What’s your primary job when you call on a prospect? To sell? To win a contract? To impress a prospect with your knowledge? Actually, none of these. That’s right, none of these.
Your first job as a selling professional is to ask questions to uncover the truth of a prospect’s situation. Your job is not to give information. It’s to ask questions. Without knowing a prospect’s truth you’ll be off course and won’t sell anything. As you ask questions, you’ll get to the real issues a prospect may be facing.
Well, you may ask, what about a prospect’s asking questions? Don’t you have to answer them? Yes, but not right away. That’s because prospects generally don’t ask their real questions up front, or they disguise the intent behind their questions for as long as they can.
To know a prospect’s intent by asking questions is more important than the upfront content he or she may talk about. To probe this intent takes reversing, that is asking a prospect to go deeper about the intent that drives the content he or she talks about.
Two examples of reversing are: Good question, could you please tell me more? What might be prompting your question?
As you might guess, getting to the truth of a prospect’s intent is no easy task, again, because prospects tend to keep intent a secret. That’s why it may take three or more reverses to get to a prospect’s real intent.
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