Today I’m going to explain why every seller should wear this hat. It’s called the ‘curiosity hat’ and it’s far superior to the ‘sales hat’ most people wear.
As a seller, curiosity is your superpower. The more curious you are, the more you learn about your prospects. The more you learn about your prospects, the more you understand the problems they’re facing. If you know what problems they’re facing and how it’s impacting their business - you're 90% of the way to a sale.
If you don’t put your curiosity hat on every morning you reek of what Josh Braun calls commission breath. You won’t learn about your prospects, or the problems they’re facing or how these problems are stopping them from achieving their goals. You’ll just mindlessly push prospects down YOUR predetermined path resulting in an uphill battle for the sale.
Curiosity is a seller's super power. Put your curiosity hat on every morning.
In today’s article we’ll look at the three important behaviors reps exhibit when they’re wearing their curiosity hat:
- Listening with the intent to understand
- Asking questions as opposed to pitching
- Digging for reasons why the prospect might not be a good fit
Listening with intent to understand not the intent to respond
Ever been in a conversation where you can tell the person isn’t actually listening to you but just waiting for you to stop speaking so they can start again.
This is a common trap for sales people because we often end up having similar conversations throughout the day, and because you’ve heard it all before - you know what you want to say next. It might even be scripted.
The problem with this is that you’ll miss the nuance. You’ll be looking to group what the prospect is saying into a specific bucket so that you can use your pre-loaded talk track.
Missing the nuance means you miss the subtle differences that make each situation unique.
These slight variances are what you need to pick up on in order to truly understand your prospects' current situation.
Do they respond by saying - “yeah kind of” or do they say “yes, that’s exactly right”
If you were listening with the intent to respond you might group these into the same bucket and respond in an identical way in both situations. But it’s likely these responses could point to very different situations within the prospect’s business.
It’s your job as a sales person to be curious about these responses and to dig into the nuance - in order to get a better understanding. You can only do this if you’re listening to understand, not listening to respond.
Asking questions as opposed to pitching
The best salespeople are masters at getting prospects to continue to reveal information. They know that the more information they get from a prospect, the better odds they have of uncovering a problem they can help solve. Or identifying that a problem doesn’t actually exist.
Using expansion questions in sales conversations is the key to uncovering more information. Questions like:
- Tell me more about that
- How did that impact X?
- What do you mean by X?
- How did changing X impact Y?
- What was it like before you made the switch?
The idea here is to be genuinely curious about the prospect’s situation. Use questions to satisfy this curiosity and uncover additional information. Once you have a more complete picture of their situation you can more accurately prescribe solutions to their problems.
Dig for reasons the prospect might not be a good fit
Every solution has limitations. There are some prospects that just aren’t a good fit. Maybe it’s based on the tech stack they currently use, or an internal process or the number of locations they have. When you’re wearing your curiosity hat, you’ll dig into conversations to identify these things early in the sales process, saving both you and your prospect time.
Someone wearing a sales hat tries to push everyone they speak to down their predetermined path. This results in over inflated pipelines that create more harm than good. So seek to identify disqualifiers early. If you find one - let them know why your solution doesn’t typically work for people like them.
So remember to wear your curiosity hat. You’ll have better sales conversations by focusing on:
- Listening with the intent to understand
- Asking questions as opposed to pitching
- Digging for reasons why the prospect might not be a good fit
Happy Hunting in 2023!
Meet with our founder
Want to meet to discuss what an outbound engine would look like in your business?
