Want Your Sales Team to Sell More? Hire and Train for Curiosity.

The best sales people are naturally curious. They instinctively ask the right questions, at the right moment, in the right tone. This trait helps them gather key information, bond with their prospect, sell consultatively and win more deals.

According to Harvard Business Review, “Curiosity can be described as a person’s hunger for knowledge and information. Eighty-two percent of top salespeople scored extremely high curiosity levels. Top salespeople are naturally more curious than their lesser performing counterparts.”

When I encounter a rep who is struggling, it usually starts with the questions they are (or rather, aren’t) asking.

For some sales reps, curiosity is a trait that has to be practiced, because it doesn’t come naturally. And improvement doesn’t always come easily either. Great questions are driven by innate curiosity, a difficult characteristic to teach and develop in sales reps who don’t already have it. That said, it is  incumbent on sales managers to nurture this characteristic in their sales team through disciplined candidate screening, culture reinforcement, coaching and skill development.

A sales candidate that doesn’t ask a ton of questions is a red flag. Look for candidates who display genuine curiosity about your team/company/culture, your buyer, sales cycle, average contract value, common objections, competitive landscape, win/loss reasons and more. Ideally, you want to see not only that they display innate curiosity, but that they do it in a natural, conversational way.

I want a sales rep to interview me during the hiring process. But I don’t want them grilling me or just plowing through a pre-set list of questions that they ask every potential employer. If a candidate handles their curiosity in an awkward or aggressive way that you find unpleasant, know that your prospects will also probably find it unpleasant as well. Screen for a natural conversationalist who has an inquisitive nature that puts you at ease.

Foster curiosity in your team by ensuring it’s part of your culture. You can reward reps when they display curiosity in a unique or effective way during their deals. Have your most naturally curious reps conduct a peer workshop to ignite the entire team’s passion for this skill. Share articles about curiosity. Make it a frequent topic in meetings to help keep it to of mind for everyone. And, make sure you are displaying curiosity as well. When it comes to managing and coaching your team, ask rather than tell.

When shadowing calls with new reps, build curiosity into your coaching. If a rep is shadowing a call, afterwards ask them what they would have asked that you didn’t. And where you could have gone deeper. Ask them to echo back to you where they heard you displaying curiosity in an effective way during the call.

Do the same when you are shadowing their calls. During the call debrief ask what questions they meant to ask but didn’t, what information they wish they had, and what they need but don’t yet know. This helps build the curiosity muscle and reinforce how important this skill is from the beginning.

There are many ways to purposely develop curiosity in your team members. One thing I have found to be effective is to reinforce the skill by using different modalities for training.

I used to think that just doing role play was enough, but that works on a limited basis. Role playing is deceptive. Some reps are fantastic at role play, but then miss the mark in real prospect conversations. Likewise, some reps are horrible at role play, and then ask just the right questions at just the right time during their sales calls. Role play is an important way to teach and to practice. But it’s not enough.

In addition to live role plays, have your team listen to a mock role play (or even an actual recorded sales call) and have them suggest other questions to ask, and different information to gather.

Give your reps a very short written buyer statement and have them to write down all the questions they have for that buyer. Ask them to be exhaustive, and to write questions for five full minutes without distraction. For some reps, this written effort is just the thing to kick start their curiosity gene.

While I think curiosity is one of those things that you either have or you don’t, and that every top sales person naturally possesses it, it’s the sales manager’s responsibility to help nurture and reinforce this important trait across the team.