“Discipline of question asking, opens up the opportunity for those unplanned questions which really unlock the deal or solidify the deal or get the answers you need.” – Katie Jane Bailey in today’s Tip 1131
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Katie Jane Bailey on LinkedIn
Katie Jane Bailey on Sales Success Stories Interview
Lifestyle Discovery & Reverse Panel – DeJuan Brown & Katie Jane Bailey
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip is a clip from last year’s Sales Success Summit and some brilliant comments from Katie Jane Bailey of Figma. Here it is:
Where I want to start is Katie Jane kicked things off in her presentation, the opening presentation, and we talked about this in the podcast about discovery as a lifestyle, not a stage. And I realized after DeJuan’s comments in his session around managing up and the discovery he was doing to understand the lifestyle and the preferences of your leader in that particular context. But what it made me realize was if we just put it in the bucket of Discovery lifestyle, you get two sides. You get Discovery is all the time. Discovery is we’re always asking questions and leading with that curiosity. But also if we can discover the lifestyle, if we can understand the human that we’re working with, whether that’s a teammate to continue the previous conversation or that’s to understand the individual human stakeholder that we’re selling to and understand, what is it that is driving them? What are their communication preferences? Right. Sometimes you’re just barking up the wrong tree because they don’t do email. So those are the things I wanted to dig into. So, Katie Jane, why don’t we start with, Oh and I didn’t do a good job on educating everyone before. It was bothering me probably more than she, it bothers you. It’s Katie Jane.
Katie Jane Bailey: That’s okay.
Scott Ingram: Katie Jane, let’s start with when you think about the Discovery lifestyle, you live it. What does that really mean?
Katie Jane Bailey: Yeah. Okay. So I mentioned this yesterday, but my career did not start in tech sales. My career started a musical theater. And I remember going through starting to sell, making a lot of the same mistakes that Sarah talked about today, and almost not knowing how to navigate just a sale. Right. Like a close. And I discovered spin selling a couple of years in. And it was so illuminating for me because it gave me all the answers and all the answers were ironically questions.
And it taught me that, “Okay, the way that I can start winning in a repeatable fashion is not what I tell people, but it’s what I ask people.” And so it introduced in my work this like, discipline of questions asking. And so what I have found is as a discovery of the lifestyle is that when you see that’s where the secrets lie, that’s where the answers lie. You start to create that as a discipline which then opens up later in the deal. like the moment that you’re like, “Oh, that is the question that unlocked the deal.” And that question didn’t come from spin selling. It didn’t come from training. It came from this discipline of asking questions that then allowed me to improve in that moment and think of like, “Oh, something is blocking here. How do I unblock it? What is it that XYZ?” And then all the answers come spilling out.
And so I think it’s this combination, if we start on part one of the double entendre of Discovery’s lifestyle, then your mentality changes from I win on something I say versus I win on something that I ask. And by having that discipline and by having that mindset, there is no part of the sale or the deal that you’re not basically questioning everything, right?
Someone was talking about the final stage of the deal. You never know what blocker is going to come up. But if you have this mentality of discovery is ongoing throughout the entire thing, you’re going to ask those questions like, “Hey, when are you going on vacation? Hey, have you taken vacation this year?” And that genuine curiosity, which is also a theme that’s been talked about this whole week or a whole couple of days, feeds into that as well.
I think that’s one way I think about it is like the discipline of question asking, opens up the opportunity for those unplanned questions which really unlock the deal or solidify the deal or get the answers you need.
Scott Ingram: For a link to this full conversation, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1131 and we’ll have that as well as a link to my complete original interview with Katie Jane Bailey.
Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!