EP - 067

Powerful Sales Questions

With Guest Carole Mahoney

How understanding your customer’s needs can transform your sales approach

The How To Sell More Podcast

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May 17, 2024

Are your assumptions about your customer base holding you back?

This week, Mark is joined by Carole Mahoney, author of Buyer First: Grow Your Business with Collaborative Selling, and the founder of Unbound Growth, to talk about how asking the right questions can make you a better salesperson. They also discuss how active listening is crucial for identifying clients' underlying challenges and objectives and review six sales mindsets that may be keeping you from selling more.

Ask: Continuous dialogue and feedback with clients help refine and adjust solutions and ensure they remain relevant and effective over time.

Listen: A consultative approach, including asking open-ended questions, helps uncover deeper insights into a client's business and fosters a more personalized relationship.

Inform: Empowering clients with knowledge enables them to make more informed decisions, which can lead to increased satisfaction with the solutions provided.

“If you can just learn to shut up, you'll be able to win more deals...” - Carole Mahoney

Links to This Episode

Key Takeaways

  • Understanding Customer Needs - Active listening is crucial for identifying clients' underlying challenges and objectives. This ensures solutions are closely aligned with their actual -- not perceived -- requirements.
  • Collaboration in Solution Development - Engaging clients in the solution creation process ensures the product or service is tailor-made to address their unique needs, and enhances its perceived value.
  • The Strategic Value of Educating Customers - Providing valuable insights and education about relevant industry trends positions salespeople as trusted advisors, not just vendors.

Top 3 Reasons to Listen

Ask More Questions: Successful salespeople ask open-ended sequential questions and then customize their value proposition based on the answers they get to tie problems and solutions together.

Adapting Sales Strategies: Carole explains why your sales strategy has to be tailored to address the role the person has in a company and the specific concerns they have.

The Six Mindsets That Impact Sales Techniques: From understanding why “how you buy is how you sell” to our fear of rejection and need for validation, these six mindsets play a pivotal role in our ability to sell effectively.

Follow Carole Mahoney on Social

Website: https://carolemahoney.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carolemahoney/?hl=en

Get a copy of her book: https://www.amazon.com/Buyer-First-Business-Collaborative-Selling/dp/1774583208

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolemahoney/

More About Today's Guest, Carole Mahoney

Author & Speaker @ Buyer First | Founder @ Unbound Growth

Carole Mahoney, known as the “Sales Therapist” by a Harvard Business School professor, specializes in helping business owners, entrepreneurs, and salespeople who have exhausted all the traditional tips, tricks, and hacks to acquire more clients and customers.

As a sales coach for Harvard Business School's Entrepreneurial MBA students, Carole brings a wealth of expertise to her clients. Recognized as a top 15 sales influencer in 2020 by LinkedIn, she has also been named a Woman to Watch in Sales by Sales Hacker and a top sales coach by Ambition.

At Unbound Growth, Carole uses data from 2.2 million sales professionals to coach others on what makes a great seller. She holds a BA in Marketing and Business Management from Franklin Pierce University and resides in Maine.

A Transcription of The Talk

Mark Drager: So Carole, one thing I noticed in your bio is it says that you are the coach for the entrepreneurial MBA program at Harvard, is that right?

Carole Mahoney: Yes. So that my official title is entrepreneurial sales coach for the MBA program. We actually just started our spring semester yesterday.

Mark Drager: Okay, so I don't have an undergrad, I never went to college or university. I look at people with MBAs, and I used to be like, oh, man, you have an MBA. Now I feel like it's kind of like they're just turning people out with MBAs as a bit of the industrial educational complex. But what interested me was like, Harvard, that's pretty cool. First, and second, why does the MBA program need a sales coach? Right? Like, aren't they all going into, like, finance jobs?

Carole Mahoney: Well, that's a good question. What happened is that there's this little book that was written a couple of decades ago called "What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School." The thing that they don't teach you is that once you leave business school and you go out into the business world, the author was lamenting the fact that there was no sales training or even mention of sales in the business school, and sales are the lifeblood of every business. The other part of it is that the Dean realized that by learning sales skills as an MBA, no matter whether you go into being an analyst, or a researcher, or a consultant at, you know, Bain or one of those larger consulting companies, sales skills are the things that are going to actually help you be successful in those roles, which I completely agree with. Because whether you're a marketer or a business owner, you're still a salesperson. You're still trying to persuade or influence someone to get resources, to take on your ideas, to understand their problems and solutions. So it's a sales skill. So I often say sales skills are life skills. And so as an MBA student going into the world, having those kinds of skills helps you to be more successful in whatever role it is that you decide to go into.

