🥳 Hey, Kasey here! Welcome to this week’s 🏔High Growth Founders🏔 newsletter.
If you are a builder, creator, or project starter who embraces life’s challenges to extract the growth lessons within them, you are a High Growth Founder.
And this newsletter is for you.
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In this Week’s Issue:
Growth Insight: If you want to close more sales, you need to ask better questions
Twitter Thread: The Pain Primer
HGF Episode: Juan Medina of Lalo, Preserving Stories and Memories
Growth Tool: The best form, survey, intake, and pain primer builder — Typeform
Growth Insight: If you want to close more sales, you need to ask better questions
Most entrepreneurs suck at sales — at least at first.
Even the ones who started their career in sales struggle. Because selling a product or service you created is different from selling someone else’s product. Hint: it’s harder.
When it’s yours, you are more likely to get emotional, skip critical steps, and avoid having hard conversations.
Last week, I shared a thread on Twitter all about the single most effective strategy I’ve learned to improve discovery calls: The Pain Primer.
This approach is underrated and under-known. But it’s wildly effective at transforming these calls, getting prospects to open up, and guiding you to learn critical information about your prospects. It’s the secret to closing more business.
I encourage you to read the thread and dive into the framework.
But here, I want to talk more about what you do after the Pain Primer.
What makes a sales conversation effective?
An effective sales call is one that gets a prospect to open up. Most prospects are trained to distrust salespeople. They purposefully dodge your questions.
Effective sales conversations and the questions that fuel them get people to be real and share details about their challenges and goals with you.
They are also conversations that help you uncover the most important information about a prospect. They go beyond surface-level conversation and get to the information that will ultimately help you determine if you want the deal and if you do, to close it.
What is the information you want to learn?
What problems are they dealing with
How do those problems cause them personal pain
How motivated are they to solve these problems
How much time or money are these problems costing them
Who else would be involved in their buying decision
What is their budget to solve these problems
5 Sales Questioning Strategies
Especially the kind that gets a prospect to open up and get vulnerable with you?
There are a few approaches you want to learn to build the kind of trust and transparency that leads to the kinds of conversations that lead to closed-won business and positive relationships with prospects and customers alike.
The key is to emphasize trust and honesty and every turn.
Get Specific
Prospects’ first instinct is to be vague. They will speak in general terms.
“We’re struggling with X.”
“We want to improve Y.”
At first, it will seem like you’re getting the information you need. You’re not. You need to push them to get more specific.
“Interesting, can you give me an example?
The moment they start giving specific examples of when they struggled or where they want to improve, the pain of their situation or the hope they have for something better will become clearer.
But don’t let them stop there. Keep digging.
Tell me more about how you handled that.
How did that affect the rest of the team/business?
What did they do to try to solve the problem
Did it work
Get them to paint a vivid image of this challenge, its impact, how it felt, and what they did. This process gives you ample information to evaluate the prospect and their potential fit for your business. But it also twists the knife in their pain.
By the end, they will be grateful they’re talking to you.
The Pattern Interrupt
Prospects expect salespeople to swindle them, to put their own interests first, and to be dishonest to get the business. THey will be prepared for you to exaggerate their problem and oversell your ability to fix it. Instead, do the opposite.
The perfect time is when they share how much their problem is costing them now.
If they say a high number, respond, “Oh it can’t be that much! Let’s assume it’s half that.” Then you can calculate the value of fixing it using numbers far lower than they’ve estimated. Suddenly, your solution looks even better.
If they give a low number, say, “That’s not bad at all! I’m curious why you’d even bother trying to fix it.” They will usually respond with how bad the situation is, sharing new information, and making the case why they need your help.
Another perfect time for a pattern interrupt is when they jump on a call, eager to talk, and acting as though you’ve closed the deal before you even got started. Don’t listen to them!
Instead, tell them you’re not sure you, your product, or your service is right for them. Encourage them to tell you more about their situation to determine if you can help at all. They won’t expect it and they’ll respect the hell out of you for it.
The Cost of Inaction
Once you have uncovered their pain and frustration, you want to find out what happens if they don’t fix this problem. How bad could it get?
Once they dive into these examples, and you’ve gotten them to paint this vivid picture of their pain, ask them:
“This might be a dumb question, but what happens if you don’t fix this?”
They will immediately jump into how extreme the problems would be. Sometimes they will give you a doomsday scenario about how they will be fired or their business will fail. Let them.
It’s here that they are again realizing how devastating this issue is and how desperate they are to get it fixed.
Reveal Their Process
A common error in the sales process is thinking you’re talking to the decision maker and realizing you are not. Prospects always say they are the decision maker even if they’re on a fact finding mission. It’s an ego thing.
Instead of asking “Are you the decision maker?” ask who else is affected by this problem. You can also ask them to tell you a story.
“Tell me how it works for you all. When you’re working to solve a problem like this, who tends to be involved in deciding which direction you go?”
That feels less direct and confrontational. They will be much more likely to say:
“Oh well, typically, X, Y, Z, and I get together and make the decision.”
Then you can ask for more details about if they expect this decision to be the same and if it would make sense to include X, Y, and Z on the next call.
Know Their Timeline
You also want to find out if there is a triggering event. Do they have a drop-dead date for solving this problem? Is there genuine urgency?
Ask them:
It sounds like you’ve been dealing with this for a while. Why now? What’s prompting you to reach out and try to fix this today?
You want to use your pattern interrupting skills to act as though this probably isn’t a big deal to them. Find out why this and why now.
If you leverage these 5 simple questioning strategies in your sales calls, especially if you use the pain primer described in the Twitter thread below, you will dramatically improve your close rate, while building serious trust with your prospects.
Twitter Thread: The Pain Primer
Here are the highlights of the pain primer, what it is, and how to use it.
If you want to see the full thread (these are only the main parts), click here to check it out.
This method is the single most effective sales call strategy I’ve seen. Especially if you’re not a natural or experienced sales person, this will transform your calls — positioning you as the expert.
If you follow it up with the 5 questioning strategies above, you’re golden.
HGF Episode: Juan Medina Founder of Lalo
In this week’s episode, I talk with Juan Medina, Founder of Lalo, an inspiring app designed to help us preserve our family’s memories, culture, and stories.
I think a lot of you will be able to relate to Juan’s story of his father’s death and the realization that made him decide to quit a very safe and lucrative career at Amazon to start Lalo.
Listen here. Website | Apple | Spotify
Growth Resource: The best form builder ever
I’ve tried every survey, intake, form builder out there. All of them. Survey Monkey, Jotform, Google Forms, Airtable, the list goes on.
Typeform is my all time favorite. It’s the prettiest, easiest to use, integrates with everything, uses logic jumps. Everything you want.
It’s not the cheapest — which is why I’ve tried all of them — but I always come back to Typeform. It’s an awesome way to build your pain primer.
Okay my loves. I appreciate you reading all the way to the end.
If you know someone who needs this newsletter, share it with them.
As always, thanks for being here. If there’s any way I can help you, you know where to find me.
In Love and Growth,
Kasey
P.S. I’m spending a lot of time on Twitter these days. Come hang out with me there. https://twitter.com/abetterjones