3
mine for gold
(STEP TWO: ASK PROBING QUESTIONS)
In selling, as in medicine, prescription before diagnosis is malpractice.
You can find street vendors on nearly every corner in New York City.
They set up their tables, roll out their trunks, set up their tchotchkes and fakes, and go to work. They try to entice every passerby. They want everybody—anybody—to buy what they’ve got.
On the other side of the world in my native Victoria, Zack owns a business-coaching franchise. Despite the sophistication that comes with his line of work, his approach to sales was less like Jude’s and more like a New York street hawker’s.
Whereas Jude skipped the agenda and went into interrogation mode—all he was missing was a dark room and a spotlight hanging over the prospect’s head—Zack skipped the questions altogether and went straight into the pitch.
Shortly after he answered an inbound phone call, he’d launch into all the courses his franchise offered, the benefits of each, how they were structured, prices and payments, and more and more and more. The prospect would sit on the other end of the line as if in front of a fire hydrant, drowning in information. When Zack was finished, he’d sit back and wait to see which of those options the prospect wanted, even as the person was still trying to come up for air.
Like a street vendor, he displayed all his wares at once and left it up to the customers to decide which one they needed. He didn’t want to “sell,” manipulate, or persuade the prospects. He didn’t want to feel like the sleazy salesman trying to get them to buy. Zack’s approach was to present the courses he sold and leave everything else to the customers.
Those on the other side of the line, however, didn’t fully understand what Zack sold (even if they thought they did) or how it suited their specific wants and needs. Often, customers aren’t even fully aware of what their real problem is. I’ve had plenty of people call wanting to hire me to coach them or their sales team, only to discover that sales training would only partially solve their problem. After questioning, I may find, for example, that they compete in a saturated market and need to redefine their niche and unified message. Customers often don’t know what they need. After all, they aren’t the expert—you are.
FIND THE BLEEDING
I’m sure you’ve read Theodore Levitt’s quip that “people don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill bit—they want a quarter-inch hole.” They want a solution to their problem, not just a tool to fix it.
Some of my clients come to me saying they need sales training. I say, “No, you don’t; you want more customers. Well, actually, you just want to make more profit, don’t you? I mean, when you think about it, you don’t really care if you have more sales or get more customers. At the end of the day, you just want to make more profit. So let’s talk about how we make that happen.”
Think of it like going to the doctor. I’m not a medical expert; when something’s wrong, I just know that something’s wrong. I don’t go see the doctor already armed with the knowledge of my treatment plan, the prescriptions I need, and which tests need to be run. I need help, but I lack the expertise to figure out what that looks like. I may even go online and do my own “research,” but it might lead me to a false conclusion and a bad self-diagnosis.
That’s why we pay for experts: Doctors draw on their experience with past patients to identify potential causes and then continue to ask more and more specific questions until they have a pretty good idea of the cause of the pain.
Your back pain may actually be kidney trouble. Your weight gain could be indicative of a thyroid problem. Your dyslexia could be misdiagnosed Irlen Syndrome.
You want your prospects to think of you like I thought of the sales clerk who helped me select $3,000 worth of clothing: Finally! Here’s someone I can trust to advise me! You want them to think of you like they think of their doctor or accountant: an expert whose advice they trust and follow to the letter.
It’s been years since I called myself a salesman. I’m not; I’m a consultant. I don’t just sell a product or service; I consult on people’s problems and get them their desired outcome. Once I understand the goal they’re trying to achieve—and we both agree on what the true pain or challenge is—then I can suggest some solutions.
Likewise, you don’t want to just address their pain. That’s tempting because it’s an easier sell. But if you’re truly going to add value, you need to focus on solving the real problem. If I suffer a deep cut that results in internal bleeding, a bandage only hides the problem; I’m still losing blood.
If you’re a student of sales literature at all, this practice should be old news. You want to “probe for pain,” right? Discover the underlying cause (aka, where they’re bleeding the most) and then implement a solution (aka, find something to cure what ails them).
Wouldn’t it be nice if it was as easy as being a doctor and your prospects just trusted you? Imagine that as soon as you asked, “Okay, so what’s your problem?” they’d just open up.
