Picture two sales meetings.
Meeting A. The salesperson opens the laptop and presents 40 slides about the company, the differentiators, the awards, the clients. The customer looks at the clock.
Meeting B. The salesperson asks questions for 20 minutes. What changed in the last year? What went wrong the last time you tried to solve this? What would happen if nothing changed? At the end, they summarize what they heard in the customer’s own words.
Whom would you hire?
Most people answer B. Most companies practice A.
Three ideas to shake up your sales:
1. Sell the “after,” not the “now.” Nobody buys a product. They buy what they can do, be or avoid after it.
2. The best presentation is a good question. A question that makes the other person think out loud is, at once, diagnosis, relationship and sales argument.
3. Marketing is conversation at scale. If your content talks about what you do and not about what your customer lives, it’s talking to itself.
And a personal rule I’ve carried for years: a customer who takes notes, asks questions and wants to involve more people is the profile worth investing time in. Someone who only asks “is it a lot of work?” probably won’t change anything.
A test for next week: in your next sales meeting, count how many minutes you talked and how many the customer did. If it doesn’t come close to 50/50, adjust.
What’s the best question a customer ever asked you?
Is there a decision weighing on you? Sometimes what’s missing isn’t an answer, it’s a good conversation with someone from the outside. If it makes sense, let’s talk. No script, no strings.