When you’re sick, what do you do? Google your symptoms, right?

Instantly, you’re presented with a slew of information: A headache is most likely a headache – though it could be hay fever, a sinus infection, the flu or even the prelude to a rare neurological condition.

The rabbit hole of information is never-ending if you choose to go down it, and in the end, we’re never fully confident in our conclusions.

Now, imagine doing the same thing on the scale of a global organization. Research and compile all of the symptoms, underlying conditions and environmental factors that affect the health of a business – then try to muddle through all of the possible solutions in the marketplace.

It seems nebulous, doesn’t it?

That’s exactly the boat that C-suite executives find themselves in. Confronted with serious inflation of information, executive buyers become confused – and when they’re confused, they do nothing. This is doubly true in economic times like the present. When the economy seems to be continually hovering on the edge of a recession, the de facto response is to wait and see.

However, inaction is not always the best answer. To effectively sell to C-level executives, you must position yourself as a trusted business advisor who helps executives synthesize information and trends to instill confidence in their buying decisions – and that starts with understanding their position.

Understanding Executive-level Buyers

As hinted at above, senior executives spend their time strategizing about issues with far-reaching consequences – everything from economic conditions to industry dynamics and social issues. They track any and all drivers powerful enough to shift markets – and to appear credible and relevant, you’ll need to do the same.

The true value you bring to senior executives is not product knowledge or the outcomes you’re selling, it’s the experience an executive has in meeting with you, the actionable ideas that can expand their thinking. And to do that, you’ll need to become conversant in the language of business: finance.

At a minimum, you should be able to digest and understand three financial statements:

• Income Statement or Profit and Loss: Look at the year-over-year (YOY) performance, tracking total revenue growth rate, net income growth rate and profit margin growth rate.
• Balance Sheet: Be on the lookout for net cash generated by operating activities increasing over time and track net cash from financial activities for insight into borrowing trends and compare to industry standards.
• Statement of Cash Flows: Investigate both assets and liabilities and how they relate to sales trends.

How to Prepare for Executive Sales Calls

Most sales reps invest significant effort in becoming product experts – they memorize features and functions and internalize ROI stats. This knowledge is always there. If they are nervous or excited or confused about where to take the conversation next, they reach for this repository and fall into the trap of a product-centric approach.

Guess what?

Executives do not care about your product.

Executives are not product users or product experts. They are there to make impactful business decisions and see them through – all an executive truly cares about is their own issues, and how they’re going to lead their company to success, so you’ll need to tailor the conversation appropriately. Before going into any executive sales call, equip yourself with a solid understanding of the executive’s business and its financial health – you should be able to answer the following questions:

Company Information:

• What is the company’s business and its products/services?
• Who are its customers, and how does the business go to market?
• Are there industry trends, opportunities, challenges or threats currently impacting their business?

Financials:

• How have revenues, net profits and profit margins changed over the past several years?
• As you analyze the above, what does it tell you about the health of the business?
• What’s its fiscal year, and how does this impact budget cycles?

Why You Should Sell to C-suite Executives

Many sellers are understandably intimidated by selling to the C-suite – don’t be one of them. You do not have to be an executive’s peer to become a trusted advisor. If you internalize this fact, you gain incredible advantages:

• A Behind the Scenes View: To sell to C-level buyers, you have to understand the business issues that are getting in the way of the company’s goals and demonstrate how your solution will impact them. Well, there’s no one at the company with a better understanding of the high-level business strategy and its challenges than the executive who created it.
• Credibility and Access: An introduction from the C-suite goes a long way to helping you build credibility, trust and rapport with key stakeholders across the organization.
• Faster Sales Cycles: C-level executives are paid to make decisions quickly – they need impactful solutions, now. As a result, sales cycles tend to be shorter.

***

Despite continued hesitation by many buyers, forward-thinking executives will always be on the lookout for thoughtful advisors and sound solutions to propel the business forward. By doing your research, becoming conversant in the language of business and engaging on a human level, you’ll be able to uniquely position your solution and positively impact the organizations you’re selling into.

