This amazing statistic is getting a lot of buzz in sales blogs and numerous LinkedIn group discussions. And rightfully so.

What this means is that you have a three to one advantage over the competition when you can show your prospect how to obtain the value they seek. With those odds isn’t it worth digging deeper to understand exactly how to help your clients create and deliver on a vision?

What if I were to tell you that all you have to do is ask the right sales questions?

That’s why I wrote an article about the importance of leading with strategic questions rather than pitching

Why Ask Strategic Questions First Rather than Pitching?

First of all I am not a fan of the word ‘pitching’. It implies throwing something out and hoping it will strike a chord. ‘Positioning’ is my word of choice when it comes time to offer my ideas and solutions.

‘Positioning’ implies a strategic approach and one that is modified based on context. And the only way to understand the context is to ask questions FIRST.

So instead of pitching, isn’t it better to have a business conversation where you are asking high quality questions, deeply listening to the buyer and then responding not with answers but with deep, thoughtful follow-up questions? When you listen with the intention to hear rather than to tell, there is always the next logical question layered underneath your client’s response.

With this approach you will be able to tailor how you ‘position’ your solution in a way that resonates for your client. You can make linkages and tie back what you heard to create relevance and a vision of possibility.

Remember…setting a vision into a clear path to value gives you a 74% chance of winning the deal according to the Forrester research.

Without the right sales questions how can you understand what’s valuable for your buyer? Leading with strategic questions is your best shot at winning the deal.

The Quality of the Question Determines the Quality of Your Client’s Answer

“But I AM asking questions,” you say?

When I placed my article about Strategic Questioning in different LinkedIn groups people came out in droves defending that they ARE asking questions. That may be true, but the problem is they are not asking the right questions. Not all questions are equal. Not by a long shot.

And I will go further and claim that there is not enough listening going on. Asking a question and pouncing on the answer with your pitch is not called listening.

I am not referring to lame questions that only help the seller. Questions that pull out information, data and facts about the client should be researched well before the meeting ever takes place and not asked in the meeting. This allows you to focus on quality questions during the meeting that add value to your client because you are encouraging the buyer to reflect, challenging their thinking and broadening their perspective.

Strategic Questioning Framework

Here’s the catch. It’s not only important to ask high quality questions…it’s critical that you have a strategy or a roadmap for how you engage your prospect in the business conversation. The last thing you want to do is throw questions out helter skelter like popcorn.

I provide my coaching clients with a strategic framework which is different for different industries. I use a ‘6P’ Framework’, A ‘DISCOVER’ Framework or ‘SCOPE’ framework depending on what makes sense for their business. Then within the framework, we develop killer questions that are high quality and yield gold for both the seller and the buyer.

Helping your buyer gain insight about matters of importance to them is time well spent for both you and your buyer. Today’s empowered buyers’ need reps to diagnose and solve business problems rather than just pitching product and solution capabilities. This means that the need to develop the art and science of strategic questioning and deep listening skills has never been more important.

Do you want to receive a free copy of the SCOPE Strategic Questioning Framework? If so, please click this link.

The post Ask Sales Questions & Tip These Odds in Your Favour appeared first on Partners In Performance.

Every morning I wake up and have a glass of water with a squeeze of lemon juice. It’s supposed to be good for the liver. What’s more important to me is that this daily habit sets the right tone for how I eat all day long. Starting my day with a healthy habit makes me eat healthfully all day.

It’s like that with daily sales habits. The first 30 minutes of your work day sets the pace and tone for the rest of the day. If you are productive right off the bat, you will gain momentum that will carry you through a very productive day.

I was speaking with one of my coaching clients last week who has a robust consulting practice, and she never takes her eye off her sales pipeline.

She has formed a sales habit to reach out to three people each day who can help fill her funnel and build the next wave of business. That way she is always in ‘sales’ mode even while she is in delivery mode with other clients.

An approach that I use successfully is to be intentional about my daily work habits. I create daily focus on my top priorities by asking myself “What are the three things that I must do that will tell me, at the end of the day that I was productive and produced the results I intended?”

Closest to the Money

For example, when I am in high sales mode, one of my daily habits is to set one face-to-face or ear-to-ear appointment with an existing or prospective client before I move onto anything else. That might take a few calls and emails or it might take only one. For me this is a high pay-off activity and ensures consistency in my sales results. A focusing question I often use in this context is “What activity is closest to the money?”