Mark Drager: And if you were to break down the 123, like really key takeaways that you're trying to instill in these students, I have to imagine that, of course, like, in the top of my head, I think of MBA students tend to be younger, but often people are going back for an MBA. So the people with experience, these are people maybe in their 30s or 40s, are looking to level up and hit that next level, not just 22-year-olds. Yeah. But what are you focusing on like these one, two, or three key points?

Carole Mahoney: I think the first point that we're trying to get through to them is that you may have a Ferrari mind, but how smart you are isn't always necessarily the thing that's going to make you successful in a sales conversation. And I actually saw this in the first year I started doing this with my Harvard students was, you know, I had they came in, they had, it's an experiential experience. And so they have case studies, they actually have to play the role of a salesperson and a buyer. So they're actually understanding what the role might be like. Andthe first year the first students that came in, you know, the first calls that they did, it was pitch slaps, like, Here I am, I've got this product for you. It's wonderful, we're gonna give you a huge discount, they never stopped to pause, they never stopped to ask a question. And when I was coaching them, later on, I was giving them pushback as to why they didn't ask a single question in the conversation. Their response was, Well, one thing think, I don't know what I'm talking about. If I ask too many questions, don't people get annoyed by asking too many questions? And that was a huge lightbulb moment for me because they were taking their perception of what other people looked at them as, and that was causing their behaviors. So that was the first thing I tried to get my students to understand and that they teach really well in the course now is that it doesn't matter what you know, or how much you think, you know, it is really all about understanding what your buyer or your customer thinks that they know, because it has to be all about them.

Mark Drager: Before we move on to the next point, I just want to pause on that. I did notice in my own agency that once we got so good at productizing a service and selecting our targets carefully, pre-qualifying them, and moving in the process, it became almost like through repetition and muscle memory. Yeah, we were able to skip four or five steps and get clients right to the solution. But we were robbing the prospects of the opportunity of self-discovery. And even though I wanted to save time, even though I was bored, and the team was bored by asking these questions, I realized that there was this performative nature of, again, allowing, like asking the right questions to allow the prospect to draw the right conclusions rather than us just jumping straight to the end. Well, I made a lot of mistakes doing it.

Carole Mahoney: Well. And the other thing is, is that when you make assumptions, you know the old saying, you make a you-know-what out of you and me. But even though you may feel like you're asking these same kinds of questions over and over again, the honest answers that you get back are not always the same. And that's the second thing that we really tried to drill into the students. You know, poor salespeople don't ask any questions. Okay, salespeople, ask some questions, but they're typically closed-ended questions, yes or no answers. Good salespeople ask open-ended questions. Great salespeople ask open-ended sequential questions like they're asking an open-ended question, then asking another one to dig deeper and deeper and uncover more things. But an excellent salesperson is one who can ask those open-ended sequential questions and then customize their value proposition in their demo based on the answers that they're getting so that they can tie problems and solutions together. Which is one of the things that I see so many salespeople and marketers struggle with is how to tie what our buyers are thinking and feeling to the solutions that we offer and lower the risk in their minds to be able to do so. And that's what top salespeople, elite salespeople, are able to do. And then I think the final thing that we're trying to teach our Harvard students.

Mark Drager: I'm gonna keep jumping in because I want to just ask a question on that last, on that second point. So I learned a few years ago, completely outside of sales, more on the personal development side, the idea of like five levels or seven levels deep, the idea of a trusted space where you would ask someone a question, and they would give you the first answer, and you'd say that's interesting. And you repeat back their terminology. And then ask a follow-up question, repeat back the terminology, ask a follow-up, and continue pushing to the point where usually around four or five levels into it, people are running out of words, they're running out of rote responses. They are, they are forced to rethink it in a different way because they will not just gloss over this uncomfortable moment. And when we started incorporating that into our sales process, we realized that was the type of thing that was required. Are you correct in connecting those dots, or is there a framework that you've used to be able to address this idea of asking the right questions, asking open-ended questions, asking the right sequential questions, and then making it a customized experience for the person you're across the table from?

