The Tour

As soon as we walked out of his office, Chuck's entire demeanor changed—an emotional shift that often occurs when the barrier of the desk and the power center of the office are removed and you begin walking side by side with a stakeholder.

At the subconscious level your stakeholder's brain moves you from adversary (caution) to student (safe). At the same time, stakeholders begin to feel emotionally significant because they have the opportunity to tell their story, brag, and show off—triggering the self-disclosure loop.

Sitting across the desk from a prospect is one-dimensional, whereas walking through a facility is three-dimensional. You see things, intuit things, and discuss things that you'd never experience in an across-the-desk conversation. This tactic is unavailable to inside sales reps, but for field sales professionals, a facility tour, when it makes sense, is a powerful tool for building emotional connections and complete 360-degree discovery.

Chuck started our tour on the loading dock. He showed me how the freshly baked bread was loaded onto the trucks, expressing pride in their new “green” fleet. Then we walked to the other side of the dock to where the raw ingredients were unloaded. He explained that the plant never shut down and they received thousands of pounds of flour around the clock.

From there we moved to the mixing floor where the dough was made. I learned about yeast and how bread rises. We then moved on to the ovens and watched as the bread cooled and went on conveyor belts to the packaging room. The packaging machines were my favorite part of the tour—the people who invent those things are geniuses.

Finally, we walked into the quality control room. There the bread was inspected by a group of serious-looking men and women who eyeballed every loaf before the bread passed through a strange-looking arch on the way to shipping.

“Chuck, what's that for?” I pointed at the arch and the strip of red lights embedded in it.

“That's the metal detector.” Chuck's voice took on a somber tone. “Every loaf passes through a metal detector. You can imagine how bad it would be for us if someone purchased our bread at their local grocery store, made a sandwich, and then broke a tooth on a piece of metal that had inadvertently fallen into the dough. The store would get sued, we'd get sued, and the PR would be very bad for business.”

I nodded gravely. “That would be bad.”

With the tour over, we headed back toward Chuck's office. On our way, I asked if we could go back over to the mixing room because there was one more thing I wanted to see. Chuck said, “Sure,” and we walked over.

Earlier he'd introduced me to Betty, a lady who had worked at the bakery for 40 years. When we arrived back at the mixing room, I caught her attention. “Hey, Betty, got a minute?” Betty smiled and walked over to Chuck and me.

“Betty, I know this is a weird question, but I'm just curious. What kind of buttons are those on your shirt?”

Betty looked down at her shirt and thought about it for a moment. Then she looked back up and said, “Well, if I'm not mistaken, those are plastic buttons.”

I didn't say anything, giving Betty's answer time to sink in. Finally, I saw it register on Chuck's face. Plastic buttons don't get caught by metal detectors.

Metal detectors are required by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to be in food service plants.¹ Along with metal detectors are regulations that require garments worn in food service plants to have metal snaps rather than plastic buttons, hidden under a closed placket just for an extra measure of safety.

The people in Chuck's plant were wearing the wrong uniforms, and this was putting him and his company at risk. His current vendor—the one he thought was doing a good job—had failed him. But because I asked the right question, I didn't have to say it. He became aware of this on his own terms, which is a far more effective means of challenging status quo than an attempt to argue him into believing he is wrong.

In sales, a question you ask is far more powerful than anything you'll ever say.

Alpha and Omega

Multiple-choice test. If I were to write and publish an article, which article do you predict would get the most views—a or b?

1. Discovery and asking questions
2. Closing and overcoming objections

If you chose the article on closing and objections you'd be correct. We've run the experiment enough times to gauge what the sales audience likes to read. Closing and dealing with objections is sexy. Salespeople yawn at articles about questioning.

But the sales audience is dead wrong. The magic in sales does not happen at the close. It happens in discovery.

It's time for a mind-set shift. Discovery is the heart and soul of sales. The reason so many salespeople struggle with closing and objections is they skip or take short-cuts with discovery.

Ultra-high performers (UHPs) close many deals during discovery. Not because there is a conscious decision to buy in that moment. Rather, a well-placed question creates doubt about a current vendor, process, or belief, or, provokes a stakeholder to consider the risk of failing to act.

Average salespeople tend to believe that challenging the status quo is about telling stakeholders that they are doing things wrong, teaching them about what they should be doing, or pushing insight down their throats. It mostly comes off as arrogant pontificating.