Rather that diving into mindless activities (email, coffee, the news, etc) it works better to create a daily focused plan and to start with high pay-off activities before I move on to other things. The morning is often when we have the highest energy, focus and concentration. This strategy primes the pump for a productive day.

Are you juggling glass or rubber balls?

We juggle many balls every day but one thing I know is this: When we juggle three balls that are rubber and drop one, they keep bouncing for a while and may eventually roll off into the corner. I can pick it up later without consequence. But when we juggle glass balls and one of them drops, it shatters.

It’s useful to think about all the balls you juggle on a daily basis. Which ones are glass and which ones are rubber? Remember to always keep your eye focused on your glass balls. One of the ways that top-performing salespeople separate themselves from others is by effectively using the first 30 minutes of the day.

It is highly beneficial to your productivity to know exactly what you are going to accomplish during this period. Therefore, it’s a good idea to determine the day before what you intend to do when you first arrive in the morning.

For anyone in sales, this means one thing: start the day by making a minimum of three sales calls before you do anything else.

Sales consultant Mark Hunter agrees with me. Here’s what he said in an article on the CPSA site called “Sales Motivation: The First 30 Minutes of the Day:” 

Many studies have shown that people waste on average 15 minutes each day just getting ready to make that first call. It is ironic to think that you will have made three phone calls in the time it takes the average salesperson to even start making theirs.

An additional benefit of this plan will come when you begin applying this same principle to the first 15 minutes after returning from lunch. Use that time to make three prospecting calls.

By establishing good sales habits, you will increase the number of phone calls you make every day by utilizing time that, in the past, was unproductive. Make it part of your routine at the end of each day to identify the three people you intend to contact the next morning and the three you’ll contact after lunch.

What do you think about this idea? Try it out. You may discover that one good sales habit like this in the first 30 minutes of your day will increase sales dramatically.

Enjoyed this post? Join below for email updates and stay up to date on all my sales and presentation tips.

The post Your Daily Sales Habit appeared first on Partners In Performance.

I see this failure to open and close meetings properly happen all the time. And I know you do too. This one thing is done so poorly and inconsistently in client sales meetings, that it’s a #1 cause of “no sale” or a longer than necessary sales cycle. I can’t say enough about how important it is.

When you start opening effectively, you will see a dramatic difference in your desired outcomes. When I have a meeting that doesn’t quite play out the way I intend, it inevitably comes back to this: a poor start and a poor wrap up of the meeting.

More specifically, it comes down to how you as a sales person take control and guide the meeting process. That’s our job, after all, and without taking charge of the sales conversation, we can’t be as effective at making sales.

Taking control begins with setting the context. There are similar terms for this:

• Framing the meeting
• Setting the stage
• Providing an overview

It’s important not just for sales meetings. ALL meetings and presentations, both internal and external, will benefit when you start with a strong context set.

(Tell me you’ve never been in a meeting where you’re sitting there confused, wondering what’s going to happen, why I am really here, and what do they want from me? Of course you have.)

Context setting is tough for people. It requires clarity of thought and planning. It has to be concise, delivered in a conversational tone and it has to clearly answer these questions that are percolating in the mind of your client:

• Why are we are?
• What is going to happen and how will we proceed?
• What am I going to get out of this time spent with you?
• What are you going to ask me to do at the end?

You’ve likely have heard the expression “Tell them what you are going to tell them – Tell them – Tell them what you told them.” It’s typically a suggested format for presentation skills but it applies equally to all meetings.

Your opening and closing statements are like ‘bookends’ to your sales process. Book ends shore up your books. Setting the context in a sales meeting frames and supports the sales conversation.

Bookends are almost invisible but that doesn’t mean they aren’t important. Without them your books fall apart. In the same way, your opening and closing only take a minute or so to deliver but they each serve a distinct and critical purpose.

Even I, as a sales coach expert have fallen into the trap of not setting the context properly. Last week I was in a first Discovery meeting with two partners from a professional services company. My typical pattern is to establish rapport and then to take the reins with words of transition such as:

“Is it okay if I take a minute to set the stage for our time together?”

It consistently works like a charm and allows me to set up the meeting properly.