For more selling advice, check out:

• My latest book, The Power of Value Selling: The Gold Standard to Drive Revenue and Create Customers for Life. Available for pre-order now!
• “RevOps Alone Won’t Fix Bad Sales Calls” in Forbes.
• “Unlocking Your Revenue Operations Potential in a Data-Driven Era with Jeremey Donovan,” a recent episode of The B2B Revenue Executive Experience podcast.

As always, Sell with Value,

Julie

Three weeks ago, I attended the Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference in Las Vegas – let me tell you why it was the ideal location.

In any major Las Vegas casino, you’re confronted with the strange dichotomy of human emotion and technology. The gambling experience is rooted in powerful human emotions – while the management of that experience is facilitated by advanced tech. And at a sales conference where AI-based technology was table stakes for vendors and a central theme of many conversations, human emotion carried the day.

As Gartner made clear in the keynote on day one – and as I’ve been saying for months – there’s one thing AI cannot do very well: instill confidence in buying decisions. Gartner calls this “value affirmation,” and it stems from all of the human-to-human interactions that buyers use to validate buying decisions.

Why should we care?

Because value affirmation increases the chance of a high-quality deal by 30%, and it’s more than twice as likely to occur when working with a human rep versus a purely digital buying experience – so the solution would seem to be to emphasize human-to-human interactions and adopt a buyer-centric mindset.

Here’s where us humans get in our own way.

As I mentioned in my last post, I can’t tell you how many people have told me they do buyer-centric selling through pitch decks or using ROI calculators.

Now, don’t get me wrong. A well-crafted presentation and an ROI calculator are tools that can be put to tremendous use, and they are merely that: tools. Instilling confidence in those tools depends on adopting a buyer-centric approach founded on human-to-human connection.

Except, what happens when different roles within your organization have different understandings of what buyer-centric selling truly means? It’s only natural, and yet the consequences on customer experience can be severe.

Using our recent research study, “From Selling to Solving: The Buyer-Centric Approach to Sales Success,” let’s look at how companies can avoid that fate and foster alignment on best practices.

Step 1: Use a Common Enterprise Language to Establish a Buyer-Centric Culture

To be truly buyer-centric, sales organizations need to adopt a common language. Training is a phenomenal way to jump-start this journey, and long-term success also comes down to how sales leaders and processes reinforce this language. Every aspect of the buying process should be designed with the customer in mind and as opportunities for knowledge collection. And it’s that common language that facilitates a revenue team’s ability to amass the knowledge to better understand buyers’ needs and preferences and continuously improve their sales approach.

Step 2: Create Feedback Loops

As I mentioned last month, one of the more profound benefits of a common framework and language is the creation of efficient feedback loops. When all cross-functional roles contributing to revenue growth use the same criteria to evaluate and discuss opportunities, it speeds time to insight and enables teams to align on driving customer value and loyalty.
These feedback loops can also be harnessed to forge new dialogues with prospects and clients – and to help identify additional needs and expand opportunities for improved revenue growth and customer value.

Step 3: Address Contextual Challenges

Sales problems often appear as the tip of the iceberg. To be buyer-centric, you’ll need to address the underlying condition; begin by examining two categories of problems:

• Issues with Tech – The proliferation of revenue tech has overloaded sellers and hindered productivity. However, tech can significantly impact selling behaviors, but its impact depends on how it is integrated into seller workflows and used to enhance buyer-centric behaviors. The right tech helps salespeople prepare and engage at the right moment, in the right way, to build buyer confidence.
• Issues With Sales Skills – For salespeople to foster meaningful conversations and shape solutions that support client goals, training must support the facilitation and management of the buyer’s process.