Ultra-high performers leverage a language of questions to uncover needs, problems, pain, and opportunities; to provoke self-awareness; and to challenge the status quo. Because stakeholders act for their reasons, not yours, anything you might tell them about their business or problems is 10 times more powerful when delivered in the form of a question.

In sales, questions are the beginning and the end. Alpha and omega. If sales were a language, it would be a language of questions—strategic, artful, and fluid questions asked in the context of a conversation.

Joe the Interrogator

If you've ever had a chance to see an iceberg up close, you know they are huge. What is hard to fathom, though, is that what you see of the iceberg is only a small portion of the total mass, most of which is hidden below the water's surface.

It is this hidden mass that poses the greatest danger. On ships that sail in seas where icebergs float, failure to heed the danger posed by the hidden mass of icebergs leads to disastrous and fatal consequences.

Stakeholders are much like icebergs, revealing only surface information while keeping their real problems and emotions hidden from view. Until you get beneath the surface, you have no way of knowing if you are addressing their most important and emotional issues.

Consider Joe, an account executive, who walks into the office of a new prospect, introduces himself, and begins pitching his company and products. After his initial pitch (as taught in his company's sales training), he transitions into interrogating Linda, the buyer:

1. Are you happy with your current supplier?
2. What product specs do you need?
3. Are you having issues with delivery?
4. What do you do when a shipment is poor quality?
5. How often do you order?
6. How much do you order?
7. How much are you paying per unit?
8. Are you the decision maker on this product?

Faced with Joe's questioning onslaught, Linda raises her emotional wall and sticks to her buyer script, responding with just the facts.

1. Yes, they do a good job, but we are always open to other quotes.
2. Here is a spec sheet of what we are using now.
3. Not really; like I said, they do a good job.
4. We don't have issues, but if we did we would ask them to replace the defective units.
5. Monthly.
6. From 20,000 to 75,000 units, depending on demand.
7. We don't share that information. But I'm happy to look at a competitive quote.
8. Yes. I make the final decision.

As the conversation hits an awkward pause, Joe swings into a pitch for his “higher-quality” product. Bored, Linda hurries him up. She looks at her watch. “Joe, I've got another meeting to get to. Why don't you e-mail your prices and specs over to me and we'll talk again in a couple of weeks?”

Joe dashes back to his office and grabs his sales manager. “I've got a great opportunity over at XTech Industries. I'm talking to the decision maker and she's super interested! But I need to get aggressive on our pricing to get this one.”

Joe talks his sales manager into approving rock-bottom prices and shoots his quote over to Linda that afternoon. He puts the deal into his forecast.

Three days later, Joe, anticipating an easy close, calls Linda back. He gets voice mail. Then he sends an e-mail. Days go by and then weeks. He calls and calls but gets no response. He promises his anxious sales manager that the deal will close soon, and the forecast will be okay.

Finally, he gets Linda on the phone. After a quick exchange of pleasantries, Linda explains that she's decided to go with one of Joe's competitors instead. Joe feels the blood drain from his head. Stunned and lightheaded, he manages to stammer a weak “Why?”

Linda explains that the other vendor had a better solution to her most pressing problem—a problem that Joe knew nothing about. Joe stammers back, “You didn't say anything about that issue. I wish I had known. We have the best solution on the market for that problem. Will you please reconsider? I can be back over there in an hour!”

But it is too late. The decision has been made. Why didn't Joe know about this problem?

Imagine the scene from a movie. The villain is strapped to a chair in the middle of an empty room. A bright light is pointed into his eyes while the interrogator peppers him with accusatory, leading, closed-ended questions. The interrogator intends to make the villain feel as uncomfortable as possible and push him off-balance, breaking him down so that in a moment of weakness he reveals his deepest secrets.

Many salespeople, like Joe, unknowingly put stakeholders in a similar uncomfortable position. They unload an avalanche of closed-ended, and often leading, questions that may come off as imposing, self-serving, and manipulative. In response, stakeholders deflect, obfuscate, and erect emotional barriers.

The stakeholders who've endured these interrogations before are prepared with pat answers and a rote buyer script. Held at bay, interrogators like Joe only scrape the surface, learning little about the stakeholder's real problems, and in the process, shatter emotional connections.

On the contrary, artfully structured, open-ended questions asked in the context of a fluid conversation keep stakeholders engaged. Sales is a conversation, not an interrogation. When you treat discovery as a fluid conversation, you disarm your stakeholders, draw them in, and lower the emotional wall.

