Hey, welcome to another Fast Tip Friday from Growth Dynamics! This is Charlie Hauck, lead trainer, founder, sharing some information and some concepts to our clients and anybody else that gets to access this little video clip. My topic today is it's simple, but it's not simple. Frankly, in all the work that I do, I hear a lot of business development professionals, saying how they prepare to go out and make a business conversation happen, see if they can do business with a new client, add on business to an existing client, and they're all sitting down. Not all a lot of them, though, sit down and try to think of all the right questions they need to ask people that will support the business development process that they're trying to manage to success.
As I started hearing that comment over and over again, "hey, I'm sitting down, I'm really preparing I'm trying to repair, prepare all the questions, I need to ask this person", I started to worry about what was going to happen on those business conversation appointments. There's a real problem, and the problem is, there are questions, and then there's the right questions. And in trying to be so strategic and so pointed, and so in some cases, it's an ego game, "look how smart I am about your world that I can think of these questions", they're actually not the right questions. They're not the questions that create trust. They're not the right questions that extract the right information. They're not the right questions that actually get the job done, which is to move a conversation from "Why am I here?" to "what happens next?" and "why are we doing it?"
So I implore all of you that if you're trying to become the Question Master, be careful that you're not outsmarting yourself that the questions that you're creating, don't come off as questions that corner the prospect or the person you're trying to do business with. Because frankly, there's very few people that don't realize what you're trying to do when you ask those questions about, well, "what do you wish your current vendor would do better?" "What do you what do you like about them?" "What don't you like about them?" And all those kinds of things where you ask people to incriminate themselves for making bad business choices, so that you can rescue them from their own unaware stupidity.
So look, there's a simple list of questions, and frankly, if you've ever been to the doctor's office, because you had a headache, or a sinus infection, or a tennis elbow, or a bad knee, or all of the things that we tend to go for medical treatment, the best salespeople in the world are the people in the white coats that spent a lot of years in college. I'm not trying to demean their profession or minimize the amount of training, but the diagnostic interview that a physician does is basically the best list of sales questions you could ever ask anybody. And when you stray from that, and you decide to deep dive into technical information, and product knowledge and volumes of usage, and all that kind of stuff, you may be getting in your own way without realizing it. Your ego thinks you're really sharp and on top of things, but the prospect feels like you're trying to put a pen in their hand and drag it across the paper, so you end up with a PO.
So my advice to everybody is - get the seven or eight right questions that are a diagnostic interview, not a cornering interview, and one, you'll get the right information about the right issues, that are costing someone more money or more aggravation then they want to put up with. If you do it right, they'll actually tell you what they'll buy from you to fix the problem that that you're supposed to be there to help them with! Get out of the technical side and get into the into a pure diagnostic side, and watch how much more effective your business development conversations become, and how much easier it is to collect a decision from someone that trusts you because you listened, not that you led them to slaughter.
Thanks for listening and watching today. Slow down, it'll happen faster. Have a great weekend.
