Cliche Questions You Must Stop Asking Prospects (Live from the Same Side Selling Academy)

Hello there, it's Bob London here at the Same Side Selling Academy, masterminded by Ian Altman, my, my dear friend. And I'm— my business is called Chief Listening Officer, so I make my living teaching companies and executives how to really hear what their customers are actually thinking, not what they say, but what they really think and believe and what their priorities and pain points are. The real ones. So this is— I always say reality is the new marketing. Um, marketing, which is my background, um, is not going to be able to continue to put, uh, stuff out there in the way of customers and prospects that doesn't help the customer prospect do their job better and make a decision. So marketing is going to be going through some— a lot of changes, but that's not why we're here to talk. We're here to talk about whether marketing or sales, is in front of a customer or prospect, and some of the cliché, almost painfully funny or cringeworthy questions that customers and prospects hear all the time. Now, I'm going to use the word cliché, which is a little gentle. What you're about to hear are questions that actually are off-putting. So in all seriousness, if it's a cliché and someone has heard the question a lot, then they are going to feel, have a negative feeling. They're going to describe a negative feeling like, hey, can't this salesperson or marketing person be a little more creative with their questions? Can't they be a little more thought-provoking or probing? And that's the idea. We're going to talk about some alternatives today. And the other thing is, if everyone, if everyone in sales is asking the same questions of customers and prospects, then the customer and prospect theoretically is giving everyone the same information. So where's the advantage in that if you're a salesperson? So I asked earlier today for people to post on the Same Side Selling Academy Facebook page, which is private and exclusive. What are some of the favorite cliché questions or cliché questions you've come across? First, we had Gabriel, Gabriel Muller, and I don't— I apologize, I don't know if it's Muller or Mueller. He listed a few questions that I thought were brilliantly cringeworthy. Question: I know you're happy with your current vendor, but what could cause your management to bring on a new vendor? Well, that's not too insulting, is it? Answer: Anything. Did I answer your question? Yes. Did it help you sell your solution? No. And P.S., how'd you know I was happy with my current vendor anyways? But that is a classic. That's a classic. Thank you, Gabriel. I know you're happy with your current vendor, but what could cause your management to bring on a new vendor? So that's— that is— that may be the laziest question I've ever heard. Here's one from our dear friend Mark Friedman: How can I help you differently than your current provider? How can I help you currently differently than your current provider? So there's nothing like asking the customer prospect to do your job for you, right? So your job is to point out how you're different after doing some fact-finding. And then none other than the same side selling king himself, Ian Altman, chimed in on the same side selling page. Some of my favorite bad questions: Who's the decision maker? What's your budget? Should I write up the contract? Are these your children? So I think Ian's referring to if you're in someone's office and you see a picture behind them of their family and you say, oh, those are your children? And Ian's favorite answer is, no, they just came with the frame. You gotta love that. You gotta love that. So thank you, Ian and Gabriel Muller and Mark Friedman, for chiming in. So I want to go now to— I did a little research. We all have our favorite cliché questions, but I found a blog post from a number of years ago, and it just goes to show you that cliché questions never go out of style. Um, Kelly Robertson, writing on a website called the Growth University, Check it out. 10 cliché questions that hurt your sales. And I cannot wait to give you the number 1 question on there. In fact, if anyone can type in the number 1 cliché question from this blog post that I also blogged about recently, then we'll give you— I'll give you a free hour of consulting. How's that? How'd you like that? Question number 10 of the most cliché questions according to Kelly Robertson on thegrowthuniversity.com. Number 10, would you like to know the difference between these products? Would you? Number 9, is saving money important to you? Number 8, or number 7, if I could wave a magic wand, what problem would you like solved? So that's, that's not too insulting, is it? Yes, let's pretend we're in preschool and I have a magic wand. What would you magically like to be solved? Are you the decision maker? So we heard that before from, I believe, Ian. If I could get you a better price, would you buy? This is the whiff of desperation. It sounds like some of these questions come at the end of the month, right? So the end of the month is the time when that dangerous thing that we're armed with called a quota, it just creeps over and takes over our entire personality. And the quota is sitting here on our shoulder saying, ask them, is ask them if you can reduce the price, will that, will that help? Ask them anything, you know, figure out can they fax us the order by the end of the, by midnight tomorrow at the end of the month? Let's check it out. Uh, okay, I'm going to skip to the number one, according to this article, most cliché question: what keeps you up at night? Yes, we really want to know what keeps our customers and prospects up at night. I'm going to say that in, in days past, uh, so there's nothing inherently insidious or evil about this question. In days past, I think it probably did yield some interesting information, maybe the 1940s or '50s. Um, but that's the point, is we can't use our parents' and grandparents' questions when we're talking to customers and prospects because we want insights. If I ask a customer or prospect, what keeps you up at night? They've been asked that question so many times, I guarantee it, they're not even going to think about the answer. They're going to give you a cliché answer that they've probably given a dozen times before. How does that help you? How is an answer that all of your competitors got when they asked the same exact tired cliché question, how is that answer going to help you? And the answer is, of course, it's not. Now, before we reveal some of the other questions, The same gentleman, I got to give him props, Kelly Robertson has a blog post on Growth University called Feeble Sales Questions You Need to Avoid. You gotta love the word feeble, it really draws you in. So I'm just gonna go through a couple of these that are worth mentioning. Number 11: Do you want to make more money, gain new clients, increase your sales, etc.? You know, that sounds familiar. It sounds like, do you want six-pack abs? Do you want to lose 20 pounds? Do you want to fit into a size 2 dress? Yes. Yeah. So do you