Curiosity leads to Sales Success – Part 1
Elite Sales Professionals are curious by nature. Here’s why.
- Curiosity helps Elite Sales Professionals learn more about their customer, their business challenges, and their competitive position. Being curious helps Elite Sales Professionals gain knowledge that will help them engage with the customer in the right way.
- Curiosity also helps Elite Sales Professionals manage their pipeline better… they can develop new opportunities, position to defeat the competition, advance deals that may have slowed down or stalled, and open doors to win bigger deals in the future.
Let’s look at why curiosity is a great skill for salespeople to develop and how curiosity can lead to greater success.
During the Discovery Phase – Curiosity improves your outcome.
Asking open-ended questions, such as those which start with Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How… These get the customer engaged and places the salesperson in the role of a valued consultant, rather than someone just looking for a quick transaction. Be aware that the customer should view your questions as being helpful, not annoying.
Open-ended questions help you explore topics more deeply, such as this…
“If this machine problem is causing inconsistent production quality, how is it affecting shipping schedules and overall customer satisfaction?”
Open-ended questions help you qualify potential opportunities.
Questions along the line of “What happens if you don’t address this business issue?” can help you determine whether the customer is committed to pursuing a solution… and whether it’s worth spending your time and resources with this prospective customer.
Open-ended questions help you determine the priority of business issues.
Pursuing a proper line of questioning will help you determine which issues are higher priority… And the urgency changes for different people in the customer’s organization.
I’m DJ Sebastian, and we’ll continue this discussion on curiosity in the next briefing.