Pre-Call Planning

You’ve got to begin asking hard questions in a soft way.
-William T. Brooks

As we established in the Standards Chapter, the purpose of a sales call is to engage the client in a business dialogue and help them to think, act and win. And, one of our primary tools for achieving this result is a question. Think about it. During any business dialogue, you have two communication tools of influence – a statement and a question.

And of course, a statement sets forth facts, observations, or opinions. In other words, it supplies information. A question, on the other hand, draws out this same information. The word question is derived from the word quest, which is a search or pursuit undertaken to discover something of value.

So, statements push and questions pull. Yet, when it comes to influence, research shows that questions are often more powerful than statements. Pull is stronger than push.Why's that? It's because statements invite the client to consider your thoughts, which is good. But in contrast, questions invite the client to consider their own thoughts, which is best. Questions lead to self-discovery. Questions invite the client to follow the advice of their #1 coach – themselves.

Compelling questions stimulate thinking and provoke client insight and action. The quality of your call is commensurate with the quality of the questions you ask on the call. So, let's talk about how you can best plan and organize your questions prior to making a sales call.

First, the basis for any business dialogue is pain and gain. That's right. It's about avoiding pain or achieving gain in business. Pain based questions ask about the client's business problems, challenges, difficulties and dissatisfactions. Gain based questions ask about the client's business goals, initiatives, projects and desired outcomes. You want to be prepared to ask both type of questions on the sales call because some clients response more to pain than gain and vice-versa.

Second, the basis for any business dialog is current and future state. Current state questions invite the client to think about their current condition. Future state questions invite the client to think about their future condition. The difference between their current state and future state is the results gap. This gap represents the greatest potential for you and your organization to create client value and results. Here's a small sample of effective questions that you can plan to help you achieve the right results on your next sales call:

Investigating Pain and Gain (Present State)
• What are your top 3 challenges you'd like to solve within the next 12 months?
• What are the top 3 goals you'd like to achieve in the next 12 months?
• What are the key changes in your business over the last 12 months?
• What's most important to you about this decision?
• What is the ideal outcome you'd like to achieve?

Developing Pain and Gain (Future State)
• What are the risks of not changing your behavior?
• If this problem worsens, what would happen?
• Could this solution help you achieve your goals?
• What would solving this problem mean to you personally?
• If your competitor solves this problem before you do, what could
that mean?

If you'd like a complete list of questions that you can use on your next sales call, then drop me an email at daniel@phdinresults.com and I'll send you the list.

The Results Cycle

The process begins with preparing a plan, then working your plan and reviewing your plan. This is the results cycle. Most salespeople invest their time in taking action. This is the good news. The bad news is taking action without pre-call planning and post-call review reduces the quality of each call while concurrently reducing client value and sales results.

Sadly, the misuse of the results cycle rings true in personal life, too. Think about how most of us behave when we decide to attend church. We "take action" and go to the Sunday service. But, do we prepare before going to service by reading a few scriptures in advance? Do we examine our notes after the sermon and digest the lessons learned? Let me ask you a better question.How would our results improve if we did?

No, most of us don't use the results cycle effectively in sales or leadership. But you can change that by stepping up and using the results cycle.