Sometimes a customer will do that, especially if you’ve done your marketing right. These days, thanks to strong marketing, I have calls with potential clients who booked weeks or months prior. I thank them for booking a call and let them know how grateful I am that we get to chat. I then say that while I’ve reviewed their website and read the notes from their booking email, because it’s been many weeks or months since then, I’d like to start by asking where they’re at now, what they’re struggling with, and what they need help with most in the thirty minutes we have together. And the client just opens up.
But in the case of me going door-to-door selling telecom plans to small-shop owners who didn’t need or want to change plans (or maybe didn’t care enough to do so), they didn’t share anything. The only problem they had was an acne-faced teenager in a polyester suit trying to sell them something they didn’t want to buy in the first place.
Door number ninety-three—my very first sale as a “professional” salesman—was a pawnshop. The guy basically bought and sold junk: used watches, old stereos, and secondhand sporting equipment. As I walked in, I thought, What am I even doing wasting my time here? This guy isn’t going to buy business telecom plans. He probably doesn’t even have a business phone.
Nevertheless, I soldiered on.
As it turns out, the owner had been thinking about getting a mobile phone. Of course, he wanted the absolute cheapest option. As we continued talking, I said, “Well, if you’re going to get a mobile for your business, then you probably want a 1-800 number, too. After all, no one is going to take a business advertising with an 04 number”—all cell phones in Australia begin with that prefix—“as a legitimate business.” He agreed. After a bit more conversation, I said, “Why aren’t you on the Internet?”
“Should I be?” he asked.
“Of course you should. You’re paying all this money to rent a shop for passerby traffic. Think about selling to anyone with a computer! Do you know what you could do? I heard about this guy . . . ,” and then I sold him an Internet package. Well, if he wanted to have Internet, he needed a landline. (This was back in the days of dial-up modems.) So I sold him a landline, too.
Do you see where I’m going with this? He’d already been thinking about getting a mobile phone, but as I asked him questions, we unearthed more of his wants and needs. I matched what my telecom provided to what he wanted and before you knew it, I had my first sale.
If I’d laid out the brochure to the junk shop owner and said, “Okay, here’s what we have. What do you want?” he’d have just picked the mobile phone plan. I’d have written the contract and walked out.
Instead, I asked questions. Had he considered what having an email address could do for his business? Did he think that people ever hesitated to pick up the phone because they didn’t want the toll of calling a mobile line (forty-two cents a minute back then)? Did he ever use a 1-800 number himself because he liked not having to pay the toll?
I wasn’t a sophisticated salesperson. I didn’t know how to use questions to uncover customer needs. I stumbled onto asking questions by happy accident in my desperation to make more than the twenty-dollar commission I’d get from just a mobile plan. That’s how I walked out with more than triple that.
LISTEN, NOT TO ANSWER BUT TO UNDERSTAND
Introverts are extraordinarily good at listening.
One of the best descriptions of this talent is in the article “The Gifted Introvert” by Lesley Sword where, discussing introverts, she notes:
They understand the world through careful contemplation and prefer not to act or respond without thoughtful consideration. Introverts will take in information and perhaps ask a few clarifying questions.
They will not frequently interrupt with questions and comments as most extraverts are prone to do. Introverts need time “to digest” information before responding to it.
Unfortunately, when we understand, we often want to jump past the questions and go straight to the answer. This was one of Alex Murphy’s problems: As soon as clients began to outline their issues, he was smart and experienced enough to know exactly what they needed. He’d jump from asking questions to going straight into problem-solving mode. Even worse, though he listened intently, he didn’t empathize with them or make any effort to show understanding.
This ties back into building basic trust: If clients don’t know you and don’t feel that you adequately understand the problem, how can they trust your solution?
Step Two isn’t just about identifying the problem by asking questions. It’s also about customers feeling that you’re sincerely concerned about helping them, that you’ve thoroughly understood their problem, and—most important—that you’ve truly heard them. In other words, it’s not enough for you to feel that you know what their problem is. They need to know that you understand and care.
Zack’s problem was that he knew too much . . . as was mine.