However in this case, as soon as the senior partner sat down he immediately kicked off by describing their current situation. Of course that’s what we want in a Discovery meeting – to learn about the client. It simply would have been better had I framed up the meeting first to set up expectations for what would happen during the meeting and on the heels of the meeting.

As quickly as my ‘driver’ style client opened the meeting, he also brought the meeting to a close and told me to follow up in two weeks. While I attempted to establish a better and more concrete call to action, it didn’t happen to the degree I would have liked. At least not until I reflected on the meeting process afterwards and injected a follow up call to get the process on a better track.

My takeaway is that the next time I meet with a ‘driver’ client (and many are) who takes the reins at the beginning of the meeting, I will respectfully take the reins at an appropriate opening early on and inject a quick context set to set up the meeting for mutual success.

What about you, has this ever happened to you in a client meeting? I’d love to hear from you;you can reach me here or on LinkedIn.

The post Client Sales Meeting Failures: The #1 Cause appeared first on Partners In Performance.

For Fred, my colleague, it was not only a lost sale but a missed opportunity to contribute his unique expertise and make a positive difference. By all rights he should have won this business. This work was right in his wheelhouse. He had recently completed a project for a similar client with identical challenges. The measurable results were astonishing.

So how did this happen?

Deconstructing the Selling Cycle

After a few questions to understand his step by step process, the following jumped out at me:

Big Whopper Mistake #1: Selling to the Wrong Client Contact

The client contact who reached out to Fred was a Training Manager. According to Miller Heiman’s Strategic Selling she is the ‘Technical Buyer’. The ‘User’ client was an executive in her company and she had been tasked to source a solution. In this example the executive was also the ‘Buyer’. While it’s ok to initiate discussions with a technical buyer, it’s a mistake to not engage all the key stakeholders who will impact the decision.

Even though Fred asked excellent questions of the Training Manager and she was well grounded in her executive’s needs, without connecting directly with executive, Fred compromised his success. What could he have done?

1. Fred could have requested a second discovery meeting including the executive to confirm his understanding of requirements.
2. Or he could have requested to include the executive in the proposal presentation. This is riskier because the summary of needs outlined in the proposal would be missing first hand perspectives from the executive.

Here in lies the second mistake. There was no proposal presentation. Fred emailed the proposal with instructions to call if there were questions.

Big Whopper Mistake #2: Emailing proposals without setting up a meeting to present and review it together

I know some people think it’s okay to fire off a proposal by email without properly presenting it to get the client reaction, address concerns and confirm next steps. I see it happening more and more, but why?

• Are people trying to save time?
• Do they not know how to present virtually if the client is out of town?
• Are they missing a process to present a proposal?

For me it’s a big problem and I would never do it. When I have a qualified lead and put in hard work to get to the proposal writing stage you can be darn sure I am going to maintain control of the process by securing a time to present the proposal.  This is my goal even when the proposal is brief and simple. I will set up a face-to-face or virtual meeting with a system like GoToMeeting. And I strive to set up the meeting to include the right people – the ones who will make or influence the decision.

What about you? Is it ever okay to email a sales proposal without a confirmed meeting to review it and if so under what circumstances? I’d love to hear from you; you can reach me here or on LinkedIn.

I am curious to know just how prevalent this is. Please vote:

The post Deconstructing Big Whopper Sales Mistakes appeared first on Partners In Performance.

My research tells me that leveraging LinkedIn yields significant sales results. I am working with Kristina Jaramillo and her partner Eric Gruber of  GetLinkedInHelp.com to help me execute a focused plan for LinkedIn. Their approach is strategic and that’s what resonated with me. This guest post written by Kristina speaks to the importance of having a strategy for social selling.

Guest Post By Kristina Jaramillo

I’m sorry to say – but most sales leaders on LinkedIn do not have a strategy. They have a shopping list of tactics that need to be completed. But there’s no cohesive strategy. If you really want to use LinkedIn for sales, you’ve got to be strategical.

Instead, there’s no thought behind the connections they’re making. There’s no thought on what happens after that connection is made – how are they’re going to turn that prospect into a client? There’s no thought about the content they’re posting and how it’s going to position them (if they did, they wouldn’t be posting reminders on the LinkedIn content platform that do not differentiate them.)

