This week I was listening in on one of our virtual Sales Wisdom workshops. After hearing the candor between the instructor and the participants about how to respond to a particular question, it struck me that there is a big difference between the “right answer”, and the “right conversation”. The role play in the workshop takes real world situations that the participants experience, and strives to have them rethink their automatic responses in tense or confrontational situations. The hope is to engage the conversational partner in a meaningful dialogue rather than directly answer their question (which often can shut down the conversation). Naturally some participants are a little uncomfortable with this approach and have been inclined to answer the question right-out, especially when they did not see any adverse effect on their or their company’s position by doing so.
In this particular situation, the participant’s client stated that they didn’t want a particular person to come to an upcoming meeting. It is easy and non-confrontational to agree with a customer’s or prospect’s wish. And we really haven’t hurt either our position or our company by doing so, or have we? Well let’s take a fresh look at one of our core teachings.
As you progress in your career into senior leadership, a key skill that is important to acquire is curiosity – why do people (inside or outside your company) want certain things? In short, you need to ingrain one important question as a default in your mental grid influencing your habits at all times– why? I know that there are schools of thought that try to convince you that there is a “perfect” answer to every question. Furthermore these schools of thoughts reason that you need to build up your skills to a point that you in fact have all the right answers ready to go all the time. This is part of the reason that people often put more emphasis on their knowledge and trying to convey to the prospect how smart they are rather than understanding the prospect’s thought process. It is interesting to observe that in a case where a junior presenter thinks that a presentation is not going well, more and more slides are being put to the front lines and the tempo of speech increases to convince the other person of their ability to address all of the problems instead of turning the discussion over to the prospect and have them explain what truly matters to them.
The confusing fact about building a catalog of “right answers” is that the “right” answer may sometimes work to get a deal closed – but with two major downsides. In the vast majority of cases the closed deal will remain a singular transaction, because the chance to build deep rapport during the engagement process was missed and potential follow-on business has to be resold with the same effort as the first transaction. The second downside being that without creating the “right conversation” you will never know the true motivation behind your prospect’s actions. The initial transaction might have been much larger than the one you just closed. Developing an attitude of keen interest to finding out the true motivations behind the request coming towards you will help you to make good decisions during the selling/persuading process. A participant from one of our workshops recently shared with us…
“At a major healthcare company, shortly after the workshop, we used the techniques to further establish our credibility with some of the evaluators during the Q&A sessions leading up to the proposal and during the oral presentations (multiple rounds). We won the business, which was very significant for our Healthcare group. I used the techniques I learned on the clarifying questions and fought the urge to answer directly during the orals as a result of the training. The feedback we got was that those discussions we held during the orals is what won us that deal.”
Rich Wilson, Partner, Big 5 Consulting Firm
Our programs strive to get people focused on engaging in meaningful conversations, not having sharp answers to all the questions. The benefits are numerous: rapport, understanding, collaboration, synergy, relationships, etc. In time we find that most of the questions we are being asked are driven by motivations that have little to do with the initial request.
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