Important drawback to a ‘smart’ salesperson

Has this ever happened to you? You’re in the middle of your second or third “good conversation” with a prospect. Everything’s going great. The prospect seems engaged and positively disposed to work with you. The prospect poses an innocent-sounding question:

“Anne, how big is your company?”

Without hesitating for even a moment, you answer that question. You recite, more or less verbatim, the standard reply you were trained to recite when people ask you about the size of your company, the answer laid out for you in your orientation training, your website, your phone scripts and your press releases: 500 employees, one headquarters location and three offices in three states.

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The prospect nods. The conversation continues. Although there are plenty of smiles, pleasantries and earnest promises to be in touch as you wrap up the meeting, the oddest thing takes place once you leave the building:

All forward motion in the sale stops.

The prospect no longer returns your calls. Your emails receive ambiguous replies. Weeks pass by. You’re off the prospect’s radar screen. You find that no one else in the company seems willing to acknowledge your attempts to reach out, either. It’s like the prospect has ordered everyone in the enterprise to deny your company’s existence.

What happened? You answered the prospect’s question.

Northern Colorado is home to a high concentration of leading-edge companies in technology, manufacturing and professional services. Smart people work at those companies, many with advanced degrees, who have spent their whole life cataloging professional/company knowledge and wisdom.

In effect, our intelligent sales, marketing and business-development workforce has been conditioned for most of their lives to “have the right answer” and “educate prospects” on their product or service. Unfortunately, all of this intelligence can be a real problem in professional selling.

David Sandler advised that you should only answer your prospects’ questions if doing so can help you – or at least can’t hurt you. Since prospects tend to “smokescreen” their questions – meaning that they tend to ask questions whose true purposes aren’t likely to be clear to you at first – you must make sure, first and foremost, that you’re answering the real question.

Guess what? When that prospect asked, “How big is your company?” the real question was:

“Will you be able to handle an 11-state field territory?”

As it happens, you can handle an 11-state territory. However, your company’s standard answer, which you were taught during onboarding sessions and company training, only mentions three states. That was enough (non)information for this prospect to tune you out – without telling you why and asking her real question.

In most cases, and especially in the early going, you have to assume that every question you hear from a prospect is a smokescreen question. So the question, “How soon would you schedule an installation for us?” may mean, “We’d like to hold off for 30 days and put this into the next quarter.” The question “How strict are you with multiple user discounts?” may mean, “Can I take advantage of multiple user discounts and have our part-time admins access the platform?”

If you make a habit of answering the first question you hear, you’ll never understand the real question! You must discover why the prospect asked the question you just heard. You must identify the underlying intent. If you don’t know the intent – the importance and true relevance of the question to the topic of discussion – you can’t respond intelligently.

How do you identify the intent? By “reversing.”

Reversing is the strategy of responding to your prospect’s questions and statements with a question. It puts the verbal “ball” back in the prospect’s court.

Reversing prevents you from attempting to mind-read. It adds clarity and completeness to the prospect’s smokescreen questions and statements. It helps you uncover the underlying intent of those questions and statements.

You should be an expert on your company, its services and products. Learn all you can about your business. Just don’t tell anyone.

While that sounds like an overstatement, it takes true restraint and a strong desire to focus diligently on what the prospect really needs and is asking for to master this technique. Try it today and see if you don’t learn more by being “less smart!”

Bob Bolak is president of Sandler Training. Contact him at bbolak@sandler.com.