Want to know my favorite sales question? It’s powerful, versatile, and helps you become a better sales leader.
The question is “why?”
Sure, it sounds simple. But, let’s not underestimate the hidden power behind simplicity.
When you ask this simple, one word question, you uncover the foundational reasons behind a prospect’s motivations, a client’s desires, a team member’s performance, a colleague’s strategy and more.
Often in our day-to-day conversations, we take what the other party is saying for granted. We generally will accept an idea, answer, or strategy at the surface without diving deeper into the reasoning behind them.
Here are some examples:
- Why do you feel this will be an effective strategy?
- Why are you interested in this service but not that one?
- Why did you just have your best sales month ever?
- Why did you reach out to us for support?
- Why did you feel motivated to leave us a review on Google?
Seriously, any of those five above examples above could unlock meaningful and powerful insights for you as a sales leader. You could uncover blind spots in a strategy prior to its execution, or discover a new prospecting method your top seller from last month used to generate results.
By simply diving deeper, using “why?” as your key question to do so, you could penetrate beyond surface-level understanding of vital elements of your sales process and discover critical ideas, missing elements, or important insights to take your sales team, its results, and your clients’ success to the next level.
Give it a try.
In your conversations, whether it be with a colleague, client, or prospect, take the opportunity to ask this simple question when appropriate. While I’m not advocating its use after every statement a client makes (unless you want to drive them crazy and scare them off!), there are certainly opportunities for us all to take less of our conversations for granted and take a step further into truly understanding the other party’s communication.
