Key SPIN Selling Questions to Ask

Want to speed up B2B buyer decisions? Ask how they feel. Not just what they think. B2B sales teams love structured questions: → What’s the budget? → Who signs off? → When are you looking to implement? Useful? Yes. Complete? Not even close. Here’s the gap: None of those questions speaks to how the buyer is 'feeling'. Neuroscience tells us that decision-making happens in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain that blends logic and emotion. But emotion hits first. You’re operating on 'half the data' if your discovery is purely logical. Dialog Example: Seller: “How are you feeling about our direction?” Buyer (pause): “Honestly? It’s a good fit… but I’m worried it might take more internal buy-in than I thought.” That’s the truth. And truth unlocks movement. You didn’t get that by pitching. You got it by asking how they 'feel'. Questions to Try: → “What’s exciting about this? And what still feels risky?” → “What would need to happen for this to feel like a no-brainer?” → “What concerns haven’t we talked about yet?” Buyers will answer questions that feel safe. And emotional questions — asked with warmth — create that safety. Tactic to Try: Build one emotional check-in into each sales stage: • Post-discovery: “What’s your gut saying right now?” • After a demo: “Is there anything that didn’t land how you expected?” • Near proposal: “Is anything about this still feeling off?” Because emotionally honest buyers don’t ghost. They collaborate. They tell you what’s going on. Which emotional check-in could you ask today that you didn’t ask yesterday? Try one. Let it breathe. Watch what opens up. ___ Follow me for more sales tips and repost if this resonated.

I've watched over 2,500 discovery calls in the last few years. There's one thing I'm convinced of: Top salespeople get to the "heart of the problem" FASTER than their peers. SPEED to uncovering the 'real' problem matters. Here's why: Avg salespeople don't uncover even the tip of the ice berg until late in the call. So they never get a chance to go beyond the surface. They run out of time. Great salespeople get to the heart of the matter fast. That gives them TIME: Time to peel back the onion. Time to explore negative impact. Time to diagnose the root cause. Here are four questions (in order) that get to 'the heart of the deal' fast: 1. Tell me about your biggest challenges when it comes to X? Easy enough. Just enough to kickstart the conversation in the right direction. But not enough by itself. Customers will (almost) always give surface level answers to the first question. 2. What's going on in the business that's driving [what they shared] to be a priorty. Ask this, and your customers will CHUCKLE half the time. Why? Because you are striking a CHORD when you ask that. You're getting to the 'need behind the need.' That's where big money lives. Getting closer. 3. What metric is suffering most as a result of that? Avg sellers struggle to quantify pain. You walk into a different world when you go from expressed pain to quantified pain. Your customer's urgency ramps up. And spending money to solve the problem begins to look REAL good. 4. What's driving you to solve all this now rather than later? Ask this too early? And the answers will be weak. BUT... If you ask this AFTER those first three questions... Your customer now has the FULL CONTEXT of the problem top-of-mind. And now... their answers to THIS question will be far, FAR richer. Give those 4 questions (in order) a try. P.S. Here's 39 more questions that sell: https://lnkd.in/g-VRcCsq

Sales Truth: No matter what you sell, people already have a solution. They’re getting the job done. They’re making progress. They’re getting from point A to point B. To disrupt the status quo, you need to shine a light on a potential problem with their current way of doing things. In other words, poke the bear. Examples: 1. Google Docs (Collaboration Limits) “When multiple people are making changes at once, how do you handle version control or resolve conflicting edits?” 2. Grit Guard “When you wash your car with one bucket, grit can settle at the bottom, get trapped in your sponge, and scratch your car. How are you preventing that when you wash your car?” 3. Netflix (Discovery) “When you’re looking for something new to watch, do you rely on recommendations, or do you spend time scrolling?” 4. MacBook Pro (Port Availability) “When you need to connect multiple external devices, do you use a dock or manage with just the USB-C ports?” 5. Diamond Rio MP3 Player (Limited Storage) “I know the Diamond Rio holds about 30 minutes of music. When you’re on longer runs or trips, do you find yourself swapping songs often or just sticking with the same playlist?” 6. Spreadsheet (Lack of Visibility) “When reps want to see where they stand or how their commissions are calculated, do they come to you with questions, or can they see a real-time view on a dashboard?” Why this works: Questions like these expose the shortcomings of the current solution without directly criticizing it. Instead of leading the person to a desired answer, they prompt reflection, creating an openness to a new way of doing things. If you want to be a better closer, be a better opener. Buyers have the answers. Sellers have the questions.

Here's the list of my favorite discovery questions I shared on last week's Sell Better show. If you asked me for this list 10 years ago, none of these Qs would've been on it. It took me losing a lot of deals to "no decision" to realize where my deals were falling apart. Here's what I learned. It was easy for me to get happy ears when a champion wanted our solution. Especially when they were C-level. What I failed to realize is, it's rare for an entire buying group to share the exact same POV on business problems and priorities. Example (from when I sold a sales methodology): CRO thinks they need a new sales methodology. VP Sales - East thinks they need to buy a call recording software. VP Sales - West thinks they just need negotiation training. CEO thinks they need to hire more SMEs. HR thinks they need to re-org the sales team. Marketing thinks they need to spend more on events. Each person has a different take on the "right" solution, because they have different takes on the "right" problem to be solved + the root cause of that problem. So, job #1 is to aid our champion to get group alignment on the problem. Slow down your champion in discovery with these questions. Help them think through alternative points of view. Help them seek disagreement, before they seek agreement. Once I got good at this, it almost always opened the door for them to bring in the rest of the buying group early for a group meeting with me about the problem. Because I wasn't pushing a solution. I was aiding in the group's collective understanding of the problem. Those deals moved the fastest for me. Not always to a 'yes'. But, I'd much rather get a fast 'no' over a slow 'no decision'.