Carole Mahoney: Yes, almost exactly. The one thing I would add to that framework that you just shared is so asking the first open-ended question. And maybe you go two or three layers deep in that first sort of thread of questions. Now you've got maybe a pile of information that you then summarize where you're repeating back to them what you've heard. But there's another piece to this that a lot of people miss, which is one of the things that buyers today value is telling me something I don't know, something that I haven't fully considered, or something Google can't answer for me. And as the salesperson, when you're hearing what they're saying, you're summarizing that, offering some type of insight to them to get them thinking a little bit differently about how they might be perceiving their problem or the solutions that they have. And then following that up with an open-ended diagnostic question that gets insight into that, "I'm not really sure how we're going to handle this particular obstacle that you just shared with me. What's your advice? What do you think that we should do?" That is absolute gold right there. And so being able to offer insights to our customers, or our buyers in a way that helps them to think differently, that's what buyers today value. Also, the other side of this is by asking these open-ended questions, essentially what we're doing is collaborating with our buyers to come up with that solution.

And it's that collaborative nature of things that people value even more. Like, I would even argue when you were talking about how you had these questions that you went through all of the time, that one of the things that might be missing is that when we don't ask enough of those deeper questions and offering those insights, what's happening is that the value in our buyers' mind is not as high as it could be. But when buyers feel that their input is being taken into consideration and that they're actually helping to form a solution with you, they place more value on that, because they've got skin in the game, they've contributed their input into it. Harvard Business Review, calls this the IKEA effect. In other words, the more we put effort into something, the more value we place on it. And that's what happens in these collaborative open-ended kind of questioning techniques and conversations.

Mark Drager: That is so interesting. When I'm working with my clients, one of the first things I look at is not necessarily their speed to sale because often you're looking to increase velocity, but in fact, whether they are trying to rush the sale. And I'm a huge proponent, now I come from a certain background. You know, if you're selling consumer products or goods, there are a lot of situations that don't apply, but when you're selling more complex professional services, or B2B or enterprise-level solutions, I like to just make the process as long as we possibly can. Because the more high-level decision makers I have, and so usually I'm trying to just scope and then I'm trying to earn the right to bring the right people in, and then re-educate and then build a framework. And this takes a ton of resources on our side and a ton of time. If they keep giving me new time and resources, and they're transparent and they're open and they're honest, by the time we get to the proposal, there is nothing new there. Like there's no close, it's literally like we've already done all the work we need to do. And often we're paid for this work even as a small initial kickoff, but we are not trying to close anyone on anything. It's just literally let's get the paperwork signed. So we can move on to the next step because it's become a natural progression. I know this doesn't work in RFPs or other competitive situations, but is that the type of thing that you see our world moving to?

Carole Mahoney: That is the type of thing that I see a lot of B2B sales moving into. As you said, RFPs are not necessarily the type of sale that that's going to work in. But, you know, everyone wants to feel that their case is special, that their case is unique, and that they've built this solution out with you. And so if you've done your job well as a salesperson, you don't need to say, "Alright, it's now the time for us to close the business." It's a natural occurrence because we've already covered it, we've dotted the I's, and we've crossed the T's. And then it just comes down to three questions. Do you believe that we understand everything about what's going on? Do you believe we have the solution to help? And do you want our help? And if the answer to any of those three things is a maybe or a no, then you know you've missed something, and you need to go back and cover that piece of thing, which is not necessarily something we teach our Harvard students, but you asked, "What was the top three things?" The third thing, is I'm having a hard time choosing. Because there's too much? I do. Yeah, there are so many things that we teach that are so essential, but I would say probably, and this is something I see in my own clients that I'm coaching and training is that they will approach different levels of the organization in the same way, like what the CEO cares about is not what the manager cares about, which is not what the end user cares about. And so your target, your questions need to be targeted to the role of the person and the concerns that they have. The other thing that, you know, so that we call that the complex decision-making process. And so that's the other thing that we're trying to teach them you don't sell the same way to everyone. Each person has not only their own personality but their own responsibilities and things that they're measured by. That's how you need to then target your questions in a way that speaks directly to the things that that individual cares about. No assumptions.

