“What’s the one thing that will make you more successful?”

Mastering that simple question in your buyer conversations will make the difference between top and mediocre sales performance.

All sales and deal velocity comes from helping a buyer see a path to a more successful future by solving a problem they cannot solve on their own.

Here are a few reasons focusing on that question leads to stronger sales results:

• It anchors a conversation on your buyer’s why, not your product
• It forces you and your buyer to prioritize and agree on urgency into a close
• It very quickly separates the tire kickers from buyers with a real problem

Middle performing reps tend to drone on about their product. They are convinced if they just show enough product, something will excite the buyer.     

Top performers show just enough product to tease a better future and then ask for the buyer to help to define that future.

Middle performers can be good at discovery, and then also get overwhelmed and overwhelm their buyers with possibilities that come out of a discovery phase.

Top performers are always really good at discovery AND at asking buyers to prioritize: 

• What do you need to fix first?  
• What comes next?  
• What is less urgent?

Middle performers often struggle to know if a buyer is really qualified. They may catch high potential deals, but do not qualify well and so waste time on marginal deals.

Top performers, by contrast, are voracious qualifiers and good at sniffing out bad deals. They use the success question to quickly identify the buyers with real problems that need to be solved from those that do not.

And, here is the bonus outcome to focusing on your buyer’s success!

It does not help you just close more deals, but to expand your account value faster.

Asking buyers to prioritize the things that will make them more successful is just as helpful to your customer success team in quickly expanding accounts as it is to your sales team in landing them in the first place.