
#1 Why Now?
An example way to ask “You’ve been using our open-source version for a few years now, what’s the driving the interest to move to our enterprise offering now?”
If you take anything from this article, please let it be this. “No Date, No Deal”. This question will help your reps attach to a compelling event for the customer and accurately forecast. An example customer response would be “We’re onboarding an enterprise customer in 4 weeks who need more security features”
#2 Why Anything?
An example way to ask “What exactly is the current priority for the business?” or “What projects are you working on?”
This question is to understand what initiative or projects a customer is focused on. This gives us information to ask 2nd and 3rd level questions to understand the business impact of a potential project or initiative.
Example conversation
Sales rep “What is the current priority for the business?”
Customer “We’re launching into the US end of August”
Sales rep “That’s awesome! What’s driving the deadline of the end of August?
Customer “We’re partnering with a marketing agency to promote our app for NFL fans and want to launch at the end of the NFL pre-season.”
Sales rep “That’s a very passionate fan base to sell into! How’s the business measuring the success of the launch?”
Customer “We’re hoping to grow our current user base by 10,000”
Sales rep “oh wow, if we’re able to successfully onboard 10,000 new users, how does that impact revenue? Are we talking a 10k, 100k, or 1 m bump?
The goal here is the understand the true motivation behind doing something and attach to the biggest problem. The bigger the problem we can solve, the easier we can justify our prices.
#3 Why Us?
An example way to ask “What’s more important to your regarding our product?”
Most sales reps are able to feature dump and talk about the benefits of their product till they’re blue in the face. Customers will typically zone out, say “Send me more information” and never talk to you again.
When we ask this question, we are able to pinpoint exactly what is relevant to our prospect and ask 2nd and 3rd level questions to understand business impact.
REMEMBER EVERYTHING HAS TO DRIVE A BUSINESS OUTCOME. That’s the only way our buyers will be able to justify the cost of a solution.
Sales rep “What’s important to you regarding MySQL?”
Customer “Performance”
Sales rep “Interesting, I hear that quite a bit. Typically that means different things for different prospects. How does poor database performance affect your users?”
Customer “Typically if the database is slow our customer can’t make purchases and will be on the checkout screen for a few seconds.”
Sales rep “It sounds like checkout loads times directly affect purchases, how's the checkout experience today?”
Customer “It’s alright, it takes about 5 seconds to process the order for our customer”
Sales rep “what would you like it to be?”
Customer “Ideally around 1-2 seconds?”
Sales rep “that’s interesting, typically performance and scalability are very much intertwined. If we’re not able to get the checkout down to 1 second, how does that negatively impact the business?
Customer “we’ll probably see lower conversation rates for our cold traffic”
Do you see what we did? We understood what capability was relevant to our customer and tied it to a business outcome so can justify premium prices.
These questions provide a great framework for sellers to control the sale. We've all had conversations where a customer will try to take control or we lose our train of thought. This is our home base if you can use these questions to stay relevant and find the real pain.
Let us know if you have any questions!
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