Mark Drager: That's actually a point I've taken for granted. I think for far too long. I started my company in 2006, and it was a very hard lesson, it probably took me about two and a half years to realize how important what you just said was, but once it clicked, in my mind, the idea of target segmentation. And trying to figure out if you're gonna segment based on need, or based on the demo, or based on the challenge, or psychographics, or what have you just become a natural part of the way that we all thought. And I didn't realize that people still struggle with that, you know if I'm going to speak to a C-suite person, then obviously I might be more operational or finance-focused or worry more about shareholder returns if it's a publicly traded company, or what have you. If I'm speaking to someone who's more of a manager level, well, they're more focused on their department, their silo, making their quarter, managing up, making sure it can be implemented, making sure they don't look bad if they're making investments, and it fails. Right? And I suppose perhaps I do this naturally. But this is something that is a learned skill. And are people not focusing on this or talking about it?

Carole Mahoney: Well, it's not that they're not focusing on it, they're not talking about it, but they're also not being taught it, whether it's in their sales training within their companies. You know, there are some sales books that do address these things. But I think what happens is that we've trained our salespeople and our marketing collateral to focus on features and benefits. And we somehow assume that these features and benefits apply across the board. But what we need to do as salespeople, and as marketers is to be able to understand not just what is it that they're measured by. But what's the psychology behind it? So you mentioned, you know, the CEO cares about these things. They also care about the brand, the customer experience, and their legacy, whereas managers care about Yes. How do I, you know, how do I look good to my bosses? Do I have a trusted strategic partner here? Whereas the end user care about? Am I going to be able to do my job well, so that I can get the next promotion? And so it's understanding both what their role and measurements are, but then also psychologically, in that role, what are they trying to do in that, and what's important to them internally, that I think is a part that we overlook a lot of times. Like, we make the assumption that the CEO is going to be the decision-maker, but often that CEO has to report to a board, or shareholders or stakeholders in some other way. And so they're not always the final decision-maker. And so understanding how they're measured, and how what they care about is going to be crucial in you being able to get them on board.

Mark Drager: So what I've always done is found it's best just to ask them. You know, I can think back to a nonprofit charity we were working with, one of these types of charities that helps grant wishes to children in need. And they were struggling with moving from a philanthropic-based model to a corporate sponsorship-based model where corporate giving was really being moved over to marketing as opposed to just large endowments. And they had some clear ideas on who they target, and I didn't think it would really align. So I drew my network, and I found a few people who had connections to some of the largest foundations in Canada and some of the largest banks. I reached out, and said, "I have a client who has these needs. Can I have 10 minutes of your time?" And then I just asked them, and they literally gave me the roadmap. They said, "Here's our criteria, here's what's in, here's what's out, here's what they would need to do. Here's how they'd have to go about it." And I've always found that two weeks ago, I was in Phoenix on a hike with someone. I don't really understand how accountants make the decisions that they make. This person runs an accounting firm, a fractional CFO firm. Yep. And so the whole hike, I was just picking their brain, asking them, "What do your clients want? What do they value? Why do they do this? What's what like, what are people focused on?" I have never, if you ask a question to people, people will just give you the answer. So, is that the solution? Or what's the best way for people to go about this?

Carole Mahoney: There's this psychological, neurological reason why that happens. First of all, we love talking about what we think, we love sharing our opinions.

Mark Drager: And when we were talking to a podcaster. I got it.

Carole Mahoney: Yeah, right, exactly. And so what happens is that when we get asked our opinions of things, now, this applies to what you just described, is trying to learn more about a particular buying segment, it also applies when you're asking those open-ended questions of your buyers in a collaborative way. What's happening is that as they're sharing their thoughts and their ideas, and what they think, they're getting these huge dopamine hits in their brain. Dopamine is the thing that makes us feel good. But it also comes from the part of our brain where we form relationships and trust. And so the more we talk about ourselves, the more people listen to us, we start to feel some affinity to that person who's asking these questions and giving us this, this opportunity to just spout off what we think. And so the thing that's surprising to me is how much people don't realize how much you love talking about yourself. Well, so do they. So if you can just learn to shut up, you'll be able to win more deals and make more friends, if you could just learn to be quiet. How are your dopamine levels doing right now? You feel okay, totally off the charts right now.

Mark Drager: Exactly. For our listeners, you can't see. But something happens when I'm interviewing people and I get so into it. And I smile so much and love it so much that I get this vein on the top of my head that does not come up any other time other than when I'm podcasting. Exactly. I want to shift gears slightly because you are the author of the book "Buyer First: Grow Your Business with Collaborative Selling." And I've heard you in a few other podcasts and with some of my research talk about the six mindsets now, not necessarily that this is lifting straight from your book. But I thought this was really powerful. Can you share the six mindsets, in terms of salespeople and the traps we could fall into if we get stuck with them?

