Several of the most interesting things I learned at Collaxa (the small startup I was at which got acquired into Oracle in 2004) were around the sales process. Collaxa was a unique growth opportunity in this area because it was a small company where we had one salesrep for only part of the lifetime of the company, and so everyone in a leadership or outbound position took on a sales role. Also because Edwin Khodabakchian, co-founder and CEO of Collaxa, was young back then, but had some incredible intuition around the intersection of sales, marketing and engineering. And finally, since we were all going to be doing sales, when none of us were formally trained in it, Edwin purchased or otherwise acquired a set of cassette tapes from a Netscape sales training (yes, cassette tapes and Netscape co-existed at one point in time - both are gone now, but that is a story for a different blog post).For now what prompts this blog post is that I found that sales training to be super valuable and I have been carrying around for the last 10 yrs (literally on the back of an envelope) some notes I took from the training. I just rediscovered the usefulness of some of these questions and so decided to share my notes.
These notes are around questions to ask a prospect or customer, early in the sales cycle. First, a few background comments:
* Every sales training I have seen has included the comment "Telling isn't Selling" to refer to the fact that showing up at a prospect and spending the whole time talking about what you can do, showing product demos and powerpoints, etc is not selling. Effective selling is about asking questions and understanding the customer's needs and priorities and then proposing appropriate solutions and tools.
* The sales cassettes compared this to going to a doctor. If you went to a doctor and they immediately started talking about their new fantastic drug and describing all the drugs they were able to prescribe, without even asking you what was wrong with you, you would never go back to that doctor again. A doctor starts by asking you why you are there, what your symptoms are, etc. The early part of a sales cycle should look a lot like this.
* So the questions below are intended to help people ask probing questions that determine what are the problems that a customer is interested in, and how important they are to them. And just because a customer is interested in something, doesn't mean they will buy it. They will only go through the time and expense involved in a purchase if it is solving a problem that is truly a top priority for them.
So, the questions (some of which are redundant, so use the ones like when they are useful) are:
1) "You're a busy person, why did you take the time out of your schedule to talk to us?"
- Now you get them explaining why this is important to *them*
2) "Why are you here?"
3) "Tell me a little more about that? Can you be more specific?"
- These are general purpose questions to try to get detail from a customer...
4) "How long has this been an issue / going on?"
5) "So it's not that big of a deal for you?"
- What I really learned most about is how to get the customer to convince you if something is important to them. If you are trying to convince them, their natural position will be to push back against you. Don't be afraid to "stripline". If it's not that important to them, then better for you to know that up front and not waste your time. But if it *is* important to them, then they will start convincing you of why it is important. And now you go back to questions 3 and 4...
6) "What have you done to try to address it?"
- You don't want to offer the same solution / approach which failed for them previously. Plus this will help determine where they are in their process...
7) "What's the impact this is having on your life?"
- This is a harder one for me, but I learned from the sales training to connect back to people's personal priorities and experience. Because in the end, while a company buys a product, people are the ones who recommend or use the product (or don't...).
8) "Well, I imagine you have a million other things to do - how important is this one to you?"
- Again, don't be afraid to make the customer sell to you
9) "Typically, when I talk to other <aaa's> like yourself, they talk about having problems like <bbb>. Is this an issue for you?"
- Here if the customer isn't forthcoming about their pain points, you can try to find some. Talking about other people similar to them, often elicits a more engaged response.