There’s no thought about the discussions they’re creating and how they’re going to get prospects to move from the discussions to their blog to learn more – and there’s no thought about what happens next once they get prospects to their blog. There is no strategy for integrating LinkedIn into their everyday sales and marketing activities and programs.

Strategy is the biggest difference between a sales organization that merely dabbles on LinkedIn and other social media platforms and one that is wildly successfully.

5 Strategies for Sales Leaders on LinkedIn

#1 – Your Social Media Presence Strategy

Look at your LinkedIn profile. Did you really take a strategic approach to creating your LinkedIn profile? I bet you that your profile is not a case study driven marketing tool and that it’s simply a cover letter and resume that talks about your sales achievements (which only shows that you care about making the sale instead of providing value and building a real relationship). I bet you that you’re not speaking to different targeted audiences with different needs and showing your value to them. It’s because you took a tactical approach rather than a strategic approach.

#2 – Your Thought Leadership Strategy

Many sales professionals are using LinkedIn groups as a newsfeed for their blog posts that are mostly reminders. They’re just using the LinkedIn publishing platform as another place to put their blog posts. So they’re just pushing out content instead of having a strategy to use content to pull prospects in. You need to plan out what type of content you can provide that will have decision makers thinking twice about the approaches they’re taking. You have to think about the discussions that you can create that makes you stand out as a thought leader. You have to think about whether the content inspires prospects to want to take further action and if the content is relevant– and who is it really relevant for.

#3 – An Intelligent Prospecting Strategy

Take a good look at your connections and see how many of them are “long shot hopefuls” that can possibly introduce you to so and so. If you’re like sales leaders that we have helped, then most of your connections are irrelevant to your business because you were focused on quantity instead of quality. Your intelligent prospecting strategy should be defining who your main and secondary prospects and influencers and a strategy to get them to open their closed doors – and keep them open.

#4 – Community Building and Engagement Strategy

It’s not about how many connections you make or followers you have on LinkedIn and other social media platforms. It’s about how many people you reach and engage with. The best way to engage is to create a social media community. Inside my LinkedIn group, Get Help with Linked Strategies, I’m engaging with 470+ sales and marketing leaders through regular content and discussions. Remember, B2B buyers are looking for quick access to trusted experts and relevant content that helps them with their business issues.

So you need a strategy for how you’re going to build your community and how you’re going to keep prospects active in your community so you can build a relationship with them.

#5 – Lead Generation & Lead Engagement Strategy

For most of the prospects you connect with on LinkedIn and other social media platforms, they don’t realize how and why they need you yet. You need to nurture these connections and provide them with relevant content (which gets them to raise their hand. You need a strategy for how you’re going to use case studies, white papers, 3^rd party research that supports your claims, webinars, webcasts and other thought leadership content that piques your prospects curiosity and gets them wanting to talk to you about their options.

You need a strategy for how you’re going to intrigue prospects enough that they are curious on how you achieved results. Then you need a strategy for how you’re going to move them into your pipeline and how are you going to get them to engage further with you.

Now, I just scratched the surface. Start with my ideas and then dig deeper. Really get strategic on how you use LinkedIn and other social media platforms. Stop just completing a list of tasks.

About the Author:

Kristina Jaramillo, Managing Partner and Chief LinkedIn Strategist at GetLinkedInHelp.com has generated more leads and opportunities for tech companies, professional service firms and other B2B organizations using LinkedIn (than all of their other marketing initiatives combined). Her best practices are featured on Forbes, MarketingProfs, RainToday, Website Magazine, Salesforce.com, Business Insider and many other top publications. You can learn more about her prospect development approach with her free webinar at: FreeLinkedInMarketingTraining.com/webinar.

The post LinkedIn for Sales Leaders: <br>5 Strategies for Results appeared first on Partners In Performance.

If so, how is that working for you? Likely, not very well. Here’s why.

Telling is not selling

We know that questions persuade more powerfully than any other selling skill. We know that ‘pitching’ our ideas, products and solutions without getting grounded in clients’ needs beforehand makes it next to impossible to position value.

Yet when it comes to handling tough sales objections why is it that the typical reaction for most sales professionals is to counter an objection with a statement? Because it’s the typical human reaction to defend and justify when you feel under attack. Instead of “Don’t call my baby ugly,” what can you do instead?

Ask, don’t tell

Instead, immediately start asking questions. Don’t limit your questioning strategy and skills to the discovery phase of your client meeting. Questions can and should be woven all throughout your customer interaction.