Step 4: Measure and Reward Buyer-Centric Behaviors

Buyer-centric selling begins with top-down agreement on the behaviors that matter. Work with enablement to ensure you’re supporting and measuring the leading indicators that will drive revenue results. And to emphasize the importance of a buyer-centric approach, sales organizations should experiment with incentivizing customer-centric outcomes, such as providing performance-based incentives tied to account expansion and customer retention and incorporating customer feedback into evaluations.

Step 5: Leverage Data and Analytics

From qualification tools to marketing analytics, never underestimate the impact of an integrated tech stack that facilitates information sharing across cross-functional teams. The objective should be to understand how seemingly similar buyers are different and the ways in which a salesperson could adjust their behaviors and positioning to keep the buyer in the driver’s seat while simultaneously steering them toward the best outcomes.

Step 6: Provide Ongoing Sales Training and Support

Continuous learning and development are essential, and sales training is the crucial component in creating lasting behavioral change. This can include regular coaching sessions, ongoing instructor-led and online training programs, and access to just-in-time learning and industry resources. The key word is “continuous” since changing selling behaviors isn’t typically accomplished in a single, once-per-year training.

Once you successfully identify and develop the right sales behaviors, support can come through technology. For example, embedding on-demand learning inside of CRM and leveraging qualification tools, plan creation templates and account planning add-ons can expedite buyer-centric selling and enable frontline managers with advanced insight into measuring and cultivating buyer-centric behaviors.

***

In the end, high-quality deals will always depend on building buyer confidence – and to do that, sales orgs must cultivate the behaviors that lead to credibility, trust and rapport, and the impactful business conversations that rest on these foundations.

For more selling advice, check out:

• “Why Sellers Need to Take a Value-Based Approach” in CustomerTHINK
• “Get Results: Master the Sales Methodology and Transform Your Success with Dale Knipp,” a recent episode of The B2B Revenue Executive Experience.

As always, Sell with Value,

Julie

What do revenue operations, buyer-centric selling and value-based selling have in common? At their core, they are concerned with one principle: aligning the revenue engine to the way buyers want to buy. And while most organizations understand the concepts and their theoretical impact on customer experience (CX), there remains a significant gap between theory and practice:

• Our latest research study, “From Selling to Solving: The Buyer-Centric Approach to Sales Success,” shows that nearly two-thirds (61%) of sales leaders believe in using a buyer-centric sales approach even if it makes the sales cycle longer because it’s more effective – yet, less than half think their organizations demonstrate a higher mastery of buyer-centric sales skills than the competition.

• Forrester’s “The Rise Of Revenue Operations” report reveals that most organizations recognize the power of revenue ops, but only 25% embrace the core tenants.

• From personal experience, I can’t tell you how many times someone has told me that their organization practices value-based selling, only to discover that extent of their “value-based selling” is including the company’s value proposition in pitch decks and cold-call scripts.

Why the disconnect? Why do so many organizations agree on the value of these customer-focused GTM motions and fail to integrate the core tenants into their revenue DNA?

It all comes down to a lack of top-down support, siloed departments and segmented tech stacks. The good news is that companies can overcome these challenges with a shared framework, language and toolset. 

Shared Framework and Language for Cross-Functional Teams

Investing in and adopting a new sales methodology is a leap for any organization – and when done correctly, results in a dramatic increase in revenue performance. Companies encounter problems when they fail to coach to and integrate one common framework and language into their revenue DNA, so let’s look at how to prevent that.

Leadership Buy-in and Unifed Goals

The first step for aligning your revenue function is agreement on a strategic plan for growth. If you’re considering rolling out a new sales methodology, have recently undergone leadership changes or are in the midst of mergers or acquisitions – I highly encourage you to involve key stakeholders early on in the process and train them on the new methodology before your customer-facing teams. Top-down support and goal alignment must be in place from the beginning.

This goes doubly for frontline managers. Make no mistake, initiatives live and die at this level. Frontline sales leadership must thoroughly understand the tenants of the new system and be trained on how to coach to it. Remember: there’s no “silver bullet” for driving adoption, but if there was one, it would be the support of firstline managers. 

