Strategic Human Capital Insights

In sales, success often hinges on asking the right questions rather than having the right pitch. Mastering the art of inquiry allows you to uncover your prospect’s needs, build trust, and tailor your solutions to provide real value. In this post, we’ll explore why asking great questions is the ultimate sales skill and how it can transform your approach, leading to deeper relationships, customer understanding, and more closed deals.

The Essentials

Questions are the most important tool in your sales toolkit.  Never underestimate the importance of questions.  They help you navigate through conversations and maximize the opportunity for information gathering.  Asking great questions requires mental preparation, agility, and precise communication skills.  Before you can ask great questions, consider the question’s purpose.

• Why are you asking the questions?  
• What is the best question to use?
• What do you want to gain from this question?
• Who are you asking?
• What is their perspective? What are their goals? What are their issues, challenges, and/or problems?
• How can you phrase your questions to maximize your advantage?

Questions – The Power Tool in the Sales Toolkit 

MULTI-DIMENSIONAL PRODUCT LEVELS: Where the sales battle is won or lost!

This is the fourth blog in in our Sales & Business Development blog series.  In case you missed the other blogs, you can view them here.

Your product / solution is not one-dimensional.  The complex relationship selling process often makes your product elastic, meaning different things to different people in your client buying center.  When you think about your product, think about the multi-dimensional product levels from basic commodity to differentiated product.

3 Steps to Matching & Positioning Product for Maximum Impact

1. It’s All About the Client  

When a client has a problem, issue, or ‘hook’ requiring a solution, they look for one thing: simplicity. They want to "break down" an existing problem and seek a solution to satisfy their needs and take their business forward. Your job is to understand the specific business issues and then provide a solution that will address them in concrete, tangible ways.  Here is where you will need two key things:

1. A complete understanding of the client, the business, and their aspirations for the future and blockers that will get in the way and hinder future growth
2. A thorough and detailed understanding of your product/solution and how to position that product appropriately so it presents a business answer to client growth

If you can’t define it – you haven’t ‘tangibilized’ it.

What does 'tangibilizing' mean? Tangibilizing’© is the process of taking ambiguous language and precisely defining the terms through the questioning process. You can then completely describe the client's situation in concrete, defined, specific terms. 

The Basics of the Relationship Sales Process

In the relationship sales process, clients want you to be a confidante and resource who understands and is working to help solve their business challenges.  They are looking for someone to advise and partner with them, moving up the trust ladder together.  They don’t want to feel like they are ‘being sold’!  (Clients can definitely tell if you're there just for a quick sale.) If you want to succeed at relationship selling, everything about your approach must reflect this proposition.

The best sales strategy can fail without a disciplined sales methodology supporting it.  In sales, the results can be immediate and dramatic. With over 35 years of sales and business development experience consulting with the largest global financial services firms, Phoenix Strategic Performance (PSP) has developed an approach and business development/sales methodology to provide the all-important WHY and HOW information necessary to drive complex sales and accelerate growth.  

Because we are focused on WHY and HOW information, the sales methodology approach is multifunctional – requiring simultaneous overlays of information.  

The Business Impact of Transformation Initiatives

The research tells us that 90% of change/transformation initiatives fail. Failure can be very simply measured relative to the following three criteria. Determine if the initiative was:

         1) On Time
         2) On Budget
         3) With Quality

So while transformation initiatives may get done, unless they meet these three criteria, we must question their success. A bigger organizational question must be considered. What is the strategic business impact of transformation failure or delay on organizational business sustainability?

By most estimates, only 10 – 30% of training transfers into job performance. That low estimate creates a trillion dollar training problem in the U.S. alone.  The whole area of learning transfer – has been significantly neglected as a business discipline.  As a result, companies are now being forced to evaluate if their training is having business impact, adding value and delivering the strategic advantage that it should. 

To deal with this issue, there appears to be a global movement of people who are filling the potential vacuum in both corporations and the entrepreneurial market.  It’s a force not only in the West, but in the Middle East, India and Asia. The outdated learning and development models of the past are being questioned and broken.

In our blog series, our constant focus is on organizational alignment.  In many cases, we review the macro issues of leadership, change, the role of HR, and using learning and development as a growth accelerator.  While the macro issues are organizational levers, these issues impact individuals at the micro level.  Every layer of every organization is, or should be, interconnected and aligned. So for the next few blogs, we are going to focus on the individual professional and how they fit into the organization. When it works, and when it doesn’t. Just like organizations shift and change, so do the people who work in them. 

For this blog, May Busch is our guest blogger. May was formerly a Managing Director with Morgan Stanley and is now the founder of Career Mastery. In this blog, May addresses the question we have all faced in our careers, “What do we do when we are no longer happy with our career?"

In this continuously changing world, would you rehire your current leadership team?

If the world of work is changing, we can’t ignore how the role of the leader fits into this change and is evolving itself.  The leadership of yesterday and today may not have the necessary knowledge and skill sets to drive the business into the future.  It doesn’t mean leadership can’t.  It does mean that they will most likely need to be developed to use a new set of core competencies.  The role of the leader is CRITICAL to the organization and its success. This role requires a person who is both outwardly focused and inwardly responsive. Some required key competencies for the future are:

• Vision
• Risk Assessment
• Creativity and Innovation
• Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
• Communication
  
  

Here are some questions to consider as you evaluate your current leaders to see if they are "upskilled" to meet tomorrow’s business challenges.