When presented with an objection be prepared to ask questions FIRST before you answer. Our goal is to maintain empathy and gain understanding when an objection is raised. We need to get the client to do the talking. We need to listen. The way to accomplish that is with open ended, opinion finding questions.

Be prepared to ask at least THREE questions before you deliver your answer.

4 Reasons Why You Should Ask Questions Before Answering an Objection

1. Asking clarifies the concern: Questions uncover what lies beneath the objection. What is spoken on the surface is often too general and if you answer right away, you may not address the real concern unless you ask clarifying questions first.
2. Builds empathy and trust: The intention of your questions is to understand your client. Your client wants to feel heard. There’s no better way to do this than by asking to hear more of what they mean.
3. Buys you time: As you ask questions and listen you will be able to formulate a better response.
4. Shifts Perspective: Good questions shift perspective. Your questions build awareness and make your client think about the implications and potential limitations of their current thinking.

Objection: “Your Fees Are Too High”

Here are a few questions you could ask when encountering the objection about price.

• As compared to what?
• What makes you say that?
• Apart from price, what are other factors (criteria) are important in making your decision to move forward?
• If you don’t achieve the goals outlined in our solution, what are the costs (risks, implications, etc)?
• How important is it for you to achieve the outcomes we discussed?
• What do you consider to be reasonable fees?

Objection Handling Toolbox

To avoid being stumped by objections the best strategy is to prevent them.  If your sales process doesn’t include discovery to uncover client issues,  impacts, desired outcomes and decision criteria you only have yourself to blame for creating unnecessary objections. However no matter how effective your process, objections, concerns or unanswered questions will still surface. That’s why it’s important to have a proactive strategy to respond. Plan your questions in advance for the common objections you encounter. In my Intentional Selling training workshops we identify the 4 or 5 common objection themes that typically surface.

Then we roll up our sleeves and get to work. For each objection, the sales team generates multiple questions. We evaluate the quality of the questions and then the best ones are documented. This becomes an objection handling toolbox that is used to prepare future meetings.

Don’t go unprepared into a sales meeting. Take your best objection-handling questions with you and see what happens. Then let me know. I can be reached here, and on LinkedIn.

The post The #1 Mistake in Handling Sales Objections appeared first on Partners In Performance.

I recently asked Jim, one of my colleagues, for an update on the sales opportunity he had been pursuing with one of the top professional service firms. In previous conversations he sounded cautiously optimistic. He was on a shortlist of two and all the indications were there that he would land the deal.

During his initial discovery meeting he had elicited the client’s decision criteria and he was confident that his solution was a fit. He had done a lot of things right but sadly, the firm chose the other contender. He was shocked. It turns out he was more than cautiously optimistic. He was overly confident.

When I asked him why they weren’t selected he said he didn’t know – yet. Surprisingly after all the time, energy and value that Jim delivered in the process, they informed him of the outcome in an email. Wow! But courage kicked in and he followed up and has a scheduled meeting with the client to debrief the result. Smart man. If you don’t succeed in getting the business at least get the lessons learned.

But here is where he wasn’t so smart. The client had certainly asked plenty of questions throughout the process but had not raised any major concerns or objections. I asked Jim if he had smoked out potential barriers to winning the deal in the final stages of the sales process. Sadly he had not. It seems his mindset was like a search light looking for positive indications.

The mind shift that would have better served Jim is this: Objections are not barriers or obstacles – they are clues to understanding client needs.

While the best strategy for handling client objections is to proactively prevent them in the first place (or at least minimize them), there is no escaping objections. It’s a natural part of the buying/selling experience.

Voicing concerns is an important way customers express their needs. Research reveals that objections are critical for success and calls with objections are more likely to result in success than those without. A resourceful way to view objections is that they are simply a request for more information.

So bring them on! Be intentional. I’m of the school that it’s wise to smoke out unspoken objections with a key question like:

“If there was one thing that might get in the way of moving forward with us what might that be?”

There are three things to note about the structure of this key question:

1. I am not asking for multiple barriers. I am only asking for ONE. The intent is to smoke out the MAIN objection or concern.
2. The words “moving forward with us” is imbedded in the question and suggests that we will move forward once the objection is successfully handled.
3. The word ‘might’ is soft and gently encourages the customer to reveal what might otherwise not be spoken.