This is where dual process combined with strategic and artful questions is especially powerful. It is not in the nature of stakeholders to allow sellers below the surface. You can't force it. You've got to stand in their shoes from a place of empathy, and build your questions organically, in the moment, based on the flow of the conversation, while remembering your call objective and targeted next step.

Ask Easy Questions First

Imagine you see a stranger from a distance walking in your direction, a man you don't know. He's making a beeline right toward you. As he comes to a halt in front of you, your guard is up. Then, without hesitation, he begins peppering you with personal questions:

• Where do you live?
• What's your mom's name?
• How many kids do you have?
• What are their names?
• Where do they go to school?
• What color car do you drive?
• Where is it parked?

How does this line of questioning feel? What will you say? Will you give him the answers he's looking for? Will you lie? How long would you stand there before screaming at him to get away from you or before running away?

This is how a stakeholder feels the first time she meets an interrogator who begins blasting her with difficult questions. She knows that the salesperson's motivation is, first and foremost, to sell her something. She believes the salesperson is only asking questions to uncover a weakness that will be exploited. She does not want to be or feel manipulated.

It is human nature to put up an emotional wall when strangers start asking difficult, intrusive questions. In your role as a salesperson you are the stranger. When you ask questions that make your stakeholders uncomfortable, before you have established an emotional connection and trust, their emotional wall goes up, and they shut down.

The key to breaking through the stakeholder's emotional wall and activating the self-disclosure loop is beginning the sales conversation with questions that are easy for them to answer and that they will enjoy answering.

Difficult questions require complex answers or cause stakeholders to feel uncomfortable or vulnerable to manipulation. Easy questions are not too personal or probing and make it comfortable for stakeholders to begin telling their story.

Avoid wasting the stakeholder's time with cheesy questions about some random object on their desk, or the weather, or other nonsense. This just makes you look and sound like every other average salesperson. In this pattern, you trigger the reflexive buyer script, and your conversation remains on the surface and will stall—especially if you're dealing with directors and analyzers.

When I'm meeting with a potential client for the first time, I often ask, “How long have you been working here?” If they say 20 years, it gives me the opportunity to compliment the accomplishment (which makes the person feel important). Then I follow up with “I bet you've seen a lot of changes around here!” and with that the floodgates usually open.

On the other hand, if they say six months, I ask, “What made you decide to work here?” In this case I learn about their motivations, career aspirations, and background. This opens the opportunity for a wide array of follow-up questions, which again, makes my stakeholder feel important, keeps them talking, and pulls their emotional wall down.

Common ground is another source of easy questions. If you both have something in common—you went to the same school, live in the same neighborhood, know the same people, have the same hobby, love the same sports team, and so forth—you'll have a natural jumping-off point for easy questions. You'll also trigger their similarity bias and move into their in-group.

The pitfall with common ground is when, instead of allowing your stakeholder to talk, you take over the conversation. You begin pontificating on the subject with the illusion that your stakeholder will perceive you as knowledgeable.

When discussing a subject that you have in common with a stakeholder, ask intelligent questions related to the subject so the other person does the talking. Trust me on this: people don't want to listen to you talk; they want to listen to themselves talk.

The more you become genuinely interested in what your stakeholders are saying, the more valuable and important they feel. The better they feel, the more they will want to talk. The more they talk, the more connected they will feel to you. As you connect, you gain the right to ask the deeper, more strategic questions that get below the surface and challenge the status quo.

The Power of Open-Ended Questions

Here is a fact: the more questions you ask, the more sales you will make. Of course, as we learned from Joe the interrogator, discovery is more than just asking questions. It's about asking the right questions and the right questions are open-ended questions.

Open-ended questions like “How is that impacting you?” or “What happens when your workers' compensation costs increase?” encourage stakeholders to talk and elaborate—to tell stories.

Conversely, closed-ended questions like “How many of those do you use?” or “Are you happy with that?” elicit short, limited responses. Closed-ended questions are self-serving and interrogative because they are focused primarily on you getting only the information you need to rev up your pitch.

Most salespeople have at least a rudimentary understanding of open- and closed-ended question types. If you were to interview 100 sales professionals, 99 of them would tell you that open-ended questions are most effective in sales conversations. Yet, if you were to observe these same salespeople interacting with stakeholders, you'd mostly hear interrogating, closed-ended questions.