A few months after my success with the pawnshop owner, I hit a sales slump. I complained to my dad, “I just don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”
He asked, “When you first started selling, how much did you know?”
Easy answer: “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I was lucky just to remember what products we offered.”
“Okay, and how much do you know now?”
“Oh, gosh—everything! I know everything about everything we offer. That’s why I can’t understand why people aren’t buying off me. I can explain everything. I’m able to lay it all out.”
He said, “Do you think that’s your problem?”
At first, I thought that was a ridiculous notion. After more discussion, I conceded he might have a point. When I walked into a shop in the past, I spoke very little about the product and just talked about the prospect of saving money. Now, after acquiring more product knowledge, I focused more on education. I tried to compress three months’ worth of learning into a five-minute pitch. It was too much: too much information, too many options, happening too quickly.
Zack did the same thing: He took a decade’s worth of knowledge and laid it out in the very first phone call. We both gave our prospects far too much information instead of focusing on only what they needed to know.
In The Paradox of Choice, psychologist Barry Schwartz lays out the case that having too many options hurts us. Instead of making a simple choice, we often become anxious and even paralyzed by our desire to make the right choice. For instance, two researchers did a study with shoppers in a grocery store. On some days, there was a display table with six types of jam; on other days, the table had twenty-four types. When there were only six jams, shoppers were ten times more likely to buy than when the table held twenty-four.
Having fewer options led to higher sales.
Okay, so people buy less jam. No big deal . . . except it is. Schwartz points to something far more important: whether you spend your final years eating steak or sardines.
One of Schwartz’s colleagues got ahold of financial giant Vanguard’s data on a million employees’ participation in retirement plans and did some number crunching. He found that for every ten mutual funds an employer offered, about 2 percent fewer people took part in the plan.
For something as important as how you spend your golden years, you’d think people would take investing pretty seriously. But the more options people were given, the more likely they were to not make a decision at all.
That’s what Zack and I were both doing in our respective situations. We gave our potential customers so much information that they “needed to think about it” or said they were “not sure it’s right for me.”
Instead of doing a knowledge dump, I went back to asking meaningful questions, intently listening to prospects’ answers, offering one or two options, and telling them just what they needed to know to make the choice simple. It worked. Sales picked right back up.
For Zack, I reached back to this experience of mine for insight on how to fix his sales challenge. Instead of laying out all the courses he offered, he took a step back and began with, “Well, what’s the issue?” What made them pick up the phone in the first place? What was going on that they thought (or hoped) Zack could fix?
Sales picked up.
FIND THE PATTERN IN THE QUESTIONS
If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you inevitably start hearing some of the same questions over and over again. But let’s start with the hardest scenario: You’re just starting out, you haven’t spoken to anyone, and you have no idea what to ask.
That’s the scenario I found myself in as a fourteen-year-old kid. Except I wasn’t selling a product—I was trying to buy my own computer. My parents couldn’t afford one (we’re talking about thousands of dollars, and my family wasn’t exactly rich), so I figured I’d piece one together, using my wages from my job at McDonald’s. As I looked through the classifieds, I saw that many stores had the exact same items for quite different prices. Curious, I called up a big store and asked if it could sell me a part for X dollars.
“No, kid, I can’t even buy it at that price.”
While looking at the other store’s ad, I said, “Oh. Well, uh, I think I can. What if . . . what if I could buy it cheaper than you? Could I sell it to you? I wouldn’t want all the money, maybe—maybe just half?”
Click.
He just hung up on me. Yes, that hurt this introvert, but I wanted my computer more. So much, in fact, that I was too dumb to know that what I was doing couldn’t be done. Or maybe just too stubborn. Teenagers are famous for both.
Being a nerd, I made a list of stores selling the parts at a lower price, and then a list of all the stores charging a higher price. I began calling the different stores, trying to make this work.
A fourteen-year-old can’t hide his voice. Obviously, I was a kid. Clearly, I was a nut. What teenager thinks he can get computer parts cheaper than a legitimate business? I’ll bet some of them suspected it might be a scam. I mean, who could take seriously a call that began with a teenage boy saying, “Uh, do you want to save money on your computer parts?” I could see the cards were stacked against me.