Aligning the Revenue Engine

When we talk about improving CX, it’s tempting to only consider customer-facing roles – yet, multiple roles beyond the revenue function play a part in driving revenue growth and customer loyalty.

For instance, when you’re dealing with complex sales that require extensive proposals, individuals from across the organization are often involved. If those individuals are trained to view opportunities through the same lens as your sales force, they provide additional insight into the qualification and proposal process to ensure resources aren’t wasted. Moving higher up the funnel, the same can be said about marketing – when all marketing assets align with the common language that is your sales methodology, messaging becomes more targeted and impactful.

In turn, this cross-functional communication framework facilitates feedback loops across the organization. When sales, marketing, finance, billing, and customer support and success all use the same criteria to evaluate and discuss new and existing business, it greatly improves knowledge-sharing – allowing teams to align on driving customer value and loyalty.

The key is to ensure all revenue-impacting roles work from the same communications framework. Like musicians in an orchestra, different roles have different responsibilities – but they’re all playing from the same musical score. It’s imperative that all teams have objective criteria for evaluating deals and a shared vocabulary for communicating both internally and externally.

Shared Toolset

The importance of a single source of truth (SSOT) cannot be overlooked. And, while many revenue teams have taken that step, the proliferation of revenue tech has made it all too easy to set out with that goal in mind and wind up with a bloated and/or segmented tech stack at the end of the journey.

The ideal tech stack varies considerably according to company size and composition, industry and products/services – and there are four basic elements beyond an SSOT that benefit cross-functional teams:

Qualification Tools, Playbooks and Plan Generators

Once you’ve selected the right sales methodology, make it easy for revenue teams to implement. These SaaS tools allow teams to efficiently prepare for calls, capture vital intelligence in the voice of the customer, easily identify and mitigate areas of risk and keep deals on track with mutual plans. They enable intel to be easily shared across teams and provide leadership with easy-to-use dashboards and reports that enable analysis and optimization at scale.

Whatever solution you choose, ensure that it seamlessly integrates with your other revenue applications to avoid asking your teams to learn a new system and wasting precious selling time on redundant admin work or platform switching. 

Conversational Intelligence

As you know, these AI-driven tools track and analyze your sales calls and can be set up to monitor for leading indicators like the number, distribution and types of questions revenue professionals ask. You’re likely well acquainted with this tool’s ability to transform coaching conversations. From a CX perspective, its true value lies in the ability to capture the voice of the customer and identify patterns in business needs and how they describe those needs.

Marketing Automation & Analytics

Insight into how prospects and customers engage with your company’s sphere of influence – i.e., all the ways in which your company impacts the market, increases awareness and provides assets – can be a tremendous aid for sales and customer support and success. It enables teams to identify additional needs, be more proactive in onboarding and education efforts and refine the messaging they use to approach new customers.

Account Planning Tools

When it comes to complex and geographically-distributed accounts, these tools help teams identify where to spend their limited time and resources – and if it’s worth it. By identifying opportunities quickly, easily evaluating their value and efficiently bringing in the players and tasks you’ll need to begin engaging, revenue teams can expand their footprint in key accounts at scale. And as with the earlier examples, this detailed insight into account behavior further enables feedback loops that make it more likely you’ll attract similar opportunities in the future.

***

As revenue teams continue to face unrelenting uncertainty, strategic initiatives for improving CX and building customer loyalty will gather momentum. Revenue leaders must reevaluate their process and focus on building the behaviors that uncover and align to the buyer’s process – then invest in the technology that helps cross-functional teams reinforce and execute those buyer-centric behaviors. And remember: Regardless of your growth model, tech stack, service/product or industry, sales will always come down to human-to-human connection and building buyer confidence in the end. 

