on the challenges they face, and leading them to a place they want to be. A vital piece of this process is talking like your prospect to increase rapport.

Insights into Your Prospect’s Internal Conversation
Consider this. Let’s go back to when we were kids. I don’t know about your parents, but I’m guessing they are going to be a lot like the parents of most of the people that I’ve talked to. That is, our parents used nicknames or familiar names when addressing us most of the time. When they broke out the formal form of your name, you knew they meant business. And when they added your middle name to the mix, you knew you were in trouble!

For instance:

“Jimmy, could you take out the trash?”

Half an hour goes by and Jimmy hasn’t taken out the trash.

“Jim, please take out the trash.”

Another 30 minutes goes by and Jimmy still hasn’t taken out the trash.

“James. Take out the trash!”

And another 30 minutes goes by and the trash is still in the house.

“James Tiberius Kirk! Did you take out the trash like I told you to do?”
You see the progression?

The Tyranny of the ‘Why’ Question
These discussions typically advanced to the next stage where our parents would ask the dreaded ‘why’ question:

“Did you take out the trash like I told you?”

“No”

“Why not?”
Or

“Did you tear the bumper off the car last night?”

“Yeah.”

“Why did you do that?”
Or

“Did you eat the last of the roast beef without telling anybody?”

“Yeah.”

“Why did you do that?”
These interrogations never made us feel good. Truth be told, they aren’t meant to make us feel good.

And we are putting our prospect in that same position every time we use ‘why’ questions in our process.

For instance:

“We decided to go with Fidelity’s financial services for our employees.”

“I can appreciate that. Your employees are important. Why did you choose Fidelity?”
Or

“Our previous car was a Ford Taurus.”

“Ford is a good car manufacturer. Why did you choose the Taurus?”
Every time we break out the ‘why’ questions, we challenge our prospect’s decision-making process and put him or her on the defensive, pulling up those feelings from the good old days when our parents were questioning our judgment.

Now, don’t get me wrong. ‘Why’ questions are important. They aren’t good or bad. They have a use.  But we slow down the sales process when we use them as a crutch instead of exercising a little brain power and using a different set of questions to uncover relevant information.

The Alternative – Ask Questions Like Their Friends
An alternative to relying on the ‘why’ question also comes from our past. While our parents, our teachers, and any figure of authority were questioning our nascent decision-making process with ‘why’ questions, our friends were taking a different approach. And they were getting better results!

“Wow! Did you really pull Sarah Jane’s hair?”

“Yep.”

“How come?”
Or

“Hey, did you really tell Biff the Bully you weren’t going to do his homework anymore?”

“Yeah!”

“Wow! How come?”
Our pals were less judgmental. So, we typically viewed their questions as a statement of admiration instead of a challenge of our reasoning process. As a result, the mental baggage that comes with asking a ‘why’ question is absent when you simply ask, “how come?”

I discovered this small quirk early in my sales career and have used this phraseology since. It’s part of a larger framework that I highlight in all my consultations and programs. It follows this simple philosophy:

Salespeople who can talk like regular folks and not like they just got out of an MBA program tend to do well.

My advice to you is to talk like your prospect. Use their language and honestly see the world from their perspective.  That will help you immensely with your questioning process when you dive into your evaluation and diagnosis.