But as I kept calling store after store, I saw that different questions got different responses. I began to piece together the questions that seemed to hold their interest. The conversations began to go from “Are you serious, kid? I’ve got work to do,” to “Yes, my business sales do have a lot to do with how cheap I can get my computer parts. Yes, I’d be interested in getting them cheaper.”
By the time I got to the fortieth or so call, through trial and error (aka experimentation), I started to build a list of meaningful questions that, when asked in a specific order, increased interest and engagement.
It took probably fifty or sixty phone calls (that lets you know how badly I wanted a computer), but I finally got two managers to take a gamble and agree to split the difference with me in store credit. I hustled, and in just a couple of months, I had enough credit in the two stores to get the different parts for my very own personal computer.
(After that, I stopped. I was too busy playing on my new computer to waste time making more money. Who knows? I might have been the Australian Michael Dell, putting together computers in his parents’ garage. Dumb kid.)
Ultimately, what got those two businesses to take a chance on me was:
Asking them the right questions
In the right order
That cut to the heart of their problem
And helped them see me as someone who understood their needs
The right question series got me my first computer.
When crafting the sales process for the business training school I founded (the Pollard Institute), I thought that because we offered business education, the question process couldn’t be scripted. It was a complex sale, after all. People came from all walks of life and all sorts of industries. But I soon found a pattern: Some questions led to higher engagement and interest, which in turn led to a sale. After eight or nine months, I thought, I’m being ridiculous—and wrote out a question series for the sales team. Sales shot through the roof 300 percent, and I never doubted the power of questions again.
ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
I’ve heard so many people say, “Oh, I need to ask questions! My customers need to know that I’m looking for their problem!”
Then they ask . . . and ask . . . and ask.
They don’t seem to have a purpose. They’re asking for the sake of asking. It eventually frustrates the customer and wastes their time. How can you be strategic about choosing which questions to ask? How do you put structure around a series of questions that could lead anywhere? Well, for one, you have a set of questions ready. You don’t just ask random questions; you ask carefully prepared ones that, most of the time, should lead right back into your process.
I created a list of questions for my sales team to use. It began with saying to the customer, “Now, before we get into the details of exactly what we can do and how we can help, I’d like to ask you a few questions. That way, I can craft a solution that is absolutely tailored to you. Is that okay?”
No one’s going to say no to that. Everyone wants something “tailored” just for them. As we said earlier, everyone wants to know that you’re actually listening to them, that they’re not just another number or another sale. Plus, we politely asked for their permission to move forward. We weren’t just bulldozing in, opening up the fire hydrant of information, and then pushing them to sign, sign, sign. We were passive, relaxed, and consultative. You know—introverts.
For Zack, his first question would simply be, “What are the biggest problems in your business right now?”
After he listened to the answer, I had him say, “I can’t help you with X or Y, but I can help you with Z. Is it okay if we focus just on that one?”
I mean, if one of their problems is that their spouse doesn’t want them spending so much time on the business, unless you’re a marriage counselor you probably don’t have a product or service that helps. Don’t promise to fix a problem you can’t fix. (Although you can later use it when you frame the benefit of your offerings. Spending too much time on the business is a symptom of a greater issue, such as a lack of systems or poor time management.)
Next, Zack would ask, “So who’s experiencing this as a problem? Is it you? Or is it a staff member who’s telling you they’re experiencing it?”
If they see it as a problem, that means they are more likely to pay money to fix it. If their staff members are telling them it’s a problem, then they may not be as willing to pay for it to be fixed. That is, unless they realize it’s a big problem, which might lead to staff turnover, which can be hugely expensive.
When we left off working together, Zack’s process was a bit more involved than this, but these questions gave him his basic framework for the eventual evolution of his question series. The better prepared he became, the more he was able to use a decision-tree process: If they answered A, then he’d follow with question #2, but if they answered B, he’d follow with question #4.
Once he knew what they needed, he knew which course to recommend to them. Better yet, he could explain why that course was perfectly suited for them, using their responses as the starting point for explaining exactly how it would benefit them.
