Probing questions work only for so long. Once you know the problems, find out what the cost of not solving those problems could mean for the prospect. And it’s not always money.
Over the years several clients have asked me to observe one of their salespeople in the field to learn what is holding back their sales success. Several times the client has not wanted to risk a current prospect for research purposes so they suggest a prospect for which they believe the chances for a sale are slim to none. In other words, there’s no chance of wasting a good prospect.
They don’t necessarily tell me, however, which can lead to some surprising consequences.
In this case, my client had called on a specific Texas hospital for years without success. Our client’s service is to analyze past hospital billings looking for errors that result in Medicare or insurance companies reimbursing hospitals less than they deserve. A percentage of the captured increase in collected billings is paid to our client as a fee.
This hospital had a homegrown system for ensuring billing accuracy. Confidence in their system led them to believe that retaining an outside firm to audit past billings would be a waste of time because no savings would be found.
During the call, it became clear that there were two reasons the salesperson was not successful. The first was that he really enjoyed working the top of the funnel and rarely invested time in meaningful discovery in follow-up meetings. Consequently, he spent 90 percent of his time at medical conferences striking up new relationships with CFOs.
This tactic was easy for him because he was a past hospital CFO and well aware of the challenges his prospects faced. He also had ADHD, and, as we have written elsewhere, meeting new people energized him. We had already created a sales process for him to make him more comfortable with second and third meetings where important discoveries take place and larger sales are made. Now we were working on making first meetings more productive—in other words, so they would lead to more second meetings or a close.
The second reason this sales rep was not successful was that his discovery process was too narrow. His line of inquiry was to challenge the capability of the hospital’s homegrown system versus the system he was trying to sell. He did ask some good questions about potential issues to reveal weaknesses in the hospital’s system. Not surprisingly, in each case the response was negative, “Our system does not have those issues.”
As an observer, I could see where the discussion was going. Each side believed they had a better system, and, since no persuasion was occurring, no sale was going to take place. It was clear that the hospital CFO was not going to be convinced that billing errors would be found if he retained our client. Even though he would pay only if our client found errors, he was reluctant to invest time in a project he believed wouldn’t provide a positive return.
If you are of a certain age, or watch TV reruns, you might know about the detective television series Columbo. Each episode had a predictable formula for each case. Columbo learned all he could learn and was still stumped. But just as he was leaving, he would ask one more question that led to solving the crime.
In the case of our hospital CFO, up until this point in our meeting the questions my client’s sales rep had asked were “probing” discovery questions. They identified potential problems with the homegrown system. What happened next was a Columbo moment. It was clear to me that asking more questions to find more weaknesses was not going to be productive. I asked the buyer if I could ask something.
“Let’s assume your system is as good as or even better than ours,” I began. That statement was well received, and it moved him from being defensive about his internal system, so I continued: “What problem might you have from using a homegrown system?”
“It would not be that we are losing revenue,” he replied, “because as I’ve been saying all along, we think our system is close to being 100 percent accurate.”
“But what might be a problem?” I asked.
“My only fear is that because we believe so strongly in our system, nobody from outside our hospital has ever seen our whole system,” he said. ”It’s possible we’re doing something wrong beyond billing accuracy that we need to change. We might be violating a regulation that we are not even aware of.”
I summed up what I understood him to be saying. “You wouldn’t engage a third party because you believe you have underbilled, but you would invest in an audit so that someone who audits hospital systems all the time might find a red flag outside of billing accuracy?”
He agreed, and we left with a commitment to audit his system. The good news was that the audit did find billing errors that justified retaining our client. Even better, there were no red flags beyond billing accuracy. This result was of great value to our client’s newest client.
It was only after we returned with the order that I learned why my client had selected this specific hospital for our research: He didn’t want to waste a sales call on a prospect he “knew” was not going to buy.
Main Takeaways:
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- If you believe you have ADHD, you can be more successful by scheduling fewer first meetings and spending that time on more second and third meetings with qualified prospects. For our client, that meant cancelling half the medical CFO conventions his sales rep was planning to attend and investing more time following up with the CFO prospects he had already met.
- When your discovery is not productive, step back and restart at the point the discussion began to be about whose system is better. That’s an argument you are not going to win.
- Don’t waste years in prospect meetings in which you ask the same questions every time and get the same answers. Either decide that your product or service isn’t right for this prospect and move on—or broaden your discovery to find a need behind the need.
- In this hospital case, the hidden need was a fear that because no outside vendors had audited their system they might be in violation of regulations that an outsider would spot right away.