For more selling advice, check out:

• Our latest research report, “From Selling to Solving: The Buyer-Centric Approach to Sales Success”
• These CX- and RevOps-focused episodes of The B2B Revenue Executive Experience Podcast:
  • “Aligning Revenue Teams with Consistent Language and Processes with Angela Pritchett”
  • “RevOps: The Key to Predictable Revenue and Seamless Buying Experience with Sebastien van Heyningen”

As always, Sell with Value,

Julie

You’re the SVP of Sales at an engineering firm that designs braking technology for major car manufacturers – and you’ve been tasked with growing revenue 20% YOY.

Easier said than done, especially since your cost of acquisition skyrocketed during the pandemic. But you have a plan: a sales transformation at scale that will rebuild the way your company goes to market. You’re confident – after all, you did it before at your last company.

Still, in an attempt to mitigate risk, your CFO is now involved in all major purchasing decisions. Unless you get her approval, your entire initiative stops on a dime. Plus, you routinely go up against your counterparts from marketing and enablement for the same funds, so imagine what it feels like to open this email first thing on a Tuesday morning:

Tim,

I am sending a similar email to Shana Wilcox and Randall Hawkins to determine who at Willmire             Engineering would have the most interest in speaking with me about driving qualified leads and sales productivity.

Working with other companies in the automotive engineering space and executives in your role, we have achieved a 55% increase in sales velocity and 35% improvement in win rates – resulting in a 30% reduction in cost of acquisition.

I have time this Wednesday or Friday from 9 – 12 PT to talk in more detail about your current challenges. If that doesn’t work, please suggest a time that does.

Thank you,

Kiley Jones

I don’t know about you, but if this were me, Kiley would have my attention.

Why it Works

Kiley is able to connect with prospects and instantly pique their interest because she has done the research, identified likely business challenges already on an executive’s radar, used a strategically-choreographed sales prospecting cadence across multiple channels – and builds effective sales emails, LinkedIn InMails and warm calls using the A-I-M Framework.

A-I-M stands for Anxiety, Influence, and Motivation – and it’s a potent template for sales emails and other forms of prospecting outreach that leverages the neuroscience behind how we react to situations to generate intrigue and engagement. It’s powerful because it shows that you are relevant, knowledgeable and credible – and it’s the antithesis to a product-first approach. Let’s look at how it breaks down and how you can use it to write better sales emails and other messaging:

Anxiety

Leveraging anxiety can inspire urgency or shake a prospect out of their complacency. It triggers curiosity and makes them seek a new solution or understanding.

In the example above, Kiley uses her industry experience and research to predict that the executives at Willmire Engineering are competing for capital when she writes: “I am sending a similar email to Shana Wilcox and Randall Hawkins to determine who at Willmire Engineering would have the most interest in speaking with me about driving qualified leads and sales productivity.”

Influence

Now that you’ve gotten their attention, here’s the component you’ll use to prove your credibility and move the conversation in a more comfortable direction by showcasing the results you’ve brought to similar individuals in the past: “Working with other companies and executives in your role, we have achieved a 55% increase in sales velocity and 35% improvement in win rates – resulting in a 30% reduction in cost of acquisition.”

Notice that there is absolutely no detail on the product/service Kiley is selling. It’s not about her or her agenda – it’s about the value she brings to her customers, value that is tied to KPIs that Tim is likely charged with influencing.

Motivation

Here’s where you inspire action: “I have time this Wednesday or Friday from 9 – 12 PT to talk in more detail about your current challenges. If that doesn’t work, please suggest a time that does.” From Tim’s perspective, this provides a concrete action he can take to ensure he’s not left out of the loop.

***

The true power of the A-I-M Framework is its universality – while the above example focused on an email that included all three components, you’ll leverage different elements at different times. For example, your first few touches should also be focused on value, so you’ll be sharing resources from your company’s Sphere of Influence or relevant 3rd-party research. Then, you might make a phone call and leave a voicemail that touches on all three parts. From there, your next email is focused on influence and includes a case study that speaks to the prospect’s likely business issues. If you receive no response, it might be time for a more anxiety-focused email. You get the idea–you’re searching for that key motivating element that will resonate with a prospect and provoke action.

