When you’re in sales, especially in this industry, you can end up taking a lot of meetings with prospects that go nowhere.
Some of the time, the prospects just aren’t a good fit at all.
Sometimes, they’re not super clear about what their goals are.
And sometimes they may actually want to utilize your services, but they don’t commit on the day.
In this video, I’ll share three simple questions that you need to be asking in every prospect meeting to make sure you make the most of every meeting that you put on your calendar.
Resources:
-
- Connect with me on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/andyneary/
-
- Connect with me on Instagram: instagram.com/andy_neary/
Video Transcript:
This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.
In this video, I’m going to cover three questions that are not leveraged enough in effective sales conversations. Hi, my name is Andy Neary, CEO and founder of Complete Game Consulting, where we are on a mission to help 25,000 insurance producers sell their first $250,000 of insurance. So what are these three questions that are not leveraged enough in sales conversations?
I’m going to cover that in a minute, but let’s talk about the purpose of a discovery meeting, intro meeting, executive briefing, whatever you want to call it. Your goal in a discovery meeting is to make it all about the prospect. Get to know the prospect fact find with the prospect. Right? Absolutely. But before I share these questions, let’s talk about where many insurance producers fall short in hosting a successful discovery meeting.
Number one, too many producers are focused on doing the talking. I know I was guilty of this early in my career. I was hearing the prospect, but I wasn’t quite listening because quite frankly, I was just waiting to talk again. I wanted to get all my points across. I wanted to display how intelligent I was to the prospect.
Therefore, I never quite became a very good listener because I was just waiting to might for my chance to talk again. Number two, I spent way too much time talking about how my agency was the greatest thing since sliced bread. What I come to learn is nobody cares. Nobody cares what year where you’re founded, how big you are, and all the resources and capabilities do you see?
Prospects just want to know that you care about them. That discovery meeting is all about your prospect fact finding to get to find out what their needs, their goals, their interests are. Challenges are. And two, you want to determine if they are a good fit for you. So what are these three questions that not enough producers are leveraging today?
Let’s dive in. Question number one. The first question you want to ask when you sit down with the prospect is so what intrigued you to take the meeting? Yeah, I started using this question as a result of my frustration around the cold calling services we had been leveraging at our agency. You see, we used a cold call service for quite a while, and they were getting appointments booked on my calendar, which I loved.
But I realized I was going out to meetings with prospects who weren’t quite interested in actually meeting. So I would sit down when I knew I had an appointment booked with the cold calling service, and I’d ask the prospect. So what? Intrigued you to take the meeting? And it was here. I quickly uncovered the problem. You see, most of them said, well, I actually don’t really want to meet, but the guy on the phone won’t let me go.
So I said yes. I said, yeah, you’re not a real qualified prospect, are you? You’re not interested in making any changes. And it was there, I realized this is a question I have to kick off every discovery meeting. I used to use it as a means to figure out if they wanted to meet. But nowadays we still use this question because it helps us get to the core of the problem by simply asking your process the prospect.
So what intrigued you to take the meeting? You’re going to uncover a lot of information about why you’re sitting in front of them. So that’s question number one. What intrigued you to take the meeting? The second question, where do you need the most help today? If now if you’ve dug into why they’re actually interested in meeting now, I ask them, so where do you need the most help today in that question, you’re going to uncover a lot of good information.
They’re going to tell you where they are lacking today, but if they’re happy, they’re also going to tell you, well, I don’t know. We actually don’t feel like we need any help right now. That question of where do you need help today is going to help you quickly qualify or potentially disqualify the prospect because they’re either going to help you or you’re either going to uncover a lot of good information about where you can support them, or they’re going to tell you that they don’t feel like they have any areas of need, and you’re going to be able to move on and help the next prospect who is going to be a better fit for
you. But question number two, which I think is a great question to be asking a discovery meeting that isn’t asked enough is so what do you need the most help right now? This is the question I kick every one of my coaching calls off with today. So where do you need the most help today? Because they’re going to give you a lot of that good information you are not getting from fact finding today.
Now, the third question, and this is after you do all your fact finding everything seems like it is going well. You feel like you’ve got a prospect eating out of your hand. What is that third question you’re not asking enough. It is this. If I could show you a way to overcome, insert their problem and achieve insert their goal, is this something you’d be serious about taking action on?
Think about that one. If I could help you overcome your problem and achieve your goal, is this something you’d be serious about taking action? I’m. You see, most of us, including myself, are guilty of doing magnificent fact finding what the prospect. But we never set a clear expectation that if I am able to walk, come back and provide a solution that’s going to help them overcome their problem and achieve their goal, I don’t get any agreement whether or not they’re willing to hire me or not.
Why not ask that question right there and then to get that verbal commitment that they’re willing to give you a shot if you have the right solution. That is a great way to make sure you have a very qualified prospect sitting in front of you. See this is a question I failed to ask for a long time because when things were going well, I was actually too afraid to ask that question because that’s where they could give the answer.
I don’t want to hear it right. This is a great question to qualify, and it’s a question we use today after we find out what our prospects want and what’s keeping them from getting there, we have set this gap. And now we ask the question, if I can help you overcome this problem and achieve this goal, you’re serious about taking action.
That yes or no is going to help you dictate where you go next. So leverage these three questions to make your discovery readings more effective. Number one, what intrigued you to take the meeting in the first place? Number two, where do you need the most help today? And number three, if our I can come back with a solution to help you overcome your problem and achieve your goal, are you serious about taking action on it?
You’re going to get a great conversation. You’re going to take your conversations to the next level. But most important, you’re going to be able to clearly identify if you have a good fit in front of you. Give those questions a shot, see how they go, and watch your conversations take off.
Business is no longer about who you know. Business is about who knows you. In a noisy industry like we’re in gang, you got to get people to know who you are.