want to make more money, gain new clients? Yes. Tell me where we go from here. I'll answer your question. Yes. That's a silly question. Of course, people— companies want to do that. You need to skip to the how. How are you different? How can you uniquely help a company do those things? Who else should I talk to in the company? You gotta love that one too. So how does that work? So I'm the customer and someone says— I'm the prospect, someone says Bob London, nice talking to you. Who else should I talk to? So they're sort of looking right past me. They're thinking, this guy may or may not be able to help, but I guarantee you, said the salesperson to him or herself, there's someone else who can help me more than this guy that I'm talking to right now, and I'm going to let him know. Are you ready to buy? That's another feeble question. Can you give me a referral? That's a feeble question. It reminds me of so many people are conditioned to ask for referrals before they've done anything, before they've added any value. It reminds me of We had our kitchen underwent a substantial renovation. It was just ripped apart and replaced. When you sign the deal with the contractor, I'm signing, the first thing they do is they go out to their truck and they get out this big sign and it says, they hammer it into your lawn, and this thing's like a giant, it's like a Victorian birdhouse, it's so big, and it has the contractor's name on it. We're proudly renovating a kitchen here. Like, dude, You haven't even done the work yet and you're using me as a human billboard. How does that work? I mean, so I've actually asked folks to take the sign down until we're happy with the work. So that's, that's what this one is. Can you give me a referral? What's your budget? Yeah, that's kind of lazy. All right, I've beat up on the cliché questions enough. I think you get the point. There is a new generation of questions that has come down the pike. That are not clichés. They are meant to be thought-provoking. They are not meant to elicit quick, off-the-cuff answers. They are meant to elicit from customers and prospects the kinds of things that will help you do your job better as a sales or marketing professional. So let me talk about a couple of those. Here's, here's a way to start, and the reason we would ask this type of question that I'm about to give you, which is not a cliché, I guarantee it, is to— the reason a lot of these questions have become clichés and asking about how can we replace your current vendor, those are questions that are driven by our quota perspective, our quoted perspective. We have a need to ask that question. We shouldn't be asking about ourselves and how they can help us. We should be asking about them first. So the first question might be something like, tell me, at the next board meeting, What are the 2 or 3 top bullet points that need to be covered with the board? What's that update going to look like? That gets them thinking about, okay, so you're not asking about me and you're not trying to sell me something in this question. You're trying to understand, get some context. And that's exactly right. Here's another one. Again, to get context. Hey, if I stopped, if I was in your building and stopped someone in the hall that worked for you, and I said, hey, what are you working on? What would you want them to answer? There's usually 1, 2, or 3 things that that person should answer to help understand how to align with what the organization's overall mission and priorities are. What's the one thing you wish you and your team was doing better right now or this year? That's another one that on the heels of asking those big priority questions, when you get into, okay, what's the delta? What do you wish you were doing better right now, this week, this month, this year to achieve those priorities. Let's see, um, here's a question I started using over the last few months based on a suggestion from outside: if you could get a free hour of unbiased advice from a true industry expert in our industry, meaning the vendor's industry, the salesperson's industry, what would you want to know? That's beautiful. So at a minimum, what's going to come out of that will be the things that are on this person's mind that you're talking to that are things that are above and beyond what they expect from a regular vendor. The idea is that they should imagine hypothetically sitting on a plane or train next to an expert in the industry who's not selling anything. What would they want to know? There are some amazing insights that have come from this that have helped with content marketing because it helps you understand the themes that are on the mind of the prospect. Content marketing— so even if you're in sales and your job isn't content marketing, it gives you ideas to feed back to the marketing department or the chief marketing officer. It also gives you an idea of, of saying, well, gee, I wonder if that's the question they would ask an unbiased expert, why wouldn't they ask us that question? Like, we have sales engineers and product people who are really smart about this stuff. Why wouldn't they ask us? So it's an opportunity for you to follow up by saying, by the way, we have people that would love to answer that question in an honest, unbiased way. And so if you ever want, just, we'll connect you with them. And that's some, that's a way you can really help. What's the best vendor experience you've ever had? And then what's the worst? This is where, again, these are disarming questions that they don't get asked very often. And when I say disarming, it means that you're not trying to sell them. You're just trying to understand them, what the world looks like from their perspective. Let me skip to the last one, and I've blogged about this. I think that I posted a video on the Same Side Selling Academy about this. Last question, ma'am or sir, what would make you a customer for life? Now, that's the killer question because what we find out very quickly is what I found out in doing about 1,000 one-on-one conversations with decision makers. What would make you a customer for life? You know what they say? No one's ever asked me that. No one, Bob, has ever asked me that. What does that tell me? It tells me, A, they're probably going to think about their answer and give me something insightful. And B, if no one else has asked it, they're going to give me an answer that they haven't given anyone else, which gives me an advantage. It's going to give me an insight that other folks don't have. Hey, I've enjoyed this a lot. I hope you've gotten something out of it. In a minute, I'll post a link to an ebook, the Customer Rediscovery Playbook, that is absolutely free. If you want to go to chieflisteningofficers.com/free, I, I'm— I've open sourced my entire methodology because I want the world to be a more listening-oriented place, especially in marketing and sales. There's already plenty of noise, we don't need to make more of that, we need more listening. So download the ebook, tell your friends, tell your co-workers, tell everybody, and thanks for listening today. I appreciate it.