Discovery: the half of selling that decides the other half

Amara I hate selling. I am good at the actual work and I feel like a fraud the moment I have to talk about money.

Nadia Then you will probably be better at it than most people who enjoy it, because the thing that makes selling work is not confidence. It is curiosity.

Amara Go on.

Nadia The commonest failure in selling is talking too early. Somebody enquires and within ninety seconds they are being told about features and prices that may have nothing to do with why they rang.

Amara Because silence is uncomfortable.

Nadia Exactly that. Silence feels like failure and a pitch feels like progress. But a pitch delivered before you understand the problem is a guess, and people can hear that it is a guess.

Amara And then?

Nadia And then the only thing left to compare is price. Which is why people who skip discovery end up convinced their market is price sensitive. It is not. They just never gave anyone another basis for choosing.

Amara So what do I ask?

Nadia Four questions. Not a script, but if you leave one out you will feel it later. First: what made you look now?

Amara Why now specifically?

Nadia Because something changed, and that change is the reason they will actually buy rather than think about it for eight months. No trigger, no deal, however much they like you.

Amara Second?

Nadia What have you tried already. That tells you what has failed, so you do not cheerfully propose it again, and it tells you what they think the problem is.

Amara Third?

Nadia What happens if nothing changes. This is the one almost nobody asks, and it is the most valuable question in selling.

Amara Why?

Nadia Because nobody compares your price to zero. They compare it to living with the problem for another year. If neither of you has said out loud what that costs, your price is floating in mid air with nothing to be measured against.

Amara And the fourth?

Nadia Who else needs to be happy with this. That finds the people you have not met yet. It is the question that prevents the deal that goes quiet three weeks later because a partner or a finance director said no and nobody told you.

Amara Let me push back. Is there not something a bit interrogative about firing four questions at somebody?

Nadia There would be if you fired them. Ask one, then stop talking. The useful part almost always comes after the pause, and most people cannot bear the pause so they fill it with another question and lose the answer.

Amara What about the ones I cannot help?

Nadia Say so, quickly. And I mean this as a commercial point rather than a moral one. Beginners chase everything and are busy and poor. Experienced people disqualify fast and earn more, because an hour spent on somebody who was never going to buy is an hour stolen from somebody who was.

Amara It feels like giving up.

Nadia Try the sentence and see what happens. From what you have described I do not think we are the right fit, and here is who I would talk to instead. You lose an hour, you gain a reputation, and a surprising number of those people come back a year later with something you can actually help with.

Amara Last thing. I send quotes and hear nothing.

Nadia Because a quote sent on its own is a document waiting to be compared on price with two others. Send it, then talk it through. Say what you included and, more usefully, what you deliberately left out and why.

Amara And then chase?

Nadia Put the date in before you hang up. I will call you Thursday morning. That single sentence outperforms every closing technique ever invented, because most deals are not lost. They are just never followed up.