5/2/2024-What questions do I prioritize in my sales calls?

Whether you’re probing for account needs or building insights into the individual’s perspective and motivations, the information gathering process requires an incremental approach.

You only have so many minutes in your pitch meetings with buyers, so you must be prepared to ask questions that constructively push your agenda for both you and your prospects.

Save the tactical needs questions for email exchanges…try not to spend too much time in meetings with things like decision timelines and KPIs.

Your goal should be to ask high value questions in your F2F meetings that open doors and elevate the conversation strategically.

For your next F2F pitch meeting, develop three strategic questions that will hopefully uncover insights you need to best position your offering.

Perhaps you should focus on surfacing objections and shining a light on those issues. Or maybe you need to dive deeper into specific client objectives and strategies (which will help you frame your value prop better).

Also, remember that every individual prospect has a different agenda, so you may need to probe for insights that reveal what that buyer cares about.

Most sellers stop their needs analysis work at the account level and don’t probe their prospects for personal bias.

All KDMs come to the table with personal motivations and agendas, yet they won’t readily offer them unless you probe.

Here are a few of the so-called "table stakes" of account needs analysis:
> deal timeline
> decision timeline
> company/account goals
> objectives and strategies
> budgets
> KDMs (all those with a vote)
> buying/consideration process
> obstacles

And, here are some of the categories that need probing for each individual buyer:
> objections (personal bias)
> power weight (individual influence)
> motivations and agenda
> perceptions of company process, goals, etc.

Whether you’re probing for account needs or building insights into the individual’s perspective and motivations, the information-gathering process requires an incremental approach. Interrogating buyers doesn’t work too well, so you have to be orderly in collecting all this info.

You don’t have to venture far into this video of NBA player post-game interviews to get the point: dumb questions exist everywhere.

Are these journalists paid to be stupid? Wow.

Preparation is underrated, right?