A Roadmap to Gaining The Prospect’s Trust with Charles Muhlbauer

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The first thing I want the prospect to be thinking about are problems. However you want to, if you want to call them problems, challenges, concerns, fears. Because they may not have a problem. They may not tell you or feel that they have a problem now, but they might be very concerned that they would have that they could be having a problem soon for whatever reason. So I want them to think about problems. There is a specific formula that I coach my team to begin to execute that problem question. That's what I want them to be thinking about. And I joke around with my teammates because as much as people like to talk about how good things are, for some reason people, people like talking more about how things suck. I think our brains are wired to be negative, which is terrible, which is why we all have fear of failure and all that stuff. But they like talking about what they're afraid of, loss, aversion, all that stuff. So that's what I like them to think about first.

And so this is as fun because I go on discovery all day long because it's true, by the way. First of all, you said something very subtle there. We actually are more wired to talk about and to receive negative information is what kept us alive as a species. Ooh, the red berry tastes good. Is it nearly as important information as the red berry will kill you. And so we actually are, we are attuned to that negative information. But here's what's interesting. You know if someone's a real friend of yours based on the negatives they share with you, if you have someone who only tells you the good things going on in their life, they're probably not that good of a friend because they don't trust you enough to share the bad things. So in order for someone to share their problems, you have to have trust. So how do you set up the discovery questions or the process to start building some of that trust where someone feels comfortable sharing those problems? Because the old school classic, right? So Charles, what keeps you up at night?

Right?

Like, I mean that would get me thinking about my problems, but I don't know you, so I'm not willing to go there yet. How do you set up kind of that process or start to establish a little bit of trust so someone's willing to share those problems?

A very good question. The short answer to that is to teach them something first, which is problem related. So I'm a big fan of roadmaps. I love roadmaps. Roadmaps to ask a question, roadmaps to answer a question, followed by asking another question, etc. So the mini roadmap is one, from my perspective, one, sharing context, two, sharing insight, three, humbling disclaimer, and four, asking an open ended question to what extent? So that looks like something like this. Sharing context. Hey Kevin, as you can imagine, just to give you some context about my role here, I speak to probably two or three XYZ teams here a day. That's my context. I'm subtly giving you an understanding as to what I'm doing. Two or three private equity firms, venture capital firms, pretty much every day. And number two, which is sharing insight. They share a lot of different things with me about what they're concerned about, what they're hoping to accomplish. It ranges anywhere from 1, 2, 3 and 4 and it lists out the problems. They're concerned about this, they're worried about this. They have problems with that or they're really looking to be better at this. Okay, so that's step two. Step three. Humbling disclaimer. I don't really know exactly how to ask this question or whatever your humbling disclaimer is and then four. But I'm curious to what extent it's the open ended question using my favorite three words, to what extent? To what extent do any of those resonate at all with you? And if not, what would you say does that I might have missed? So that's the mini roadmap and that subtly does a lot of different things. Tells you where I sit, what I hear. I know what I'm talking about. Maybe none of that resonates with you and that's cool. And leaving it open ended at the end because I'm getting you to think so. That's a way I teach my reps to do that.

I love that it is damn near to the letter how I teach my reps. Oh cool. Like almost to the letter. Comically. You could actually go back and maybe listen to some podcasts I've done other places. People talk discovery. Hey, I talk to XYZ all day long, right? A lot of them seem to be really struggling with blank, blank in blank and then insert insight which is causing. I don't know if that sounds like your world or not. Like which one of those are you struggling with right now? Or do you got it all figured out already?

There you go.

Right? That's beautiful, man. That was almost to the letter there, which was really, really good.