I’d rather know and have the opportunity to influence the outcome. Much better to win the deal than get the lessons learned.

I’ll be writing more about this topic so don’t miss out.

The post How to Turn Client Objections into Sales Success appeared first on Partners In Performance.

Reactive Objection Handling

In my work coaching sales people, I find that many follow this common pattern:

• Dread objections and pray they won’t come up
• Get defensive when they surface
• Struggle with a response and lack confidence
• Don’t listen and the client doesn’t feel heard
• Client isn’t satisfied
• Limited or no success

Objection Prevention

Of course the best strategy for handling objections is to prevent them! Or at least to minimize them. Sales people are their own worst enemy if they don’t have a customer centric mindset and a process that ensures ample skill and time for discovery. How else can you link your solutions to the needs of your client if you’ve asked lame questions and only scratch the surface of what really matters to your client?

No matter how well you have honed your sales process skills and are conducting your sales meetings like a professional, those pesky objections are still going to surface. But instead of thinking of them as ‘pesky’ problems, top sales performers embrace objections and even ‘smoke’ them out with questions like “if something were to get in your way of moving forward what might that be?”

Successful sales people put themselves on the same side of the desk and collaborate with clients to find solutions to their problems.

Shifting limiting assumptions around objections is the first step to success. Having a proactive strategy is the second. Having a process to handle objections when they surface in the meeting is the third – more to come on that one in the next blog post.

Proactive Strategy for Objection Handling

One of the preparation steps for my Intentional Selling workshops is to give participants brief pre-work which includes identifying the top 3 objections they typically encounter. And here is what I have found. When the list of 30 or so objections are consolidated there are really only 6 – 8 objections themes. They may be worded slightly differently but there are consistent patterns. It’s not as if you have to come up with a strategy for 30. That would be overwhelming. But 6 or so? That is easily done.

And if it’s not something you have done…

• Isn’t it worth the time and investment to create a plan for handling each one of those 6 or so objections?
• Isn’t it the sales leader’s responsibility to equip their team (and especially their new hires) to come up with the ‘Book Answer’ which is the best possible answer for each of those objections?
• Does it not make sense to create an Objection Handling Sales Tool which documents the common objections and the ‘Book Answers’ for each one?

I feel so strongly about the importance of preparing for objections, that I’ll take your calls and questions and see if I can’t help walk you through the steps to creating a proactive strategy. Free until my ear gets tired or my phone goes dead. What have you got to lose? Call me. 907-877-5808.

The post How to Avoid Being Stumped by Client Objections appeared first on Partners In Performance.

A new prospect phoned me to let me know she was interested in purchasing my video training on ‘13 Expert Tips for Creating Truly Persuasive Presentations’. She expressed frustration because the information page lacked clarity about what she was actually buying and in what format. Yikes! I was very grateful for the feedback. Most people wouldn’t have bothered picking up the phone and sharing their frustrations.

This exchange prompted me to question what my clients experienced when engaging in my website in other areas. I wanted to experience what the client experienced when they:

1. Signed up for my blog
2. Signed up for my newsletter
3. Purchased one of my video training products
4. Participated in the self test to assess their sales skills
5. Filled out ‘contact us’

Experiencing from the Eyeballs of the Client

I hired Jennifer Kelly of New Initiatives Marketing (fresh eyeballs) to do an audit of these key engagement pages. She took screen sheets as she clicked through the step-by-step process for engaging with these key pages. She documented her feedback for each page commenting on the process, the words chosen on each page, the visual impact and most importantly what it FELT like. And then we set up an online meeting and she gave me the goods. Wow! What an eye opener! It was one of my most insightful lessons learned. We quickly put a simple action plan together and executed her recommendations. Phew!

The exercise with Jennifer may sound basic. I take great pride in my website and spend more time and money with my webmaster than I would like. But I had not experienced my website from my client’s perspective. Only mine. From my eyeballs. And I now realize how limiting that can be.

Your Client Perspective – How Do You Get It?

Client satisfaction surveys, post project evaluations, project debriefs, process checks are examples of powerful tools to gain that powerful perspective. One of my favourite and most powerful approach is one I use periodically with my clients.