For more selling advice, check out:

• How to Create a Multi-Channel Prospecting Cadence that Works
• The 3 Keys to Reach Your Prospects: Trust, Credibility and Rapport
• Building a Revenue Culture That Scales with Elizabeth Patterson and Karan Singh
• Winning at the Sales Game: The Power of Playbooks with Gerald Zankl

As always, Sell with Value,

Julie

Early in my sales career, my company hired a phenomenal negotiator to put us through a rigorous one-day training.

We learned how to focus on the other individual, generate a feeling of safety, use their language to increase rapport, and tactics for isolating and overcoming obstacles.

At the end of the event, I was confident and energized… until I found out that the procurement officers at my largest client had gone through the same training – two full weeks of it!

That’s what we’re up against as sales professionals, so you’d better be prepared.

Let’s look at five dependable tactics you can use to negotiate a win-win with your most demanding buyers.

1: Choose Your Moment

Before entering into any negotiation, always review the questions that are crucial to closing any deal:

• Can they buy?
• Will they change?
• Are you differentiated
• What’s in it for them?
• Is the timing right?

Many sales reps dive into negotiations at the first sign of hesitation – but if you haven’t created urgency by connecting your solution to problems worth solving right now, no mix of embellishments and discounts will magically close the deal.

Instead of incentivizing quick action, you compromise price integrity early in the process and put yourself at an incredible disadvantage.

2: Know What’s Negotiable

Can you offer a price discount if the client commits to a case study and features your company as a preferred partner?

Can you compromise on deliverables to reach a win-win?

Both are viable solutions. And to offer anything, you must first fully understand what you’re empowered to change.

It’s all about collaborating to find joint value here. Still, if you offer something you’re not authorized to provide, you only risk damaging credibility, trust and rapport – the critical ingredients for complex B2B purchases.

3: Make a Trade

Once you understand all the bargaining chips at your disposal, it’s time to get to work. The first tool at your disposal is the trade-off.

Both examples above fall into this category. The main idea is to listen to the buyer’s position, identify areas of flexibility, and get creative where and when you can.

For example, if you get the sense that one of your deliverables isn’t valued as highly as others, there’s an opportunity to reduce while maintaining price integrity. Alternatively, if the total price is a sticking point and those budgets dry up at year-end, it may be advantageous to offer a discount if the client prepays for services.

4: Sweeten the Deal

Think high-value, low-cost deliverables.

If you host an industry event like Dreamforce, including complimentary passes is a fantastic tactic. Another option is to offer additional training hours or user seats if applicable.

Think back to discovery and uncover additional personal and professional value you can add with these embellishments.

5: Compromise

Sometimes, you have to compromise. Once you’ve isolated the sticking point – whether it’s based on deliverables, terms and conditions or price – find the middle ground that will satisfy both parties.

The key to compromises is to look at a single category: Isolate, confirm and then split the difference.
In the end, companies and humans are incredibly dynamic – especially in Q4 of 2022. And everyone always wants to feel like they’re getting a good deal. No matter your industry, product or tenure, these tactics have served me well over my thirty years in sales. I’m confident they’ll help you propel your business forward as well.

Until next time, happy selling,

Julie

I attended the Sales 3.0 Conference in Philly last week, where many of the talks had a shocking theme running through them: Discovery is dead.

The premise was that buyers hate it. They view sales discovery calls as an annoyance — a roadblock to the demos and nuanced answers they crave from vendors. 

That’s surprising because that’s never been my experience. 

I’ve always found that asking thought-provoking, deliberate and intentional questions is not annoying — it’s engaging. And it’s the critical component that allows sales professionals to make the leap from seller to valued business advisor.

How can we reconcile these two viewpoints? 

It all comes down to what you mean by discovery. In my mind, there are two keys to effective sales discovery calls. 

