90% of Sales People Don't Know How to Answer This Question

90% of sales people don’t know what to say when they get asked this simple question…

“What does your company do?”

Today I’m going to show you exactly how to respond to that question whether you’re making cold calls, running discovery meetings or conducting a demo.

Once you have this knowledge in your toolkit, you’ll be able to answer this question in a way that instantly communicates the value you bring and opens up a richer conversation with your prospect.

Get this wrong and your prospects are lost in your word-soup of a response, with them looking for opportunities to tune you out and exit the conversation.

Michael Hanson has an interesting take on how to approach this. His framework is Your situation reminds me of X customer. They were facing Y challenge and achieved Z results after working with us.

We like this a lot - but teach a slightly differant approach...

The Question-Story-Question Framework to Answer “What do you do?”

The framework we use to answer “what do you do?” is the question-story-question framework.

• A question that sets the scene for the story
• A quick story that illuminates the problems you solve and the value you create
• Another question to seed the next part of the conversation

Here’s an example:

Prospect: What do you do exactly?

Rep: “Yeah thanks for asking John, you know how BDRs execute multi-channel outbound campaigns to prospects but only have a handful of actual conversations every day?”

Prospect: “Yeah”

Rep: “Well when they’re using channel validated data from RiteChannel - They know exactly which channel to use to reach each individual prospect meaning they can achieve 20-30% connect rates on outbound activity as opposed to 3-5%. Essentially they have many more conversations in less time.

Rep: Have you ever experimented with channel validated data before?”

Let’s break this down.

1st Question

The first part of the framework is a question that gets the prospect to validate their current situation.

You know how BDRs execute high volume multi-channel outbound campaigns to prospects but only have a handful of actual conversations every day?

What we’re doing here is getting the prospect to confirm that they agree with our assessment of the status quo. This is important because if they agree to this assessment - they’re agreeing that a problem exists within their business.

This allows us to do two things

1. Qualify them as a prospect - if the problem doesn’t exist for them - they’re likely not a fit
2. Get them primed to understand the context of the story we’re about to outline

Story

The second part of the framework is to paint a picture of a world where that problem no longer exists thanks to your product / service.

“Well when they’re using channel validated data from RiteChannel - They know exactly which channel to use to reach each individual prospect meaning they can achieve 20-30% connect rates on outbound activity as opposed to 3-5%.

This communicates the value you bring in context to the problem you’ve outlined with the first question.

2nd Question

And then finally, you want to ask a question that illuminates whether or not they’ve tried to achieve a similar thing in the past.

“Have you ever experimented with channel validated data before?”

The reason to do this is to seed the next part of the conversation in a way that puts you back in control of the questions. From here you dig into your prospects current situation, what they’ve tried in the past, what they’re doing currently - what’s working and what isn’t.

And you can now do this with the confidence that they understand the value you can bring, and the problems you can solve.

Takeaways

So next time you get asked what do you do?

Remember :

• Ask a question that sets the scene for the story
• Tell quick story that illuminates the problems you solve and the value you create
• Ask another question to seed the next part of the conversation

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