Rule #7 Double Click

Do you remember what a professional is? “Everyone can tell you

what happened. A professional can tell you why.”

A professional understands things so well that they can tell you why something

occurred, control the components, and replicate the result. Professionals

are amazing and very valuable. Professionals provide insights, and

they stabilize the situation when everyone else is panicking. Professionals

also tend to succeed over long periods of time. Professionals are repeat

winners. Professionals are great mentors. Professionals tend to get promoted

and become experts on the job at the next level. Professionals exude

quiet confidence and are rarely braggarts or obnoxious. Professionals tend

to be readers of wide-ranging topics that provide them broader perspective,

which they bring to bear on their work.

Every organization depends upon professionals. Professionals are not

afraid of failure, because they learn from failures, as well as successes.

When an inactive customer (or anyone else) brings a problem or product

failure to the attention of a professional, that professional is prepared with

several diagnostic questions that allude to legitimate possible causes. A

professional is a capable, confident investigator who routinely identifies

and resolves the problem. More importantly, a professional can articulate

the rationale supporting their diagnosis and solution, which tends to

impress and induce customers to buy from them.

What I have observed professionals do—and what helps them the most—

is ask questions. They are unusually intellectually curious by nature. They

ask questions others fail to ask. They question everything and challenge

the status quo all the time. They are looking for insights that will give

them an edge, and then they ask questions about the answers to their questions.

I call this “double-clicking.”

It’s funny how words and phrases change within our lexicon. In the modern

era, everyone knows to double-click the computer mouse on an item

on the computer screen, which then opens up folders full of files that we

can select and open to review.

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In training, I prefer a slightly different definition, emphasizing the importance

of “double-clicking” as the drilling down of questions in sales conversations.

If you ask a question and don’t follow up the answer with a

follow-up question, you are being terribly inefficient in the least and completely

ineffective at worst.

Most conversations reveal deep insights or obstacles to agreement, but

interrogations don’t. “Interrogation” is the word many customers use to

describe the experience of answering twenty questions early in meetings

with salespeople. Try it. Write down five questions to ask someone you

have just met. Then, upon first acquaintance, ask this new person in your

life the five questions. Ask them all five questions in the order you wrote

them and only those questions. Now what?

That is exactly what happens in many sales calls. Pre-call planning has its

place, and great probing questions are important. But I would describe

“double-clicking” to you this way: Suppose you are in a hallway with

dozens of doors that are all closed on either side (like a hotel corridor).

Open one, but don’t go in and

look around the room. Just

move on to the next door and

open it. Again, don’t look

inside or go inside, just move

on to the next door. That is the

illustration I would use to

describe the game of “twenty

questions” in sales calls by wellintentioned

salespeople.

My observation has been that

many salespeople get nowhere after the pre-call planning questions that

reveal only what the salesperson assumed was important before walking in

the door. I know the intent of most questions is to customize the presentation.

The customer, however, has gotten absolutely nothing out of the

interrogation and feels that their time was wasted. In most cases, questions

that don’t utilize “double-clicking” only scratch the surface in the attempt

to uncover valuable information. So with only the basic information about

the customer from a series of questions that produced no discussion, most

salespeople trot out the features and benefits of the product or service,

hoping to get something productive done.

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I am not against questions. My point is this: Ask the question, but then

demonstrate that you were listening by asking a follow-up question about the

answer you got. Double-click! Open the door, go in the room, and look

around! You might be surprised that the thing you were looking for was

behind door number one, which you walked past ten minutes ago!

The hallway analogy is great, except for one amazing aspect: By doubleclicking,

you don’t enter a room and get stuck in that room. If the real

objection or the key to unlocking the conversation is in another room,

then amazingly you get there without going back to the hallway. Just follow

the line of questioning, and you get to the real objection—and the

close—much quicker!

The reason this is true is because you are not guiding the tour; the customer

is! Instead of being in a hallway with doors you created with your list

of pre-call planning probes, imagine you came in the front door of a mansion

that you have never been in before. This mansion is very much like

other mansions you have been in, and the owner is showing you around.

