As salespeople, it's our job to identify the root of the problem when qualifying a prospect. It's our job to diagnose, because if we don't properly diagnose, we won't know if we can actually help.
I got a phone call from someone who does coaching and consulting, and they asked if I did training for retail stores. I responded that it was tough to answer such a generic question and asked for more information. He gave me some details on the number of store locations and total number of employees.
When I asked why they wanted to do sales training, he told me that sales were low and they wanted to do some sales training for their people to help boost sales.
I then asked, "How long have you been working with them? Are their sales low because they don't have enough people coming into their stores, are they low because the sales people aren't good at talking with people when they get there, or are they low for some other reason?"
He proceeded to tell me how long he had been working with them and gave me some more information about what type of consulting he does with them and what their monthly investment looks like.
I said, "You didn't answer the question. Why are their sales low?"
He responded, "I don't know."
At that point, I said I needed to call a timeout. He was asking me if I could do sales training with them, but he didn't know if the sales team had enough customers to talk to or not. How could I even begin to determine whether or not I could help them when they hadn't identified the actual problem yet?
The consultant got a little huffy with me and said that multiple other companies in town had quoted him for retail sales training and never asked any of those questions. He said he was just going to call the other place and go through their training.
I see this kind of stuff every day. Here was a pretty large retail chain with a lot of employees, and they were about to invest a lot of time and money on sales training to improve their sales, yet they didn't even know why their sales were low.
If you take a step back and think about it, I promise that this applies to your world, too. There are plenty of opportunities to ask a few more questions and better diagnose a problem, yet so many times people stop short of getting the true diagnosis and end up wasting time or money on solutions that aren't the right fit.
