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The salesforce.com blog is excited to be publishing a series of excerpts from Linda Richardson’s soon-to-be released book, Changing the Sales Conversation. The author is also the Founder and Executive Chairwoman of Richardson, a global sales training and performance improvement company.
Listening to a client’s problem and then suggesting a solution might have been enough in the past, but it isn’t anymore. Salespeople need to understand and communicate with clients, not at them. This can be easier said than done considering so many salespeople have been following the same processes for years.
So what is the best way to develop a deeper connection with clients? Asking the right questions. This demonstrates the salesperson’s desire to solve a customer’s top business pain points quickly and effectively. Linda Richardson discusses this topic and more in her forthcoming book, Changing the Sales Conversation.
Continue reading below for an excerpt.
There is a school of thought that recommends taking a “knowier than thou” approach of walking in and telling clients what they don’t know and what they should do. The problem with that method is that the content you are sharing is based on an assumption, an educated guess—until tested. Moreover, how many of your clients, especially in the C-suite, respond well to being told what to do and what they don’t know?
Indeed, clients are hungry for relevant insights and ideas that broaden their perspectives, and forestall and help solve business problems. They value highly frank, open, and honest dialogues. But they want you to communicate with them, not only to them. All the content you work so hard to build up in futuring is best paired with informed questions in a collaborative heat-mapping dialogue.
While clients are under pressure to perform and expect insights and ideas, they too have expertise and experience. They demand to be recognized and respected. It is true that clients have little patience for educating you on issues they have already thought through or that they expect you to already understand. They won’t answer a long list of uninformed discovery questions. They are suffering from questioning fatigue. On the one hand, you must be ready from the first conversation to demonstrate you know their business and can bring value. At the same time, however, you must elicit information to go from generalized insight to something that is really relevant and persuasive.
The saving grace is that clients intuitively know that no matter how much expertise you have about their business, industry, or them, you can’t know how they see their world or what is unique about their situation, and that you must get information from them. Even with the very best client analytics, research, and deep experience, there are things such as corporate or divisional strategy, point of view, ideas already considered (or in the works or rejected), hard-to-uncover politics, ingrained personal biases, financial issues, and personal goals that are rarely available through research or experience.
Clients are not interchangeable. No two decisions are ever exactly the same. Even if two different clients seem to have exactly the same needs, they can think differently about them. Moreover, almost all clients see themselves as unique. Clients want to be a part of revelation and the solutions, not the recipients. Unless you can read minds, and even if you can, there is no escaping the need to make clients contributors. It is the combination of insights and questions that is one of the distinguishing marks of the new sales conversation. The big difference is in the structure and content of the questions.
Questioning isn’t the culprit. But a list of discovery questions in search of a product opportunity, once so effective, is a problem. Clients will gladly participate when questions are informed and they see a payoff because the questions are directed toward solving a priority business challenge. Asking the right questions at the right time to the right people can be as, and often more, educational and persuasive as offering insights and answers. Stephen Shapiro, author of Best Practices are Stupid, pointed out that people remember ideas more easily when they are phrased as questions than when they are presented as answers. Clearly a new conversation is needed, and the questions you ask and how you ask them are a big part of the change.
Linda Richardson is a New York Times bestselling author, educator, sales leader, and the founder of the Richardson consulting firm. She has dedicated herself to helping organizations around the world improve sales performance, process, and effectiveness. Richardson began her career as a teacher and firmly believes that great selling is great teaching—collaborative, relevant, and results driven.
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