Closed-ended questions become habitual because they're easy, give you the illusion of control, require little intellectual effort and even less emotional investment. Salespeople who find it hard to ask open-ended questions:

• Are unable to manage their disruptive emotional attachment to always being in control.
• Are unwilling to let go and just allow the conversation to happen with the faith that their stakeholder will reveal key information inside the context of the story.
• Lack the discipline to focus their attention on the other person.
• Find it easier to ask closed-ended questions that elicit bullet points rather than listen to stakeholder stories.

In sales, 99 percent of your questions (and questioning statements like “Tell me more” or “Walk me through that process”) should be open-ended. I'm especially fond of the statement and pause approach for getting prospects to talk. I'll say something like “Wow, it sounds like that's been really challenging.” Then I pause and allow silence to do the rest of the work.

This technique serves me in two ways. First, it demonstrates that I am listening (active listening), and second (and most important), the other person almost always fills in the silence with a story.

The objective of the open-ended question is to elicit stories. Within these stories you gain access to the information you need to build your case, and insight into what is most important to your stakeholder. It is through these stories that stakeholders teach you their language (more on language in an upcoming chapter).

Avoid the Pump and Pounce

Average salespeople believe that to be in control of the sales conversation they must be doing the talking. They have the annoying tendency of pumping their buyers and stakeholders for information with interrogating, closed-ended questions and then pouncing on the first opening to start pitching.

The most destructive sales behavior during discovery is the pump and pounce. Born from impatience and poor impulse control, this one habit will cause you to miss important clues, damage relationships, and lose out on sales.

Here's how it works. During discovery, in response to a question, your stakeholder says, “We've been having a hard time with (fill in the blank).”

• If you are an average salesperson, you'll see the admission as an opportunity to pounce and start pitching solutions.
• If you are an ultra-high performer, you'll make note of this potential opportunity and, based on your call objective, you'll either follow the path and ask deeper follow-up questions to get the full story or save/leverage this issue for a future meeting.

As you uncover problems and opportunities, you'll come face-to-face with the temptation to pounce and pitch a solution. You must regulate this disruptive emotion because as soon as you start pitching, your ears turn off and so does your stakeholder.

Ultra-high performers leverage discovery to build their case. They patiently ask questions, encourage stakeholders to talk, and get all the information on the table before formulating any recommendations or offering solutions. In longer-cycle sales, discovery may span many meetings with multiple stakeholders before any presentation or recommended solutions are offered.

Ultra-high performers know that the person asking the questions is in control.

Fluid Dual Process Discovery

The key to discovery is asking the right questions, at the right time, with the right intent. In sales conversations, the questions you ask should support your effort to maintain an emotional connection, build your case, and move to the next step. It is a dual process—empathy and outcome.

Multiple generations of salespeople have learned and been trained on the SPIN methodology for discovery. SPIN selling,² developed by Neil Rackham and codified in his book by the same name, is the most popular discovery framework of all time. Rackham based SPIN selling on a well-documented study that indicated that sales calls are most successful when the salesperson is asking questions and the stakeholder is talking.

What Rackham theorized from his findings is that the most successful salespeople were asking specific types of questions, in a specific sequence. The acronym SPIN stands for four types of questions and the order in which they are asked:

1. Situation questions are helpful for gathering and qualifying facts and data, and understanding the prospect's current state.
2. Problem questions uncover the prospect's problems and opportunities.
3. Implication questions help uncover the pain the problem is causing.
4. Need-payoff questions task the stakeholder with defining the benefit of solving the problem—generating self-awareness for the need to change.

More recently, author Deb Calvert's extensive research, much like Rackham's revealed that salespeople who talk less, ask questions, and listen have a higher probability of performing ahead of their peer group. From her research, Calvert developed her DISCOVER Questions® framework.³

The DISCOVER acronym stands for:

• Data questions are used to gather facts.
• Issue questions are used to probe for problems and pain.
• Solutions questions introduce alternatives and awareness of new ideas.
• Consequence questions draw attention to risks, concerns, and challenges of not acting.
• Outcome questions reveal stakeholder expectations.
• Value questions organize stakeholder priorities.
• Example questions create self-awareness that problems exist by drawing out contrasts.
• Rationale questions reveal how decisions are made.

A good working knowledge of both SPIN and DISCOVER will help you ask more effective questions. These books and methodologies will make you better. The value of both the SPIN and DISCOVER frameworks is they guide the process of crafting more effective questions.

