Sales Meetings Are Won by the Questions You Ask

Thirty-five years, a few hundred customer meetings, and one book I should have read first.

In 1991, I was twenty-two and had just founded a software company. I understood our product better than anyone alive, and I had my first real customer meeting. I prepared like an engineer. I knew every function, every limitation, and every reason our approach beat the alternatives. I explained for most of an hour. The customer was polite. We didn't get the order, and I didn't understand why, because I had done the part I thought was the job.

Back then, I saw meetings simply. You show up, you present, they decide. It took me about ten years and a great many meetings to learn that nearly every part of that sentence is wrong.

Three years before that meeting, Neil Rackham had published SPIN Selling. His team spent twelve years observing 35,000 sales calls. In small sales, the closing techniques the trainers taught worked. In large sales, they hurt, and the quality and order of the questions won the deals.

The book was on the shelf in 1991. I hadn't read it because I was too busy knowing the product. My first meetings were presentations. Today, the meeting is where I ask questions. I present when the questions run out, and if I have asked well, the presentation is short, because the customer has already told me what to show.

A good meeting used to end with the customer liking the product. I now measure it by the commitment I can write down, with a name, a date, and a next step the customer agreed to in the room. Goodwill without a commitment leaves me with nothing, no matter how warm the handshake.

For years I treated the person across the table as the customer. In capital equipment, that person is one of about seven. People in a room I will never enter make the decision, reading a paper I will never see. The meeting is my one chance to shape that paper, so I ask who else is involved, what they care about, and what will make the paper hard to write.

Silence used to feel like failure, and when the customer went quiet, I filled it. I have learned it is the most useful thing in the room. The real answer forms in the quiet after a hard question, and a seller who cannot bear four seconds of it never hears that answer.

Preparation once meant knowing the product. Today it means having a written objective for the meeting, arriving fifteen minutes early, and knowing the customer's compelling event before I sit down. I need to know what forces them to act and by when. Without that, the meeting stays a friendly conversation.

The first impression starts fifteen minutes before the handshake, in the lobby. I sit and think about the best things that have ever happened to me, and I keep the meeting, the product, and the expected objection out of my head.

It sounds like something a coach would say, and it is. It still works on the physiology. By the time the customer comes through the door, my eyes are bright, and the handshake is firm, and no technique can fake either.

I had to remind myself to make eye contact. I hold it for most of the meeting now, because rapport is built there. My attention stays on the person, without staring and without looking at a screen.

I am old school here. I take notes with a pen in a paper notebook, never on a laptop. A laptop is a wall between two people, and nobody knows whether you are writing or reading email.

A pen moving across paper while the customer speaks tells him that what he just said was worth writing down. People give more to someone who is visibly taking it down. If you look away during their answer, they assume you weren't really asking.

I came to my early meetings to take the order. These days I come to give something every time. It might be a trend from another market that reaches them, a technology development that could move their business before their competitors know about it, or a contact who can help with a problem unrelated to what I sell.

I have found no faster way to become the person they accept for a meeting than to always leave something behind. Most of what people call charisma in a seller is generosity on a schedule.

In the early years, I thought one meeting decided the deal. The fifth follow-up decides it. Most sellers stop after the first or second because the silence feels like an answer. Usually the customer is busy, and the deal is waiting in a queue.

Once, hesitation from a customer looked like a bad sign to me. I treat it as information. A customer who raises an objection is telling you what the paper needs to address. A customer who raises none has usually already decided, and usually against you.

I used to sell what the product did. I sell what changes for the person in front of me, and that differs at each level. The engineer wants the technical problem gone, and the program director wants the schedule and the risk under control. The vice president wants a number, so the same machine needs three different meetings.

In 1991 I thought the meeting was about me. Over the years I learned it is about the customer's process. The best thing I can do is understand that process well enough to help it along, and arrive as someone they are glad to see. Rackham had the data in 1988, and I got there the slow way.

Open the notebook from your last five customer meetings and find the commitment in each one: who agreed to do what, by when. If it is not written down, the meeting did’t end. It just stopped.

The product still matters, and I still know mine better than most people in the room. I haven't explained a product for an hour since about 2001, and the orders have been better.

Kauko Väinämö, CEO, Ginolis.