The Answers Are In the Pause

I get it, you know your stuff. People trust you for the guidance you give them to avoid the potholes and snake pits. Unfortunately, telling is NOT selling and if you're going to create a six and seven-figure consulting business, you need to become the learner and not the knower when it comes to the conversations you're having with your prospect.

Like most consultants who sell, you're too quick to solve the issue with great amounts of insight and advice... prospects love that but they don't buy that. When you begin to tell them anything, you remove the authority of their own best judgment. They either accept or reject your proposed solutions and then nobody owns the outcome. This is part of neurosales, a fascinating look at how the brain works during the sales process.

Expertise is demonstrated by the smart, strategic questions you ask.

Trust is earned in those small but poignantly powerful pauses when a prospect attempts to answer that question but doesn't know the answer. You're showing them what they don't know and allowing them to own it because it's coming out as their words, not yours. Now they too know what they don't know and they now begin to depend on you to show them how to fix it.

Trust may be earned via a question but the sale, however, is earned in the echoing back of what a prospect has said in his or her responses. Relating back what you've heard to the issues you understand them to have shared and getting them to acknowledge the solution they never considered without your line of questioning, is where the magic happens.

The close naturally comes when they can see there's no other way to a solution without you. After all, it was YOU who asked the questions they didn't know to ask themselves.

The fewer words you use, the more you sell. It's not what you say that sells, it's what your client says in response to a line of intentional questions that DIGS-IN to their most expensive, pervasive and problematic challenges.

If you're ready to ask more questions, listen more intently and unearth that 2-year-old curiosity in order to DIG-IN to your next prospect call, drop me a LinkedIn message (details below) and book a call with me. I'll show you how it's done.