Want Bigger Deals? Be Curious
Frameworks to help you be interested and curious.
Be INTERESTED to be INTERESTING
The reality of human nature is that people care about themselves and love to talk about themselves.
In order to do that, you need to be CURIOUS.
Credit: BowTiedDingo
PS, give BowTiedDingo a follow either on Twitter (link above), or on Substack
This is easier said than done though. So, how can I be more curious?
Today I’ll break down two quick frameworks that help me be curious when engaging in the sales cycle. It’s certainly not all encompassing, but it will drive more questions.
Ultimately, the more questions you ask, the more interested you are in someone and what they do, the more insight they provide. It’s a proven cycle, a skillset that provides you dividends not just in sales but also in life.
Be Interested
I used to sell software in real time streaming. Nothing more exciting than looking at lines of code right?
Nah, pretty boring stuff.
But the use cases were FASCINATING.
I went to an event and met up with a prospect who led an infrastructure team at an agricultural company. He went on to tell me that they’re investing into real time infrastructure to help measure each seed when planted every season.
Why?
This would help farmers understand efficiencies during each season and allow them to produce more crops. This led me down a rabbit hole of understanding how smart and sophisticated farmers are to have to do this for a living. It also got my innately more interested in how this impacted the business.
This started opening up more dialogue around why this was important to the business. It also helped uncover personal motives behind it.
Why was it important to THEM?
WHO ELSE was this important to?
Who else cares and why?
Aside from doing your homework, via 10ks, annual reports, executive talks, and Google/GPT - the layer deeper is understanding the EMOTIONS involved.
Emotions drive action and purchases.
I’ve unpacked this more in a previous post on removing indecision and status quo.
The takeaway is that it’s never simply ROI. You need the business case, but once you’ve attached the emotions, you’ll develop the synergy to strengthen the business case because now it’s you and the prospect (us) trying to win, versus just you.
I’ve been reading The Sales Qualified Leader by John McMahon. If you haven’t had the chance to read it, I’d suggest picking it up.
Here are some of the questions he goes over that helps with not only prospecting, but leading you down a path of being interested:
Who is working on critical projects?
Who was recently promoted?
Who has been assigned to new initiatives?
Who is held personally accountable for key company decisions?
Who made the last major departmental purchase at the company?
Who do the C level executives confer with on critical company decision?
When presenting within a group at the company, whose statements are most influential?
Who in group meetings asks very perceptive and deep-probing questions?
Who do people SAY is the most influential in these types of decisions?
Ultimately all this falls into the basic pattern of human nature. This line of questioning starts going deeper into the motives of these people, ie what do THEY want?
Recognition?
Control?
Status?
Promotion?
Productivity?
These are great questions to ask but also great signals when prospecting.
If you’re struggling with being curious or wondering how to, these simple frameworks will help you to drive more questions. Inherently this makes you more curious, and makes you more interestED, and gets people to open up more to you.
Understand use cases in simple terms
Understand motives
“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious” - Albert Einstein .
Stay curious, friends.
See you next Tuesday,
-Andrew K