Sell Less, Ask More: A Simple Framework for Your Next Sales Conversation
Today’s tip: five minutes of better questions can do more than thirty minutes of presenting. Most of us were taught that selling is about talking well. We prepare the pitch, polish the slides and rehearse the objections. Then we meet the customer and, quite naturally, we fill the silence. There is another way, and it comes from coaching rather than selling. It is the GROW model, developed by Sir John Whitmore and colleagues, and it works very well in sales conversations. It has four parts: Goal, Reality, Options and Will. Why questions beat presentations Neil Rackham’s well-known SPIN Selling research, based on tens of thousands of sales calls, found that successful sellers in complex sales asked better questions rather than simply more features-and-benefits statements. Gartner’s research on B2B buying points the same way: buyers now do much of their research alone, so the time they give us is precious. They want to feel understood, not presented to. When a customer feels he...
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