The downside, though, is that in the hands of average salespeople, these questioning frameworks can quickly devolve into linear interrogations rather than fluid conversations.

Salespeople can become so focused on the type of question they are supposed to be asking that they disconnect from the conversation, causing their questions to feel disjointed and manipulative. Average salespeople are often caught contemplating their next question rather than listening.

Ultra-high performers, operate on a much different level. They leverage a more advanced Dual Process Discovery Framework. This framework relies heavily on being in the moment with your stakeholder—empathy, emotion, and attention—while moving the conversation toward the targeted next step.

It begins with broad, open-ended questions and continues with subsequent probing questions, leading to a natural point in the conversation at which you bridge to and ask for the next step. The Dual Process Discovery Framework (Figure 23.1) is conversational rather than interrogational.

Average salespeople are more comfortable with a linear questioning process because it's easier to plow through a checklist of questions than to truly listen and make an emotional investment in the conversation. It's easier to pump just enough information out of their stakeholder and pounce on the first opportunity to pitch.

Effective questions should activate the stakeholder's self-disclosure loop early in the conversation. The key is getting out of the way and allowing nature to take its course. Rather than the common practice of asking one interrogating question after another from a predetermined list, a conversation is organic, building on itself. Fewer questions are asked but uncover far more information.

Ultra-high performers leverage the Dual Process Discovery Framework because it gives them maximum flexibility to adjust their questions strategically as the conversation unfolds. This nonlinear framework opens multiple avenues of questioning, allowing UHPs to gain access to the stakeholder's emotions, flip the buyer script, and gain a clearer picture of the problems, pitfalls, and issues that lie below the surface.

Developing Go-To Questions

UHPs seem to know exactly what to ask at exactly the right moment while remaining engaged with the stakeholder. They never appear to be working very hard to come up with their next question or to keep the conversation moving and the stakeholder engaged.

UHPs keep sales conversations fluid and in the moment with go-to questions. Go-to questions are deeply ingrained and may be accessed in the moment within the context of the conversation. The questions may be repurposed, re-formed, and reframed depending on the situation and direction of the conversation.

The sales process is situational: different industries, different products and services, different cycles, multiple levels of complexity, different stakeholders, and different salespeople. Therefore, questions must flex to the moment.

Great questions are artful. Sometimes they are just simple statements with a pause that elicits responses to fill in the silence. Artful questions are provocative. They cause the stakeholder to think and become self-aware of the need to change. Artful questions naturally build on the conversation rather than being separate from it. They must match the moment and cannot be scripted.

Strategic questions are well placed within the conversation and are aligned to the overriding sales strategy and moving to the next step. Ultra-high performers are strategic and outcome focused, always thinking three to five moves ahead on the chessboard.

Developing the ability to ask strategic and artful questions that match the moment requires a high Sales EQ. You must leverage empathy, situational awareness, attention control, emotional control, and confidence.

It begins with an intentional effort to internalize your go-to questions. When I first started out, my sales manager handed me two pages of questions. The questions were not organized in a useful way and did not match my speaking style. On sales calls I sounded like a robot, reading one question after another. But this list was all I had.

It was a starting point. I read and studied SPIN, and over time I organized the questions into a better format and rewrote them to match my speaking style. This is essential because, to be conversational, your questions and questioning statements must sound like you. I also became a collector of questions:

• When you hear a question that resonates with a stakeholder, write it down and remember the context.
• Interview and observe the UHPs in your company, and collect their best questions. Notice how they ask those questions—voice inflection, body language, tone, style, and context.
• Read books like SPIN Selling and DISCOVER Questions Get You Connected to spark ideas and practice structuring effective questions.
• Experiment with different variations of the same questions to find more effective combinations that work best with your style and allow you to flex to complement your stakeholder's preferred communication style.
• Focus on situational awareness and learn when you should and should not ask certain questions.
• Be strategic. Consider the potential answers to certain questions. Then develop follow-up questions in response to each potential answer. This helps you remain in the moment, because you never need to think about what you will ask next.
• If sales were football, questions would be the plays. Following sales conversations, review the questions asked and their effectiveness—much like reviewing a game film. Keep the ones that worked and change or adjust the ones that did not.

When you follow this process, over time you'll develop your own set of go-to questions: questions that work for you, sound like you, and allow you to flex to and be in the moment.

Never, ever forget that, in sales, a question you ask is more important than anything else you'll ever say.