You ask a question about something they point out to you, which causes

them to take you somewhere else they think may be of interest to the both

of you!

Finally, be careful to leave room for an “honest question.” For example,

your comment may remind a customer of their childhood, a car wreck, or

their military service. Most of the time, customers are interacting with us

in a business transactional conversation. Most of the time, we are engaged

in a process, and both of us are trying to solve a problem. On rare occasions,

however, your meeting will spark a question that transcends the

transaction at hand. The question is not an objection; it is a legitimate

“aha!” moment or a departure from the conversation to explore a related

idea. If you don’t “double-click,” you could easily miss it.

These “honest questions” can be fun. They can also be painful if something

we said has touched upon a painful memory or opened an emotional

wound. Be careful not to miss the opportunity to explore with your customer.

Conversely, be careful not to be callous to someone who is really

hurting.

One of my favorite examples of double-clicking comes from the “Pit.” P.

F. was a highly respected vice president who managed to repeat his success

at several start-up companies and had a keen eye for talent, a passion for

leadership development in the sales ranks, and a commitment to the sales

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process, which seemed to serve him well everywhere he went. He introduced

something called the “Pit” at a company where I was fortunate

enough to work for him. At the end of sales training, each person in the

class was made to go up to the front of the room one by one and sit in one

of two tall chairs that had been placed there just for that purpose. Participants

were not allowed to have anything in their hands and to pretend or

make up additional information that favored them. In the other chair was

a role-player in the role of the customer. An objection was stated in two

sentences or less to the sales student, who was then given three minutes to

overcome the objection and close for action (i.e., a sale, training, logical

next steps, etc.).

For example, an objection in the Pit might be, “How come St. Mary’s

Hospital isn’t using it?”

The Pit became an event. Every student had been encouraged by their

region mates to return home with the bragging rights and the trophy

awarded to the Pit winner. The day after the competition, a picture of the

winner holding the trophy would be blasted by email to everyone in the

company.

In-house employees from every department all over the building would

come to watch. It was great fun, great competition, and a lot of pressure,

which was why it was such a great way to end new-hire training. When

done poorly, the customer role -players would do anything to avoid being

closed, which sent some students home on their last day deflated and with

a bad taste in their mouth, along with a sense of anxiety as they headed out

to their territories the next week to see real customers.

When done well, the customer role-player would go along when the sales

student was headed down the right path but make it clear with their words

and body language when someone was way off base.

For the most part, it was a great experience!

After harping on “double-clicking” all week to a particular student with

great promise, P. F. got an objection in the Pit that put a look of instant

panic on his face. The objection used a technical term that just so happened

to have not been used at all in class. Rather than try to mask the fact,

however, that he didn’t know the term, which would have made him look

bad in front of his peers (who had the assumption that he should have

already learned the term), after a very pregnant pause, he suddenly looked

right at me in the back of the room and smiled with a wink.

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He then “double-clicked” and asked what the term meant. The role-play

was successfully closed in 1minute 22 seconds.

He asked the right question, which gave him the key information he

needed to get him where he wanted to go extremely quickly. Then the

crowd went wild, as everybody in the class acknowledged their own fear

and dread when they, too, heard the term and didn’t have a clue what it

meant—or where to take the call.

It was an exhilarating moment that still makes me smile to think of it.

Chad R., a former A-10 Air Force pilot with whom I was privileged to

work, told me a story. He suggested to his father, in the form of question,

that he buy a snow blower for all the obvious reasons. His father replied

that he enjoyed the exercise, the fresh air, and the beauty of the snow-covered

scene from his driveway. Chad then asked his father if he had another

shovel. That’s a good “double-click.”

Practice this. Test yourself. Get someone in the field with you to observe

you and evaluate your ability to “double-click.” Make this simple discipline

work for you. Elite execution demands that you master the discipline of

“double-clicking.”