We know how important it is to ask questions to uncover client needs and perspectives. In Intentional Selling I introduce the 6P Questioning Strategy to ensure you ask a broad spectrum of strategic questions. The strategic framework is always tailored for each client and typically includes questions that uncovers needs around Product, Patrons, Positioning, etc.

One ‘P’ category that I encourage my clients to ask their existing clients is Partnering Questions: questions that elicit feedback about the client relationship and their level of satisfaction:

• What do you most appreciate about the services we provide?
• What specific value do we bring to you and your team?
• Where could I improve?
• What could I be doing more of or less of to enhance your experience?

It takes courage to ask these questions but when you frame your request to ask these ‘Partnering Questions’ with a benefit for the client, you will demonstrate your professionalism, your desire to exceed their expectations and you will stand out from the rest of the pack. So few sales professional people do this. The average person is not curious enough, doesn’t care enough or isn’t brave enough to ask. They prefer to stay in their comfort zone and simply make assumptions.

What about you? What techniques do you use to gain your client perspective? I would love to hear from you. Drop me a line in the comments below.

The post Gaining Client Perspective – From the Eyeballs of the Client appeared first on Partners In Performance.

• Prospecting skills?
• Questioning abilities?
• Objection handling?
• Closing skills?
• Ability to deliver a great presentation?
• Get referrals?

All are important. But I believe there’s one that beats all the rest hands down. It’s the ability to put yourself in your client’s shoes. To think like they think and feel what they feel. And to see the world from their perspective.

Without this fundamental ability, all your other selling abilities will fall short. You will only scratch the surface and never fully understand what is deeply important for your clients: their desires and what makes their heart sing, their fears and challenges and the niggles that need quieting. When wearing your own shoes, you will only see their world from the perspective of your world. Not good enough.

Remember you can’t wear two pairs of shoes at the same time. Deep understanding at a head, heart and gut level comes only when you are able to slip out of your shoes and put on the shoes of your client.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this is simply about ‘understanding client needs’ which we learn in ‘Sales 101’. As critical as this skill is, it is basic. It’s like snorkelling on the surface waters.

This is about taking client needs to a whole other level of deep understanding and empathy. Now we are talking about scuba diving with your dive buddy to unearth and understand what lies beneath. It takes curiosity, a caring attitude and listening skills to develop deeper understanding. Learning to shift your perspective is an invaluable technique.

Adopting the client perspective – how do you mentally shift into your clients’ shoes?

Taking your shoes off to put on your client’s shoes is easier said than done. Perceptual positions, an NLP process for discovering different perspectives and developing empathy, is a technique that can help do that.

This is perceptual position #1: Self

Imagine you are sitting in a theatre. You see the people sitting around you, you feel the upholstered seat beneath you and you are munching on your buttery popcorn. The movie begins and the screen ahead of you is in full panoramic view. You see the scenes, the action and the expressions on the faces of the actors. You hear the Dolby sound track and tune into what the actors are saying. You are looking at the movie from your own seat (shoes or perspective).

This is perceptual position #2: Other

Now imagine getting out of your seat and transporting yourself right into the screen and becoming the hero in the movie. Now you are listening and looking through his ears and eyes and are feeling what he is feeling, The best movies create a rich multi-sensory experience and transport us so into the character of the movie that we easily lose ourselves and experience the world like it’s happening to us.

This is perceptual position #3: Observer or Meta

Finally, imagine that you are now running the movie projector. You are perched in the projection room with the bird’s eye view of both the character(s) in the movie AND the people in the audience. You can even see yourself sitting down below watching the movie with rapt attention and polishing off your popcorn. You notice everything that is going on from your strategic perch.

Developing the ability to mentally transport your physical body to the second perceptual position goes a long way to being able to establish rapport, being more empathic to the Other’s needs and wants. And this ultimately results in building trust which is fundamental to offering better consulting services and buying experience for your client.

And the beauty of the third or meta position is that it enables you to detach momentarily, be impartial and do a ‘self-check’ on your communication behaviours.

The next time you prepare for a sales conversation, mentally take yourself to the movies and imagine yourself in your client’s shoes. Stay in their character for a while as you imagine what their world is like, their challenges, their desires. Then imagine how you could best serve them with what you have to offer.

Does this makes sense to you? Give it a try, you may be surprised. I’d love to hear about your experiences. Contact me here or on LinkedIn.

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