Elite Sales Strategies

4Supporting Client Discovery

He not busy being born is busy dying.

—Bob Dylan

One of the responsibilities of being One-Up is occasionally disputing your client's beliefs and questioning the way they do things. Some salespeople consider that approach rude or even heretical, mainly because it challenges what they believe about sales and professionalism. But you are only a heretic when you are early to recognize a new insight or practice. Later, you will be called prescient, a trailblazer, or a groundbreaker.

In the movie The Matrix, Neo was acutely aware that he was One-Down. He recognized that the mysterious character called Morpheus was One-Up and was his key to understanding reality. Sensing he was missing something, Neo worked to correct his One-Downness. Morpheus offered to show him what he wanted to see by offering Neo the choice of two pills (lenses). The red pill would let him see reality, while the blue pill would let him fall back into the warm, comfortable sleep that he had known all his life. Reading past this line means you are taking the red pill and all that it reveals, even if it may disturb your long-held beliefs.

What if I told you that the most powerful discovery strategy is not asking questions to identify your client's problems and pain, but instead helping them discover something about themselves? What if you were responsible for teaching your clients something that would enable them to improve their decision-making and their future? What if there were ...