You’ll recall that Jim Comer’s challenge was pushback on price. We developed something similar to this question series for him:
What was their experience like with their last speaker? Were they happy with that person?
How do they hope their experience with Jim will be similar or different?
Are they selling tickets?
Will it be recorded?
Are they an association or other nonprofit?
What are they hoping to get out of the conference?
What are the outcomes they want to achieve?
Do they have multiple speakers coming?
How many people do they expect?
With the answers to these questions, he was able to later explain to potential clients why he was uniquely suited for their needs (thereby indirectly justifying his price).
That’s all well and good for them, but what about you? What if your business is radically different? What if you’re just getting ready to launch and need a question series today? Here are the four basic questions you somehow need to ask. Use them to start customizing the pattern of questions that drives your prospects to share what you need to know to turn them into your clients.
1. What do they want? Don’t literally ask someone, “What do you want?” That’s the internal question that you’re supposed to figure out. You need to determine what they want/need before you can determine what they need you to sell them.
2. What are they doing about it right now . . . and is it working? You don’t want to be blindsided by offering a fix they’ve already tried or are trying. You need context before you can offer a solution.
3. Who says it’s a problem? You need to know who sees this as an issue that needs to be fixed. If it’s not the person you’re talking to, their perceived pain will be far less than if they’re experiencing it themselves. In short, how much of a problem do they think it really is?
4. What’s it costing them financially, in opportunities, and/or personally? This line of questioning is two-sided. One, you want to know how much pain they’re in. But on the other hand, it’s somewhat leading: You want to help them see how big the problem is (and it’s often bigger than they realize).
But what if they don’t want to tell you what the problem is? Worse: What if they don’t even see it as a problem?
GETTING STRANGERS TO OPEN UP
At the Pollard Institute, we focused on a defined niche of clients: tradesmen, such as electricians, plumbers, and other contractors. When we’d ask, “What problems are you experiencing currently?” they might shrug the question off. I can’t blame them—who wants to pour out their problems to a perfect stranger who’s trying to sell them something?
One time, I met with a plumber who wouldn’t even admit he had a problem. According to him, everything was fine. When I told him that I’d seen thirty other plumbers that month and they all had these three common issues, he said—and I quote—“Well, if they’re telling you that . . . yeah, I have those problems as well.” Then, it was like the dam burst: He started talking about all the other problems he was facing, too.
For instance, many contractors have the problem of staff members not cleaning up after themselves at customers’ houses. It’s a bit annoying. But an annoying problem doesn’t really goad people into action. What I needed was to help him realize how much he lost by having an improperly trained staff; I needed to help him feel the pain.
I said, “Let’s look at the results of them not cleaning up. Do you always make them go back, or do you go back and clean up yourself?”
He said, “It depends, but I end up doing it a lot.”
I said, “Do you get more referrals from the jobs where you have to clean up or from jobs where they get it done right the first time?”
Obvious answer.
“Okay, and how many jobs do you do yourself? About ten a month? And out of those ten, how many referrals do you get? Three to five? Perfect. Now, how many jobs does your typical staff member do? Ten a week—as many as you do in a month. Okay. And how many referrals do they get from those same ten jobs?”
He said, “Generally . . . ah . . . one?”
I let that sink in for a moment.
“So let’s do the math. Out of ten jobs, you get at least three referrals; they get one. That means you’re leaving at least two referrals on the table. Now, how many of those referrals turn into jobs, and what is each job typically worth?”
After he put pencil to paper, he realized he was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in missed referrals. All of a sudden, the question went from how much training his staff would cost to how much a lack of training cost him!
Let’s break his problems down into the three costs we laid out earlier:
1. Real costs: the wages for his staff to go back and clean up the project site.
2. Opportunity costs: the revenue he lost out on because his staff members weren’t getting as many referrals as they could be (a combination of not being trained to ask for referrals and not doing the job right in the first place).
3. Personal/emotional costs: One time he had to miss his daughter’s dance recital because he had to go clean up a site for an irate customer to keep their business.
After that was all laid out, he realized he had a huge problem, one that he couldn’t possibly ignore. Thank goodness he had someone asking the right questions to help him realize it.