Carole Mahoney: Yeah, so these six mindsets actually come from Objective Management Group, which I'm a partner with. They have data from over 2.3 million sales professionals gathered over the last 30 years across the globe, across industries, and across cultures. The thing that was interesting is that as I started diving into this data, I started to realize that we all talk about skills in sales, we all talk about techniques that we need to do, but we don't talk about the mindsets that either help or hinder us in executing on those things. And so what Objective Management Group has done, and what I do with my clients, is they've narrowed it down to six specific mindsets that impact us in our sales techniques. One of those, and the most common one that most salespeople have, 73% of salespeople worldwide struggle with their own buying process. In other words, I call it the "how you buy is how you sell" dynamic. How you make your purchase decisions is how you assume your buyers will make their purchase decisions. So if you're someone who has to research before you buy something to the nth degree.

Now, just FYI, I'm not saying go out and buy a house or a car without doing your research and checking things out. Yeah, I used to know someone who used a spreadsheet with multiple tabs to buy a pair of sneakers, like a $200 pair of sneakers, and it took them six months to decide. And they were comparing all of these features and benefits. They were delaying their decision, they had to ask everybody else around them what it was. This was a salesperson who also had really long sales cycles, who also got a lot of delays, and people who were trying to think it over because, in their mind, they thought, "Well, yeah, this is a huge investment, I would need to think it over, I totally understand that you need to do the same thing." That's the most common mindset that gets in the way. When you have a supportive mindset where you have a buying cycle where you make decisions in a certain period of time with certain criteria, then you're the kind of person who's going to be able to push back at your buyers when they say, you know what, "I need to go think this over," and ask those questions of, "Okay, what is it in your mind that's still unanswered for you, or what hesitation or risk in your mind is causing you to back away from this?" Without that supportive mindset, you won't do that. The next most common one.

Mark Drager: So this not only impacts, like, a great example in terms of the amount of research, the amount of data that you mentioned, it's almost like they need to make, they've removed the idea that anyone makes emotional decisions. But I fall in—I tend to be—I don't like the word cheap. I don't like the word cheap because I do invest in anything that I value. But I place so much importance on a risk-benefit or investment relative to potential returns or value. But I assume a lot of people shop that way. I'm not a luxury person. I'm super, super practical. And it took me a very long time to realize that just because some people think differently, doesn't mean it's wrong. So there's price, there's time, there's information. Are there a few of the other traps that we fall into, in this idea of projecting our own buying journey on prospects?

Carole Mahoney: Yeah, how much money is a lot of money? You know, I grew up in a blue-collar family. Growing up, $1,000 was a huge amount of money for me and my family. So when I started getting into the business world and started to have to deal with solutions that cost tens of thousands of dollars, I kind of had a hard time with that. I had to get over my own tolerance of how much money was a lot of money and figure out how was I projecting this idea of a lot of money onto other people. When that happens, we tend to discount more, right? You've probably heard it in sales conversations where they say the price and then they immediately say, "But we can discount that by 20%." Because in their mind, it's a lot of money. And they're projecting that onto their buyers, whereas their buyers are like, "That's nothing, that's like less than 2% of my budget per year." But to us, it's a ton of money. So we have to reconcile that how we think about money isn't how everybody thinks about money. And what's a lot to us isn't necessarily a lot to someone else.

So then the next one, that's the most common one. And it is the most human one that's out there is the need for approval. We all need to seek validation; as children, we look to our parents, when we do something new to see if we are doing it right. And it's something like even in our hardwired DNA. If you weren't part of the tribe back in the caveman days, you were dead, because you couldn't live, you couldn't survive. So it's hardwired into our brains to seek approval from others. But it gets in our way when we get into sales situations when we have to try to get to decision-makers, or when we have to ask those tough questions that might make people uncomfortable. Or even like the Harvard student that I described, who thought asking too many questions would make people think that he wasn't smart enough. So our need to be seen a certain way will get in our way of asking tough questions and challenging people. But when it supports us, then we can ask those tough questions that get buyers to think about maybe they're not thinking about this the right way, or asking about, you know, how is your boss going to make this decision? How do we get them involved in this conversation, and even be willing to go to that boss directly? "I don't want to upset my champion, then they won't like me, if they don't like me, then they're not gonna buy from me." Not true. People buy from people they like yes, and respect. And nobody respects someone who says yes to everything that they say, which is another sign of a need for approval, where you just agree with what everyone says because you don't want to upset them.

