1: “Imagine that you are a prospect,” Erik Peterson and Tim Riesterer write in their powerful book Conversations That Win the Complex Sale.
Now, perhaps you are not a software engineer in real life, but play along.
You are on a Zoom call. The face of a software salesperson fills your computer screen.
She says, “What if you never had to teach another programmer another programming language?”
(Pause)
“And, what if you could quickly recycle code into new applications 90 percent faster?”
(Pause)
“And finally, what if your documentation was automatically created for you as you wrote your applications?”
(Pause)
“That’s what you’re going to see today,” the salesperson says.
If you were a software engineer, what are you thinking at this moment?
Likely one of two things.
“First, you might be excited,” Erik and Tim explain. “You might be imagining what your life would be like if you could do these things. You might be saying to yourself, ‘Wow! If I could accomplish that, it would have a huge impact.'”
Or, perhaps you are skeptical. You think: “There’s no way that this can be done.”
But either way? You are engaged. You either want to know more. Or you want to figure out how to poke holes in what the salesperson is saying.
When the prospect is excited or skeptical, the salesperson has succeeded. The prospect is now engaged, leaning in instead of drifting off.
2: Asking a series of “What-If-You” questions is a specific type of what Erik and Tim call a “Grabber.”
What is a grabber? It’s the “wow” part of your message.
“Grabbers get your prospect emotionally involved, literally and figuratively leaning into your message,” the authors write.
This week, we’ve been exploring how the human brain is wired to pay attention at the beginning and end of meetings. In the middle? Not so much.
Erik and Tim call this “the Hammock” because research shows that a prospect’s attention wanes after 10 minutes into a meeting.
As a salesperson, “you need to work for every moment of your prospect’s attention,” they write.
You do that by using grabbers to create “your hot openings, hot closes, and spikes in the middle of your message,” the authors suggest.
Asking “What if you” questions requires a specific approach, Erik and Tim write.
“First, ask two or three what-if-you questions in a row,” they suggest. “If you ask only one what-if-you question, it doesn’t engage your prospect as much as you need to.”
Asking four or more questions is also a mistake. “It starts to feel like a technique, as opposed to a conversation,” the authors explain.
As a salesperson, you want to sound natural. Even when you are grabbing your prospect’s attention.
“Another tip is to make sure that you pause after each question,” Erik and Tim recommend. “Long enough to give your prospect a chance to register the question and think about it for a moment.”
3: There are two other common mistakes sales professionals make that reduce the power of “What if you” questions.
First, they ask the three questions and then add a closed-ended question like: “Can you see how that would be a benefit to you?”
Why is this a bad idea?
“Because part of the power of this technique is that it gets people imagining what it’s like to own your solution, and when you ask a closed-ended yes/no question, the prospect stops imagining,” the authors state.
“And that’s deadly for your messaging efforts.”
The other mistake sales professionals make? They use “we,” not “you.”
As in: “What if we could do X for you? And, what if we could do Y for you? And, what if we could do Z for you?”
Using “we” rather than “you” weakens the power of the “What if you” questions. For more information on why this is true, see this post on the power of “you phrasing.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Am I helping my prospects imagine a better future—or just explaining what my solution does?
Action: Create two or three “What if you” questions for your next conversation and practice delivering them with a pause.
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