Step 1: It’s not about you. It’s about your buyer

Salespeople often make the mistake of viewing discovery as a one-time event that’s used to begin qualifying an opportunity. 

As a result, it takes on a transactional light: Give me this info, then I’ll give you what you really want. 

Sellers start the call and attempt to run through their list of questions. Typically, these are situational questions that are stacked at the beginning.

This ends with the potential buyer feeling like they’re being interrogated and putting their guard up, which only makes sense. 

After all, have you given them a reason to answer? Have you added value in your past interactions? Are you prepared to share insights from your research and lessons learned from other customers?

Research shows that impactful business relationships are built on a foundation of trust, credibility and rapport. 

While trust is built incrementally over time, there are two powerful actions you can take to hit the ground running:

• Put the pro back in sales professional: Building your personal brand on LinkedIn is vital to presenting as the talented and dedicated sales professional you are. 
• Put in the time to do quality research: People trust those who understand their point of view. Go beyond pain points to understand the priorities of the prospect’s company and form a narrative of the unique challenges that are most likely already on their radar. 

On the other hand, credibility is something you can establish immediately: 

• Tell a good story: One of the most influential and succinct ways to present as a trusted business advisor is by telling a value-based story. It’s a 30-second opener that explains how you and your company have helped individuals like the prospect in the past.
• Think like an executive: If you come in with a transactional mindset, you put yourself at an incredible disadvantage. When you develop the business acumen to adequately understand how the business objectives, business issues, problems and value connect with your unique solution, you’re ready to sell to decision-makers.=

When you look at rapport building, there’s nothing more powerful than asking the right questions, which leads us here. 

Step 2: Ask the right sales questions.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking there’s a magic number of questions or the perfect sales-call script out there. 

If you do, you’ll fall into the trap of overanalyzing and miss the X-factor that will make your discovery calls valuable for you and your buyer: You need to ask questions that get the prospect talking.

After analyzing nearly one million sales calls, Chorus.ai found that “high-performing reps ask fewer questions per minute than lower-performing reps, but are able to get the prospect to open up more.”

Our research confirms this. When we asked sales leaders what separates their top performers from the rest of the pack, the second most important quality was the ability to ask relevant, targeted questions throughout sales conversations and actively listen to the answers. 

Start with open-ended questions that showcase your familiarity with the prospect’s situation and your interest in helping them. 

For instance, if your research revealed that the company recently brought new executives on, you might say: 

• “I saw that ___  brought on a new CEO & CFO. With those leadership changes in place, how does that impact your priorities for the business objectives and key initiatives that the company is focused on right now?” 

Once you’ve learned about the changes in focus and how those impact the individual you’re speaking to, shift the conversation to better understand their perspective on possible solutions. 

• “When you think about implementing a  ___,  what are you hoping will change as a result? 

Throughout the journey, you’ll want to ensure you’re using the prospect’s language to build rapport and ensure they feel heard. You might say something like:

• You mentioned that ___ could be a potential roadblock in your first few months of ___. What are some of the other challenges you see from a ___ perspective that could get in the way?” 

These are merely examples, but you get the idea: The more the prospect talks, the more you win. 

Of course, not every question can be open-ended. The magic behind the O-P-C questioning technique is the ability to get them talking, go deeper when you need more information and confirm what you’ve heard to improve your understanding and showcase your commitment to uncovering their most critical business issues — and helping to solve them.  

Ultimately, effective sales discovery calls will always expand perspectives and add value. Remember that discovery is a process and must be mutual — the salesperson needs to understand the prospect, and the prospect also needs vital information from the seller.

When you switch your mindset from checking a box to having consultative business conversations, you better serve your potential buyers — and improve your chances of uncovering challenges that your product or service is uniquely qualified to solve. In doing so, you’ll forge trusted business relationships and uncover the value that motivates individuals to act with urgency. 

Until next time, happy selling,

Julie