Winning Lines Aren’t Just Clinchers

"answers mostly reveal what you know but the quality of your questions reveals how you think"

When shaping my salesteam knowledge management offering to bluechip solution sellers at the start of the century, I quickly labelled one of the elements I sought Winning Lines.

I became adept at pulling these out from everyday conversations. No matter their source. Say, illuminating where key deal progress got made, outwitting a competitor, or gaining traction for a new product, I'd also pop them onto a single page. With added visibility from a scrolling ticker-style banner on their internal 'homepage'.

I soon realised that the best and invested salespeople would yearn to have one of their nuggets near the top of the listing.

Although a tiny fraction of what I delivered, on occasion I did have memorable discussions with my clients over this. I recall citing an early sentence from Miller-Hieman's Strategic Selling book. Angling that our enterprise-grade success was very much not down to "hooks, lines and clinchers".

Which is what the pronouncement atop this post evokes.

Indeed, as one such reply revels, "Oooh. Signull gettin salesy. Welcome aboard. You're a fine addition".

Some tried to go all theory monkey. "A question is an operator that alters cognitive space. It directs attention, defines boundaries, presupposes ontologies, and selects which data count as signal versus noise."

Whilst others stuck to the more literal. "Don’t just become better at finding answers. Become better at finding the right questions." Or even Yoda, "there are no answers. only better nuanced and more questions".

Of the countless winning lines I collated, many were naturally of the 'clincher' vibe. Salesguys go salesguying. Yet it was the very existence of other types of line deemed by me to be winning that helped bring progress and crystallise best-practice thinking around the salesforces.

And among these were very much a load of top drawer questions.

From time to time, I'd be alongside someone listening on a live phone call or actually in their prospect meeting. I'd often have a line down the middle of my notebook page, specifically to write down all the questions asked. One column from the prospect, the other from seller.

That the trove brimmed with gold cannot be understated. Especially when reinforcing or going beyond any 'structures' such as Spin or 5 Whys.

We need to keep track of these. When we have a question that our competitors don't ask, that's when we win. Find them.