So that's the second one. The next one that's most common is what we call emotional involvement, or emotional management in the sale. When you get excited when you start hearing the buying signals, or you start getting excited that someone has said they're going to move to the next stage. Or when you get freaked out when you hear objections, you start scrambling in your mind, you know, the reptilian brain starts to kick in. And all of a sudden, you've stopped listening, because you're too busy listening to the voices in your head, that are telling you this isn't going to work or this is going to be great. And when you stop listening to your buyers, you're missing the clues and the cues of what they're saying or not saying. And so then it's hard for you to think of what's that next question that I need to ask, what's that next open-ended that I need to ask? I've seen it where it's almost like the salesperson

isn't even there; they're not even listening. They're just going through their checklist of questions, going to the next stage of their process without actually being in the present moment with their buyers. And the good news is that you can change all of these things. The fourth one that is often happening is the fear of rejection. This is where, you know, it's pretty self-explanatory. We don't make the cold calls because we don't want to face the rejection, we don't ask the tough questions because they might say no, or we hold on to the deal in our pipeline that isn't going anywhere. Because we don't want to face the rejection of what it didn't actually have.

Mark Drager:  

That potential is so much better than hearing no. Yeah,

Carole Mahoney: I will offer this to you. If you find that you're someone who doesn't take action, who holds on to a deal, and it just sits there and sits there, think of it like a river. If a river is moving, it's healthy, it's flowing. But if it's not moving, it gets stagnant. It gets bacteria built up in it. And that's what's happening in your pipeline, in your sales pipeline. The longer things sit there, they start to ferment. And you don't want that—unless you're making alcohol. So, constant movement, kicking things out of your pipeline, does a couple of things. One is that it makes you then have to focus on how are going to replace this particular opportunity, which is another reason why we keep them in there. And that fear of rejection comes up. But then the other part of it is that when we're looking at our pipeline in a way that we want to have that movement, we're very careful about the questions that we ask, we're very careful about how we qualify these things. And if we're not able to move it and kick it out, then we can have a fresh perspective on that. It's almost like keeping it there is like a security blanket for us.

And then the last one is really about the supportive beliefs that actually influence all of the other five mindsets. And the beliefs are the things that cause these systems and mindsets to happen. So, for example, I mentioned the belief that people need to like me in order to buy from me; that's not a very supportive belief because then it causes us that need approval. Or, you know, "$1,000 is a lot of money" contributes to our supportive buy cycle. "Rejection is too tough for me. I can't get over that." The beliefs that we have feed into the mindsets that we have. But the good news is we can change our beliefs. We can change our minds. We do it all the time. It's just being very intentional about what beliefs and mindsets are preventing me from doing the things that I know I can do and should do, but I don't necessarily do them at the moment with my buyer. When I need to, I chicken out, I forget, or I just think, "Oh, I don't need to do that."

Resources & Go Deeper

Collaborative Selling: How Successful B2B Companies Win More Deals as a Team

Summary: This article discusses the benefits of collaborative selling, emphasizing the importance of working closely with both clients and internal teams (marketing, product, and customer success) to achieve better sales outcomes. It highlights how collaborative efforts streamline the sales process, improve product quality, and ensure customer satisfaction, ultimately leading to more successful deals.

Link: https://www.avoma.com/blog/collaborative-selling


Why Asking Questions in Sales Is Important

Summary: This article explores the critical role of asking the right questions in sales. It categorizes different types of questions (open, closed, and follow-up) and explains how they help uncover customer needs, qualify sales, and build better client relationships. The article also provides practical tips for incorporating these questions effectively into sales conversations.

Link: https://www.insidesales.com/asking-questions-in-sales/

Why Collaborative Selling Drives Better Business Results

Summary: This piece outlines the concept of collaborative selling, which involves working directly with clients to tailor solutions to their specific needs. It explains the benefits of this approach, such as enhanced customer trust, improved problem-solving, and increased sales effectiveness. The article also offers practical advice on implementing collaborative selling strategies within organizations.

Link: https://nbold.co/collaborative-selling/