Not long ago, I was speaking to a group of executives. Someone asked, “What is the single skill you look for in hiring a seller?” I suspect they were thinking that I’d respond with something like, prospecting, closing, managing deals, building pipeline, relationship building, or any number of other important skills.
My response surprised them, “Curiosity is the single most important skill, not only for sellers but for sales leaders.”
When you look at any of those other skills, underneath all of them is some aspect of curiosity. “Which prospects deserve the most investment of my time?” “How can I build stronger relationships with my customers?” “What are the things I could be doing to build a stronger pipeline?”
And when people struggle with these issues, or even fail to recognize them, underneath it is the absence of curiosity.
And curiosity has never been more important!
We’re drowning in change. Markets shift. Customers change. Technologies emerge and disappear. What worked last quarter doesn’t work this quarter. Nobody has all the answers anymore. Nobody can.
We can’t train people fast enough. By the time we build the course, the world has moved on. We can’t give them playbooks that cover every situation. Everything is constantly changing.
Given this is the state of the world and selling, what do we actually need?
People who can figure things out.
That’s curiosity and critical thinking. The curious person doesn’t wait to be told what to do. They’re already asking questions, poking around, trying to understand. They hit a wall and they don’t stop, they figure out how to get around it.
We can’t teach people everything they need to know. We can’t provide the scripts that can be adapted to every situation. We can’t fill every gap in our own processes or in their knowledge. But if they’re curious, they’ll find the gaps themselves. They’ll figure out what to do, they’ll experiment. They’ll keep adapting as things change.
The incurious person? They keep doing what they’ve been trained to do or what they are comfortable doing, even though those things aren’t working. We see plummeting win rates, lengthening deal cycles, horrible quota performance. These people are waiting to be told what to do or are following a playbook that’s already obsolete. And they are failing!
A seller called me. Started well. Did his homework. Asked a thoughtful question.
Then I started answering, but he interrupted. “Our company is involved in those areas as well, this is what we do…”
I let him go. Maybe that’s sadistic. When he finally asked, “When do you want to get together?” He thought he had understood my needs before I finished answering the question.
I responded, “You interrupted me before I could finish. The area you asked about isn’t a priority for us. I have no interest in continuing.”
Here’s what he didn’t know. I was interested. His products were relevant. He just never bothered to find out.
He asked a question but didn’t care about my answer. He was listening for a keyword, a trigger, so he could launch into his pitch. He had no interest, no curiosity in understanding what was really important to me. As a result, he lost an opportunity to help me buy his product.
This happens all the time. Questions as performance. Questions as pretext for pitching.
There are two types of curiosity.
Superficial curiosity is checking boxes. You ask because you’re supposed to. Because the methodology says so. You’re not interested in the answer, you just want to move on through the script, trying to elicit buying signals.
Customers sense this instantly, they’ve experienced the “question with an agenda” too many times before. They shut down
Deep curiosity is different. You ask because you actually want to know, you want to understand. And you do this not because of what you are trained to do, but because you are genuinely interested.
You dig. You follow up. You’re comfortable saying “I don’t understand” or “Help me think about this.”
When customers sense real curiosity, something shifts. They open up. They share what’s actually going on.
What’s the best response we can get from a question?
I know I’ve captured someone’s interest when I hear: “No one’s ever asked me that before.” Or, “I never thought about it that way.”
That tells me I’m helping my customers see something new. Good questions don’t just get us information. They help customers discover what they don’t know they don’t know. They provoke them into thinking differently. They stimulate the customer’s own curiosity.
We think questions are about getting answers. The best questions provoke collaborative conversations. Conversations where we are learning from each other, building something that neither of us could have done independently.
What kills curiosity?
When you hand someone a script, you’re telling them curiosity isn’t wanted.
Activity metrics rob our time for depth and deep engagement when we are trying to hit dial counts.
Product training drives our focus on “here’s what I sell” thinking instead of “what do they need?”
And the big one, experience, “This is what we’ve always done.” The more we’ve seen, the more we think we already know. We’ve handled this before. We know what the problem is. And we are missing all the cues.
That certainty kills curiosity faster than anything. The moment we think we know, we stop asking.
Figuring It Out
The world isn’t slowing down. The uncertainty isn’t going away. We can’t prepare people for everything they’ll face.
What we can do is hire and develop people who figure things out. Who don’t freeze when the playbook doesn’t have an answer. Who stay curious when everyone else is going through the motions.
Then we keep developing that curiosity “muscle.” The way we train them, the way we coach them, the way we model curiosity in our own behaviors.
The real competitive advantage, the real value we can create with our customers is not having all the answers, but having the skills and critical thinking to help discover the answers. That’s what our customers need. That’s what the people we lead need.
That’s the real differentiator.
In a world without answers, the curious will always win.
This is part of a series on sales excellence, leading up to the launch of my new book, “Is ‘Good Enough’ Good Enough: Mindset and Behaviors for Sales Excellence.”
Afterword: Here is an outstanding AI generated discussion of this post. Enjoy!
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