Getting Past Awkward

Interlock the fingers of your two hands together.  Look down to see which fingers are on top – your right or your left.

Now switch them, so if you if the pattern of your thumb and fingers is left, right, left, right, etc. you change to right, left, right, left, etc.  Keep them like this for at least 30 seconds.

How did if feel?  My bet is it felt pretty awkward, initially but the longer your fingers were in the new position the more normal it felt.  If you practiced this exercise a couple of times, you’d be able to go with either configuration without a thought.

This is a typical exercise used to demonstrate that change, initially, feels out of place, and relatively quickly becomes normal.

I write a lot about focusing on the results your customers desire and on asking the difficult questions that provoke the awareness of gaps in performance that you may be able to fill.  Recently I was sharing this approach – what we call Diagnostic Protocol – with a client.

The CEO shared with me that while he thought the questions we were developing were excellent, asking them in conversation felt quite awkward – even to him.  His feeling is quite normal, and it’s the reason that many sales teams fully capable of becoming Demand Creators fail to do so and remain Commoditizers or Peddlers.

There are two types of questions you can ask in a sales interaction:

• Questions that your customer/prospect readily knows the answer to – these questions are designed to educate the salesperson and as such create no value whatsoever in the sales process and position you as a Peddler.

• Questions that force your customer/prospect to think and consider because they don’t know the answer – these questions are designed to educate the customer/prospect (as well as the salesperson) and as such are the only types of questions that can create any value and separate your from the Peddlers and Commoditizers.

• They can make the customer uncomfortable

• They require the salesperson to be more prepared

• They’re different than the typical questions most salespeople ask, so it can feel awkward