Sales coach Bob London says start discovery calls by asking for the prospect's single top priority for the next 12-24 months, not a list. Then ask follow-up questions about the why, challenges, and goals behind it. Focus on their business before mentioning your product.
Chapters
Okay, here we go. We're starting this sort of roller coaster of very substantive questions that are my go-to list of questions for customer conversations. First, so let me ask you, at the highest levels of your company, what's the top priority that everyone needs to be focused on for the next 12 to 24 months? Think about, you know, think about it in terms of what's really important at the board of directors level. So Here we are again, creating authenticity and trust by not just jumping into the conversation and immediately asking about features and benefits, which kind of puts pressure on them if you think about it. Instead, we're asking about their company, their business, and gives them a chance to talk more broadly about things that are important outside of what you do for them. And note that I want to note a couple things that are important to all these questions. I very intentionally ask for their top priority versus what are your top priorities. It may not sound like a big difference, but this is an example of using a specific prompt or trigger to get more insight. So what I've learned is that asking for one thing helps them focus and prioritize versus asking for a list of things, you know, what are your top priorities, plural, which ends up sort of making them, it dilutes their thought process and you want this whole thing to be frictionless and you don't want them to, you want them to think about what's important, but you don't want them to have to, you know, sort of overthink the process. Once they give you that first priority and you follow up on it, you can always ask for a second one. You know, say, okay, great, thank you, what's your second biggest priority? And of course, all along the way, as you'll see, you're saying, well, what did you mean by that? How does that work, et cetera? We'll talk about those little sort of kindling. I refer to them as the kindling questions because they help accelerate the fire of the conversation. Then we want to follow up by asking why. Why is that a priority and what are the challenges? You know, you can ask them, give me a little bit of context. What's, what led up to that being a priority? How difficult is it? What are the goals the company has put out that these priorities align with? So It amazes me how we so much, so many times we miss opportunities to effectively serve customers better by, by just getting to know their why, their context. Some people like to know what their customers are incented on or compensated on. That's fine too. I've asked that question before. I didn't include it in this list, but what is driving them? And in this case, what's driving their company?
